I there,

Has anybody here read the book 'Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid', by Douglas R. Hofstadter?
After great expectation, I read it a couple of months ago, and I´m not going to say that it changed my life (as so many people said on amazon.com), but it was a pretty good, if heavy, read. It deals mainly with self-awareness, artificial intelligence and many other things besides. It´s the kind of book I´ll have to reread a couple of times to absorb more.
So has anybody read this hefty tome, and if so, what are your thoughts on it?
M.

I have seen the book before, so at least I feel that I should tell everyone that he isn't making it up. Sorry I can't help more, but I can say that Escher and Bach are definitely worthy of such a book. Who's Godel, by the way?

Hi mikeb, and welcome to FunTrivia!
As I said of sand's mention of Ishmael I can think of several people here who are interested in books in that area.
Thanks for posting!

Hi again,

As I said, I didn´t really get most a lot of this book when I read it, and I made this post with the hope of to see if anybody else has read it or has any more info on it.
***Warning*** The 'facts' below are as I understand them so they may be completely wrong, but here we go...
Godel was a mathematician who was interested in self-reference, that is to say that many of the equations he came up with actually made reference to themselves. Escher was a fantastic graphic artists whose works we've seen many times. Many of his pictures had something to to with something going back on itself, or self-referencing, for example, he has a picture of two hands, drawing each other which is funky because the two hands are making references to each other, and through this, to themselves and the picture makes a reference to itself, by illustrating something being drawn. Not very good at explaining, am I?
Bach is also mentioned in the book because he wrote many canons, which are pieces of music which start off with a central melody that builds up on a central theme, adding new chords and structures to enhance the music. An example of this idea is Canon in D, by Pachabel (Not Bach)!
Anyway, this guy Hofstadter links these three things together to form an analogy of human conciousness. A central tenet of consiousness from our point of view is that we are self-aware, that is to say, we know that we know. See? Another self reference!

Or maybe I misunderstood the book entirely! ;-)

I hope I explained myself well!