This makes sense. I read the book at age of 20 or so, and it made me to change my life and change my career path. It's very playful, it informs, connects and educates. I think older and more cynical me might not have enjoyed it so much.

I think "Metamagical Themes" and the "Fluid concepts and analogies" are his best books although GEP had the largest impact on me. They are more refined explorations of ideas.

The value of Hofstader's life work is his single minded exploration of one of the hardest problems in cognitive science. Unlike conventional AI/ML research he is tackling the problem beyond the reach of the state of the art and refusing to pick easier problems to solve even when he can't make progress.

Hofstader's main proposition is that analogy making is the core of human cognition. He has made repeated attempts to pin it down into something that is formal using toy examples and programs (copycat, letter spirit). I think his approach has been very insightful even if nothing comes out of it.

In my opinion the "Fluid concepts and analogies" is the culmination of his work. GEB and "Metamagical Themeas" are the predule, what came afterwards is more like prose and and maybe reflection of his personal tragedy.

It's Metamagica Themas, I think - an anagram of 'Mathematical Games'; the Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American which proceeded it.

A lovely book.

Metamagical Themas

(You left out the L.)

I still think Hofstadter's "old school AI" thought processes warrant more attention in today's DL frenzy than they get. His books have been a great source of very interesting questions including style transfer (he dealt with fonts in "Letter Spirit"). It was also the inspiration behind some early experiments using n-nets [1] (shameless plug)

[1] https://blog.imaginea.com/deep-type/

Thank you for sharing your experience, I may have to give `I am a Strange Loop` a try after all, and do the skip-300-pages trick with GEB.

I've tried to get through it multiple times, but I never managed to get far into the later chapters without literally falling asleep. I do not blame on the book; it's likely a consequence of my ADD. However, a significant portion of my friends did manage to get through it, and the summaries and explanations they have given of it were very inspiring. Another reason for me to conclude that it's not the book, but me ;)

Perhaps interestingly, I typically have no trouble with reading long, dense books. One of my favourite books ever is "The Master & His Emissary", an incredibly flawed but also very inspiring tome mixing loose interpretations of brain science, art history and philosophy (the best way to deal with its flaws is to approach any "scientific" argument as a philosophical line of reasoning inspired by a layman's (mis)interpretation of the underlying science, but that it's the reasoning itself that matters). I wonder if the difference in writing styles between TM&HE and GEB could tell us something about what kind of stimuli an ADHD person does and does not respond to?

I wonder if you would like McGilchrist's book then. It's full of associations and drawing lines between seemingly unrelated things, and with sentences containing more than seven comma's not being uncommon.

Writing style is important for me too. I can complete a narrative, story-style book in 2 days. I can't complete a non-fiction book in that time that's half the size. My favourite books are ones that set out to teach something practical in the form of a story (like The Goal).

I have finished non-fiction books. They tend to be fast paced and immediate with what I want out of them. To the point.

In general, that fits with the ADHD type i.e cut the bullshit and get the point!

What are some of the flaws? Or what would I be able to read in order to notice them?

Basically, McGrilchrist makes claims about what we know about how the brain works with a certainty that we simply don't have, let alone draw conclusions from it as if they're facts. He's also prone to "start from a viewpoint and find evidence that matches it"-line of thought (Popper would not be happy...). But if you are aware of that and appreciate more how the whole overarching narrative fits together it's a very enlightening book with very inspiring lines of thought.

Anyway, in my experience it goes very well with:

- "Metaphors We Live By" and other works by Lakoff & Johnson, the book that introduced the concept of "conceptual metaphor" to the world. They are referred to a lot and having read them helps you spot when McGilchrist might be misinterpreting their work.

- "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker, who asides from writing a really fun book on language, also gives some good arguments tempering Lakoff & Johnson's overenthusiasm a bit without being dismissive of them (although in their defense, metaphors are criminally underrated in their importance to thinking).

- most books by Oliver Sacks, who is more qualified to make statements about the brain than anyone else on this list, but "Seeing Voices" especially, because it really dives into the connection between language and brain development.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary#Re...

100 times, this.

