6 ms·
I tried to read this book but never quite understood it. What's it really about?
by durga 10y ago
I tried to read this book but never quite understood it. What's it really about?
- randcraw 10y agoThinking about thinking.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoIt's about the thing it's about.
- dahart 10y agoMaybe you should add "spoiler alert"? ;)
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoNah. if you haven't read GEB, your brain won't evaluate the previous statement correctly, and you won't gain any information. Neurolinguistic hacking! (it works, just ask Stephenson)(JOKE)
- dahart 10y agoYeah, right, I know, your comment was hilarious! I was adding joke to joke, but I guess I failed, someone else even downvoted my bad joke. Did my smiley make it feel snarky?
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoLook, I don't know. I didn't down you.
- drewrv 10y agoStrange loops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop
- Joof 10y agoRecursion, formal languages, math, the general structure of things.
- stan_rogers 10y agoAt its base, it's an exploration of how a conscious mind can arise from unconscious matter. For anyone who's attempted to read the thing and never quite gotten what Hofstadter's on about, the central theme is encapsulated in the dialogue ... Ant Fugue, with the emergence of the character Aunt Hillary from her component ants, who don't directly participate in "her" consciousness. Literally everything else is a long explanation -- from various angles -- of how, given sufficient complexity, the rules don't adequately describe the system, and the system need not be aware of the rules that give it rise. The mathematics, computer science, music, art and "spirituality" are all frames of reference for exploring and (to a limited extent) proving the central thesis: consciousness is an emergent phenomenon.