What do you guys think? Is it worth it?
It's only pretentious if you consider, say, Neal Stephenson pretentious. I generally find that the people who say kind of thing that don't understand the topics, but are intimidated to say so.
And G, E & B are all dead, yet their work is still relevent, which makes them by definition timeless.
I remember when it came out: it swept through my high school like wildfire. I think every student had read it by the end of that year.
I would seriously doubt 10% of a university class on Comp Sci has read this book let alone a high school class of any standard. I remember reading this but can't remember finishing it so I presume I'm one of the multitude who let it slide halfway through.
A year or so back, I mentioned my admiration to a friend, who had a copy but hadn't yet read it. My friend (a CS person with a degree in Physics) tried reading it, and found it very hard going. So I looked through my own copy (signed by the author, I'll have you know).
Yes, it's all of what you listed. It looks like I mostly skipped the pretentious parts, and read the parts with whimsical humor. It was also at a time in my life where I didn't know much about recursion or self-referential statements, which made the book's ideas all the more engaging.
My suggestion is to give it a go, skim when it gets turgid, and admire some of the lengths the author went through to explore an idea. (Eg, an exploration of the three different ways to translate the abbreviated letter of a street name from Russian into English.
If you want to understand Godel's proofs then I recommend "Godel's Proof" by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman:
http://www.amazon.com/Gödels-Proof-Ernest-Nagel/dp/081475837....
Instead of Hofstadter's GEB, read some of his papers, e.g., "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h....
But there are others who have focused longer on analogy, e.g., George Lakoff:
"Metaphors we Live by"
http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/022....
"Where Mathematics Come From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being":
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Come-Embodied-Brings....
"Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things"
http://www.amazon.com/Women-Fire-Dangerous-Things-Lakoff/dp/....
Now, over 15 years later, I'm still telling myself to read GEB, but I always wonder how much point there is.
A very worthwhile book to read in parallel to N&N is Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries, by Greenberg. It's more textbooky, but still short, and it will let you see how some of the same themes played out in geometry as well as arithmetic.
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Advent-Algorithm-300-Year-Computer...
It's my favorite book. I recommend you do try it.
Is the core thesis outdated? Well we still don't have a meaningful grasp on what consciousness is. We know a lot more about physical processes but little more about how the physical world gives rise to consciousness. We are stuck in roughly the same place pondering whether its just a non-causal phenomena of the brain or a different type of stuff entirely.
GEB is about the spine-tinglingly freaky consequences of feedback and self-reference. It gives rise to mind blowing mathematical results of Goedel, hypnotic images in Escher, the beauty of Bach but its not really about them, they are just demonstrations of the phenomena, the real message is that self-referential rules and information processing are the essence of computation, the core of language and most likely, the underlying mechanism of consciousness itself.
I think he is right. I predict a revolution in our understanding of consciousness will not come from a philosopher, or a neuro-scientist or a psychologist but from a computer-scientist who once read GEB...
I recommend with a side of Neon Genesis Evangelion, David Foster Wallace and Radiohead.
That said, you'll probably find that you need to read it more than once to glean everything from it.
Category theory and Type theory are replacing Set theory as the fundamental basis of Math, or at least it's fashionable to try to do so, and the book revolves around the Whitehead and Russel set theoretic work and Godel's deconstruction thereof. Which isn't to say that Category theory or whatever are immune to Godel's theorems, I have no idea how those would translate, and my gut tells me that they would have roughly the same outcome.
But yeah, anyways, wonderful exposition of the kind of extremely bare-bones framework fundamental mathematicians operate in, magnificient demonstration of what recursive and self-referential structures imply, and overall a great read.
Thats the only thing that comes to mind and it's only a minor quibble.
Contrast "good old-fashioned AI" with "machine learning", where the representations are as minimalistic and low-level as possible, because the only important thing is that when you update them a few billion times the right results emerge statistically.
I don't see it as a problem that this part of GEB is "dated", though, because I find GOFAI to be an interesting topic. It involves trying to think about how you think and formalize it, which rarely happens in modern AI.
Imagine a world where brute-force alpha-beta search was just not good enough to beat humans at chess; a world where advances in chess-playing computers would require chessmasters to encode their expertise in interesting data structures. This is the world that might have been, and it's the world GEB describes when it talks about AI. It's dated, but it's interesting.
It really is, in my opinion, an amazing and clever book. If you can, I would recommend taking a few weeks to really digest it, it is not a book you can read for hours and hours on end - you will need to stop, clear your mind and reflect on some of the points made - at least that is what I had to do.
Be warned, the book will start to mess with you...but it warns you when it does...most of the time.
To ask my own...how do people who read GEB find his latest "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking"? I'm just starting it and it has entranced me quite a bit...
Pretentious? I don't think it pretends to be anything other that what is is: A book that weaves together similar ideas, basically, self-reference and the resulting paradoxes and mystery that self-reference can generate, from the the worlds of art, music and math in an entertaining way for the layman.
Outdated? It's a classic, and cannot go "out-of-date" as in "invalid". In the same way that Bach's music, Escher's art, or Gödel's proof cannot go out of date, they can only become "dated".
Should you read it? Only you can decide if your time would be more richly spent on something else, but I suspect the answer is yes, reading GEB is probably a good use of your time.
Before the images of Escher and fractals and recursion had a couple of decades to work their way into the background noise of common culture, GEB was mind blowing. Now, with high speed internet, cleverly written essays interconnecting ideas are much more common, and Escher's black and white drawings feel less visually rich in a world saturated with computer graphics. The Bach still stands on its own, but the fact that the book can only talk about it and the reader is still on their own in so far as experiencing the music goes, and an appreciation for Bach is both the part of the book that took the longest to develop and the part which has stuck with me the longest...well maybe a skepticism of systems and general pessimism derived from the possibility that Godel might be right has stuck with me longer.
Though Hofstadter might have become pretentious in the thirty-five odd years since he wrote the book, in its time, it certainly wasn't pretentious - it was a risky literary exercise by an unknown author. It's essentially Hofstadter splattering his young and brilliant mind onto the printed page - drawing connections between the principles and intermingling Pythonesque dialogs and treating the whole thing seriously is absurd. And wonderfully entertaining for the right readers.
That said, the most dated aspect of the book is the mindshare it has obtained. The idea that a book offering such deep technical engagement could achieve popular exposure in today's world, borders on the unthinkable.
It's not for everyone, and it certainly isn't fundamental to computing and the world being more jaded and less stoned and more informed than the world of the Carter administration, calling GEB dated is a fair criticism.
Anyway, my recommendation is to pick up a copy from the library and see if you enjoy it. Life is to short to should one's self.
Then I read "I am a strange loop" and am now of the opinion Hofstadter is full of shit.
The description of Godel's incompleteness theorem is still excellent
It is a great read.
Read it again in 5-10 years.
Mash-up. Fusion. Outside the box.
Not a revolution, but a diversionary mind bender in its day.
A format much imitated since.
It's a well-known book in general, particularly famous and revered among STEM circles. It also won a Pulitzer Prize back when it was released.