GEB is an alright book, but nobody I know has actually managed to finish it. I Am A Strange Loop discusses the exact same thing, but does so with the experience of years of writing in metaphor, and more importantly, entirely in metaphor. All of the metaphors are well-crafted in that they are both a pleasure to imagine, can be recalled rather easily, and accurately map to what the author is trying to express. IAASL also distills the main thesis of GEB, so it is not only more expressive but much more to-the-point (Which I, too think is the main problem with GEB as a book).

I do not hesitate to recommend -- for all those that struggled with GEB, or all those that wish to read GEB, pick up a copy of IAASL, and then if you still wish to read GEB, try it after reading IAASL.

You really can't do that with GEB. It's still valuable, but I think Hofstadter covers the issues with GEB himself just fine so I won't pick it apart.

But yeah, we just pick a section at random and try to sell it to each other with a read. Sometimes we do kind of a theatrical Exquisite Corpse paragraph to paragraph. It's silly, but something about not only the content, but the context of trying to mess up each other's consciousness with the read is not only fun but after 5 minutes you're having a laugh and forget about whatever you cared about all day. Turtles all the way down. Lol.

I know it's dumb, but I just wanted to share. Works ok with Garfield comics too.

I read it again in next six months in small pieces afterwards.

Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by "finish it". Like the blog post guy says, he "looked at every page", but he's not sure he actually absorbed everything about it there was to absorb.

I’ve read it cover to cover, twice. It’s not a bad book, but it would have helped if he had used the Lambda calculus. YMMV.

(Maybe you know of something I could read that would fix that?)

I read the book entirely from first to last page, including bibliography, five times in five years. I was at the age of appr. 19-24 and I did not read many other books in that time. Everytime I read it again, it felt like a new book. I keep casually reading random parts of it until today.

I like Getty's review, although I do not share it at all. I learned many years ago, from a very wise friend, that when I struggle - for example with certain habits of my partner - that the root of my struggling is most likely not within the other, but myself. It points to some personal deficit. This friend taught me to explore myself, before I demand any change from the other. Why is it bothering me, what would I have to change in myself to get over it?

Applying this rule, in Getty's place, I would ask myself: "how comes, that so many people are appealed by this book in a way that I am not? What makes those readers, that share my criticism and those that don't, different?". This sort of introspection is very difficult and sometimes impossible. But in the case of Getty's cognition of GEB I might give some clues:

The parts of the book that receive most criticism in Getty's review are those parts, that I would consider the entertaining sections. For example: never did I perceive the dialogs in the book as didactic. I always perceived the dialogs as a rest period, an intake of breath. After long didactic and sometimes hard to swallow scientific passages, the dialogs in their playful and sometimes childish style would allow my brain to settle down, relax and get ready, very softly, for the next topic. Like you would shake your arms and legs between sportive excercises. The dialogs were always welcome intermissions for me, but I did not take them very seriously and I did not, at all, expect them to be an essential part of the didactic mission of the book.

The second major element of criticism in Getty's review are topics in the book that do not belong to the core themes (Gödels proof, logic, formal systems), but are brought in by the author in a way that does not properly embrace them for one and which he should't refer to in the first place, as he has no sufficient proficiency in those topics (according to Getty).

The expection of Getty obviously is, that GEB is supposed to be a very serious scholarly and didactic work, that must not deviate from its core topic. And I believe that is a mis-expectation: Getty expected a textbook, but got a novel. In MY perception GEB is the novel of Gödels proof and as such it can play and entertain and experiment to any degree that the author desires. Of course the author can make fun of Cage and completely miss Zen buddhism. For me, it was absolutely clear and obvious in every paragraph of the book, whether the author was didactic or playful or personal at any point. The mixture is the essence of the book that makes it so appealing to me. Textbooks are often too dry and hard to swallow, novels on scientific topics almost never go deep enough for me. GEB is an experimental format that hit the sweet point for me.

