It's not _all_ like that. Skip it and keep going. The most important stuff is in plain English.

That's great news. The chapters before that were great. I'm ignorant of anything above HS math and figured I would be lost in the rest of the book if I was having trouble in the first few pages.

I think it covers diverse explanation of the same theme i.e. can consciousness be generated out of unconscious (something like that). But I found the pq system quite interesting. BTW if you are having problem with that you can skip it, Hofstadter takes his sweet time explaining what formal systems is.