Title: Gödel, Escher, Bach
Author: Douglas Hofstadter
Category: Expository
Status: ProvP
Without doubt this book has been one of my favorite and most influential book I’ve ever read. What is the book about? Well that is a particular difficult answer to give in a plain way. The book covers the most range of topics from history, music and mathematics to genetics, robotics and logic. But if we are demanded to give a theme the book is about I would venture to say is The Mind. Yes! The mind and how something like atoms could evolve to say something like “I am”. What is that “I” in that sentence? Well that is particularly difficult question to answer, as almost eight hundred pages prove to be.
The book took me through a journey of concepts and stories. The three main branches of it were the Godel Theorem, Bach’s fugues and the drawings of M.C. Escher. Each of them gave the book a myriad of analogies to make easier to understand the points given by Hofstadter. The book also used Dialogues, in the style of Zeno and Lewis Caroll to introduce concepts and give another tone to the topics we were reading. All of them were very enjoyable and helped me to understand the topics in a better way.
What most impressed me about the book was the infinite insights I gain from reading the book. For example, how marvelous DNA is! I mean, in every tiny living being even if just a mosquito or even less, a virus, there exist such a complex machinery! Now if we think about us we have reached completely another league. Our mind without doubt is a really complex so can we ever be able to reproduce it? Well this is one of the conjectures Hofstadter works on the book. He introduces us to programing and Artificial Intelligence with characters such as Babbage and Alan Turing.
In brief was one of the book I enjoyed the most in my life since made me think really deep into what it means to have a mind and how fantastic that fact is. Besides that important factor, the style in which the book is written completely fascinated me. It is very friendly and humorous. Hofstadter discovered how to connect very well with the reader.
