Gödel, Escher, Bach
March 20, 2008
I visited a library today. Always a bad move to venture into a place full of enticingly unread books, and inevitably they had something I couldn’t resist – a brand new copy of the 20th anniversary edition of another book that I doubt I will ever finish reading, still less understand:
Gödel, Escher, Bach:
an Eternal Golden Braid
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll
by
Douglas R. Hofstadter
The question Hofstadter seeks to tackle with this mindboggling book is: “What is a self, and how can a self come out of inanimate matter?” That’s a big one. No, that’s the big one. His extraordinary efforts – weaving together art, music, mathematics, philosophy and consciousness – earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1980.
If I ever get marooned on a desert island I hope I have a copy with me. It will certainly provide a lot for me to get my head around -
in the unlikely event that I do actually read it…
What are we and why are we here? Where is here anyway? Are we really here at all? Where did we come from, and where are we going?
