Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

"I read this book in college and I understood about 40% of it. I just looked at it again and maybe got up to 50% or 60%. It’s a dense book but it’s very playful. It’s hard to describe. It’s part history , part puzzles, and a lot of philosophy . His goal is to try to explain how a bunch of lifeless atoms can create consciousness . He uses all sorts of interesting metaphors. The atoms are like a colony of ants. The atoms in our brain are like meaningless letters, but you put them together and they gain meaning. There’s the idea that when you boil it down, some things are just axiomatic and don’t make sense except within the system. Part of the book is dialogues between Achilles and a tortoise. So it’s a very strange book but it’s full of delightful little nuggets. Even if you don’t understand the whole thing, there are so many little easter eggs, as we call them now, and puzzles within the book. There’s a complicated acrostic, where you take the first letter of each paragraph, and it spells out something about J.S. Bach. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As I said, I’m a huge fan of paradoxes and recursion. As part of my book, I helped create the most time-consuming puzzle ever made. It’s a mechanical puzzle. It’s got 55 wooden pegs which you have to turn in a certain way. To finish it, you have to turn the pegs 1.3 decillion times, which is an unimaginably huge number. If you turn one peg per second, the universe will run out of energy by the time you solve it. The reason why it takes so long is that it’s a recursive puzzle. Hofstadter talks a lot about recursion, where you have to do the same thing over and over again. Think of a marathon where you run the first mile, and then go back. To run the second mile, you have to run the first mile again and then run the second mile. To do the third mile, you have to run the first mile, go back, do the second mile, go back, and then hit the third one. If you do a diagram of a recursive marathon on a piece of paper, the pages would reach higher than the Empire State Building. It’s all about these crazy exponential ways that numbers can get big. Our brains were just not built to understand numbers that go up like that. But they’re important. That’s why Covid spread so fast. We just were not able to comprehend how fast exponential phenomena can spread. You get a little bit of that, but if you want to learn about them, I recommend reading biographies. He just uses them because some of their ideas are interesting: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Escher’s paradoxical stairs, Bach with his fugues and repeating patterns. They’re in there, but they’re not the main characters."