Gödel, Escher, Bach
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Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Douglas Hofstadter |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Consciousness, intelligence |
| Published | 1979 (Basic Books) |
| Pages | 777 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 40724766 |
| 510/.1 21 | |
| LC Class | QA9.8 .H63 1999 |
| Followed by | I Am a Strange Loop |
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter. The tagline "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll" was used by the publisher to describe the book.
By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself.
In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter has emphasized that Gödel, Escher, Bach is not about the relationships of mathematics, art, and music, but rather about how cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms. At one point in the book, he presents an analogy about how the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.
Gödel, Escher, Bach takes the form of an interweaving of various narratives. The main chapters alternate with dialogues between imaginary characters, usually Achilles and the tortoise, first used by Zeno of Elea and later by Lewis Carroll in "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles". These origins are related in the first two dialogues, and later ones introduce new characters such as the Crab. These narratives frequently dip into self-reference and metafiction.
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