alt Hacker NewsI’ll never understand how GEB was using math, art, and music to explain consciousness (and Hofstadter himself still thinks no one understood it), but Nagel and Newman did a great job explaining why logic as a mechanical thing has only a tenuous relationship to concepts we understand, and that helped me crack at least a little bit of the mystery I was after when giving up on GEB.
Replies
> I’ll never understand how GEB was using math, art, and music to explain consciousness
As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "The result of the proper study of a novel should be contemplation of the mystery embodied in it, but this is a contemplation of the mystery in the whole work and not or some proposition or paraphrase. It is not the tracking down of an expressible moral or a statement about life." We don't read literature with the hopes of a book laying out a precise thesis and incontrovertibly demonstrating it.
If you come into GEB expecting a scientific explanation of consciousness (like I did, when I first read it) you walk away confused and maybe disappointed. Hofstadter observed something transcendentally beautiful about self-reference and had a spiritual or religious revelation that, for him, related it to consciousness, and he attempted to convey that beauty and spiritual revelation in - appropriately self-referentially - a book that embodied it. You're meant to appreciate it in your heart and soul, not (just) in your mind. It's literature, not science.
I have not read GEB but I thought his second book, I am a Strange Loop, did a pretty good job of connecting the idea of self referential loops (like in godels proof) to consciousness and art and such.