Just started Douglas Hofstadter’s “Godel, Escher, Bach – An Eternal Golden Braid” – A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. So far, I’m reading his 1999 Preface to the 20th Anniversary Edition of his 1979 original Pullitzer prize winner.
It’s a book about life, mind, and the evolving psychology of “I” in self-referential loops, crossing multi-level patterns in systems of sufficient complexity. His preface is mainly frustration that despite his earlier prize-winning success, few people writing about his book seem to have got the message amongst all his artistic and musical metaphors.
His bio leading up to the book is intriguing and reminiscent of many others, Pirsig for one, and perhaps myself too in a small way at least, so I’m already sympathetic to the message.
After being struck by the self-referential beauty of Godel’s theorem in refuting Russell and Whitehead’s “Principia Mathematica” – he set out thinking mathematical / formal logic was the subject that excited him, but dropped out of Maths in Berkeley after just one year of “dead” logic.
Doing Physics from 1967 onwards at Eugene Oregon, he was just off Pirsig’s ZMM Oregon trail in July 1968. But, it was 1972 before Hofstadter set off on his own trek across Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alberta, pitching his tent in forests beside lakes and the like. In his case rolling not on a Honda, but cruisin’ in a ’56 Mercury – cue refrain “My baby crazy ’bout a Mercury …” (K C Douglas, 1949) Understanding the Godelian matters ever more clearly. After then going back south he continued East and he too ended up the Big Apple’s Manhattan, albeit 20 years after Kerouac, but beating Pirsig by two years, taking in Zen and “voguish” anti-scientific, hippie-irrationality (wot, no drugs Douglas?) with Molecular Biology, not to mention Escher and his Illusory Loops and Bach and his Fugues along the way. He eventually returned to Oregon to complete graduate studies, but by the time he settled on his PhD and was moving towards AI, he had already seen the subject matter shift from mathematics and logic, to philosophy and linguistics.
That same fine line between rejecting exclusively objective logic, without being branded anti-scientific. Will we find some link between the logical paradoxes of self referential loops and the blurring of objectivity with … something else. That self-referential problem and the bootstrapping of metaphysics must be the same issue at core.
ALso love the story of creating his own printed book for publication, using traditional techniques, only to have his efforts hit the buffers at the finishing line. Very reminiscent of T E Lawrence.
Time to stop speculating, and read on.
Like this:
Like Loading...
