Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Douglas Hofstadter

Finished: December 2023
Status: read
Tags: philosophy computer science cognition

Review

I read this over six months in 2023 and it rewired my thinking. Hofstadter's central preoccupation — how meaning and selfhood can emerge from formal systems that have no meaning at all — feels more urgent in 2024 than when the book was first published in 1979. Long, recursive, sometimes maddening, but unlike anything else.

"It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a façade of order — and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order."