I want to make clear, that Getty is not "wrong" in his perception - it is his view and it is absolutely legit as such. I believe, though, it is a very big error to blame the author for not fulfilling one's own exepctations or try to convince others, to adapt their perception to one's own - there is no point in this. If Getty is really interested what makes him tick differently than others, he should introspect his indisposition with the "soft", playful, not so scientific, didactic aspects of the book. Why is he upset with those parts, where the author deviates from his views? Why is he unable to distinguish between the serious and the playful parts of the book? It might point him to some revealing aspects of his personality. There is no outcome in the sense of right or wrong!

I liked Getty's review - not for what it was proposedly written for: revealing to me weaknesses of the book I haven't discovered yet, or convincing me, that the book that I so much love, is actually not loveable - but for taking the courage and providing me with an insight in another type of brain and perception, and therefore another aspect of personhood, that I found very interesting and entertaining to learn about! This comes with absolutely no assessment from my side!

If only more people would think like that! (Not thinking of me here ... ;-) )

27, but equally impressive nonetheless

I honestly think it's kind of an important feature of the book. Since it's about the evolution of one's consciousness. At least for me being able to place how old he was as he found himself making the thing helps the parts that can feel sort of strange have the right contextual... extrusion? I recall what it was like to be in my mid 20s, I was thinking a lot about what it meant to be alive and people started suddenly around 25 treating me like what I thought was an adult.

The content of the book being about the procession of consciousness and all, yeah, it's a different book if you know he's 27 than if you think he's 60.

I’m convinced to pick it back up.

I'm going to try this mit course, I think will help motivate me to get through the rest of the book finally.

If you're trying to extrapolate his age from the publishing, someone below corrected me. He was 27 when he wrote it. A few years between writing and publishing the first edition lines up.

Found this after many years of sort of doing something similar without knowing it was a thing. It honestly felt like cheating sometimes for some reason?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

I've yet to see why people think this book is so life changing.

I wish HN had an easy way to save comments like Reddit, but this reply should do the trick :)

For now, I have a bookmarks folder for stuff like this.

1. add the ability to "favorite" from the front page. I rarely "favorite" anything, because I grew accustomed to using "upvote" as the mechanism to save stories. I would switch, but that extra little bit of friction of needing to click through first, means I stick with my old habit.

2. Add "favorite" for comments as well.

3. (maybe) - consider renaming "favorite" to "save"? Possibly people who are used to seeing the "save" link on Reddit would find that more intuitive.

dang: if you get rid of it please don't do so w/o notice so that those of us who do use it can export the links first.

Heh, there ya go. I'm one of the people who uses the favorite feature (albeit sporadically) and I didn't even know you could do that.

Yeah, surfacing the UI element for "favorite" to make it easier to find would, IMO, make it a lot more usable.

I noticed over the years that my use of Pinboard is very asymmetrical: I save several URLs every month, but retrieve at most a handful per year. But knowing that my memories are safely stored gives me peace of mind (and, just to be safe, I make a backup every year or so).

[0] https://pinboard.in

It's better to have a URL and not need, than to need a URL and not have it :)

[0] https://github.com/alphapapa/org-protocol-capture-html

But then, many years later, I read IAASL. And then reread GEB. Which I could then appreciate much better.

Also once you get through the other parts, the Socratic discussions are easy to come back to. You just don't end up in nowhere taxed with his presentation before you really find the book.

I couldn't do the dialogs until I got through the rest. I also enjoyed IAASL a bit more than I enjoyed GEB. Definitely not saying what helped me figure the book out is what everyone should do.

Hofstadter, introducing IAASL, said something like: "I wrote this book because people got so distracted by the form of GEB that they didn't get the point I was making."

My reaction: "I understood the point, I just didn't care about it as much as everything else that was happening in GEB."

Kind of similar to my appreciation of Bach himself, in fact. The content of Bach's compositions is frequently about praising God, which has no particular relevance to me. But the form and aesthetics of Bach are wonderful.

I agree, except make sure not to skip the SHRDLU [1] one, which isn't actually Hofstadter's writing at all, but a demo of the SHRDLU system which is fascinating and should not be missed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

Maybe Chapter X, "Levels of Description, and Computer Systems" on page 285. Or Chapter XI, "Brains and Thoughts" on 337.