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¿Puede un sistema comprenderse a sà mismo ? Si esta pregunta se refiere a la mente humana, entonces nos encontramos ante una cuestión clave del pensamiento cientÃfico. Y de la filosofÃa. Y del arte. Investigar este misterio es una aventura que recorre la matemática, la fÃsica, la biologÃa, la psicologÃa y, muy especialmente, el lenguaje. Douglas R. Hofstadter, joven y ya célebre cientÃfico, nos abre la puerta del enigma con la belleza y la alegrÃa creadora de su estilo. Sorprendentes paralelismos ocultos entre los grabados de Escher y la música de Bach nos remiten a las paradojas clásicas de los antiguos griegos y a un teorema de la lógica matemática moderna que ha estremecido el pensamiento del siglo XX : el de Kurt Gödel. Todo lenguaje, todo sistema formal, todo programa de ordenador, todo proceso de pensamiento, llegan, tarde o temprano, a la situación lÃmite de la autorreferencia : de querer expresarse sobre sà mismos. Surge entonces la emoción del infinito, como dos espejos enfrentados y obligados a reflejarse mutua e indefinidamente. Gödel, Escher, Bach: un Eterno y Grácil Bucle, es una obra de arte escrita por un sabio. Versa sobre los misterios del pensamiento e incluye, ella misma, sus propios misterios. / Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this book applies Godel's seminal contribution to modern Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel.mathematics to the study of the human mind and the development of artificial intelligence.
Wrong Language
| Customer Rating:   | | The book was fine, I guess. Except it was in Spanish instead of English. I'd like to return it and get the English version. |
Not my kind of philosophy
| Customer Rating: | This book is boring. It doesn't really tell you anything, kind of "all form, no substance". A cloud of a book.
I approached it a few times in the past, seeing it on top of many bestseller charts, but each time got scared away by apparent lack of clarity - when you open this book at random, you always face something unexpected - math, music, art, insects, human brains, DNA, viruses, zen, artificial intelligence, talking turtles, you name it, and always in different form.
Anyway, I thought to myself one day - it still must be a special book, it is rated so high, and it looks mysteriously clever, and so I have to read it through to understand. And I did. Geez, was it boring.
This book is 800 pages of chasing its own tail. It is full of curiousities, but no rigor, no plot, no structure. For the first 200 pages or so, reading tales seems fascinating, just imagine (you think to yourself) what the author has to offer when it gets to the point ! Never happens. As you reach page 600, you clench your teeth still hoping that there must be some sort of revelation ahead, even if on the last page. None.
These three things is this book about:
1. Self-reference. The great deal of the book is dedicated to approaching the proof of the Godel's theorem which in some sense says that a system cannot understand itself.
2. Form vs. substance. This ranges from extracting meanings from messages on different levels, to having different levels of interpreting the situation.
3. Infinity and different sorts of infinities. This only helps to fog things up. Can't spit without hitting a paradox. And this is presented rather informally.
Speaking of which, EVERYTHING in this book is presented informally. There is no facts, no proofs, no math, no logical reasoning, no conclusions, just a stream of consciousness, which twirls around and around.
It doesn't ask nor answer any single question straight. It's a philosophy, I see, but even a philosopher has to take sides, but the author does not. There is no side here really.
The discussed topics are indeed interesting and mind-provoking, for the first 200 pages even fascinating, like I said, but then it becomes pointless and boring. The only thing I want to ask after reading this book is "SO WHAT ?".
I wish I spent the time on some other book. Something with a plot.
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Computer Science
| Customer Rating: | | Godel, Escher and Bach, written by Douglas Hofstadter, while the title would suggest it is discussion of a mathematician, an artist, and a composer, is a complex examination of how human beings develop perception and meaning. More specifically, the book explores, through a series of dialogues and narrations, how symbols, thought and language are all intertwined and how reality is essentially a composition of overlapping meanings and perceptions. The book challenges the reader to observe the system of symbolic meanings around him or her objectively. |
An Incredible Intellectual Romp
| Customer Rating: | | Early this summer at a computer programming conference I found myself with a group of programmers of different ages and nationalities. The one thing we all had in common is that we'd read this book while in high school or college and found it fascinating. For some of us the book was life changing. Most of us rediscovered a love of math that our high school education had nearly destroyed. Many of us became programmers because of it. The book may seem to be dated in some respects after 20 plus years, but on the whole it is as relevant and exciting today as it was when it was first published. |
Literate, Facinating, Readable
| Customer Rating: | | This is a work of incredible depth and scope. From number theory to cognition to genetics, Hofstadter offers some incredible insights about the way we and the world work. One word of advice: don't worry if you can't understand all of his ideas. This book is so chock-full of content that most readers could spend a decade plowing through it, only to find that they've missed something important. Just read it. You'll get some of it, and that's enough. |
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