Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

I've been trying to read this book for a decade.

This is a journey, and a deeply contemplative one. But, what is the goal? In the author's words:

In a word, GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle? What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream"– that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

But a person like me, who enjoys the journey more than the destination, surely finds their stays in the way nourishing. For this is a book nothing short of cross-disciplinary. Music, Mathematics, Philosophy, Biology, Logic, and Computer Science, even Zen Buddhism, all found their fair share of pages in this work.

The Strings

Gödel

Philosophers of mathematics have toiled long to make mathematics's theoretical underpinning unassailable. Many minds of extraordinary abilities have devoted their lives to it. Gödel, in his incompleteness theorems, has shown that such efforts are futile. A sufficiently powerful system cannot prove all truths about itself.

Escher

Escher's paintings are illusory, puzzling to say the least. They are full of self-reference and paradoxical connections.

Bach

Bach is beautiful. Bach is sublime. And, Bach, mysteriously, is more mathematical than we think he is.

The Braid

These strings, along with others, braided and narrated a story and theory about consciousness. At the base of it is Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which allow, with sufficient layers, to build a self-referential and introspective system which is the basis of consciousness. For the author, this is the cornerstone of true AI.

Summarising like this, of course, doesn't do justice to this book. Instead of a run-of-the-mill scientific book, the author tried to invoke vivid scenarios to not only know this, but also to understand and feel his arguments. The primary tool for this endeavour was some Quan-like, paradoxical conversations used as preludes to every chapter.

With all these literary devices, this book is not a pop-science book. The subject matter, and to the depths they have been covered, requires a slow-going, mindful approach to comprehend.

Thoroughly enjoyed!

Towards the end, as the book explores concepts from AI, I lost a bit of interest because I had doubts about whether it's out-dated. AI has progressed greatly since this book was written.

But the first half, leading up to the explanation of Godel's theorem, I found fascinating.