.jpg) Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Douglas Hofstadter |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subjects | Consciousness,intelligence,recursivity,mathematics |
| Publisher | Basic Books |
Publication date | 1979 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 777 |
| ISBN | 978-0-465-02656-2 |
| 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 (abbreviated asGEB) is a 1979 nonfiction book by American cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter.
By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logicianKurt Gödel, artistM. C. Escher, and composerJohann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental tomathematics,symmetry, andintelligence. Through short stories, illustrations, and analysis, the book discusses how systems can acquire meaningful context despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discussesself-reference and formal rules,isomorphism, 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 emphasized thatGödel, Escher, Bach is not about the relationships ofmathematics, art, andmusic, but rather about howcognitionemerges from hidden neurological mechanisms. One point in the book presents an analogy about how individualneurons in thebrain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in acolony of ants.[1][2]
Gödel, Escher, Bach won thePulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction[3] and theNational Book Award for Science Hardcover.[4][a]
Gödel, Escher, Bach takes the form of interweaving narratives. The main chapters alternate with dialogues between imaginary characters, usuallyAchilles and the tortoise, first used byZeno of Elea and later byLewis 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 intoself-reference andmetafiction.
Word play also features prominently in the work. Puns are occasionally used to connect ideas, such as the "Magnificrab, Indeed" with Bach'sMagnificat in D; "SHRDLU, Toy of Man's Designing" with Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"; and "Typographical Number Theory", or "TNT", which inevitably reacts explosively when it attempts to make statements about itself. One dialogue contains a story about a genie (from the Arabic "Djinn") and various "tonics" (of both theliquid andmusical varieties), which is titled "Djinn and Tonic". Sometimes word play has no significant connection, such as the dialogue "AMu Offering", which has no close affinity to Bach'sThe Musical Offering.
One dialogue in the book is written in the form of acrab canon, in which every line before the midpoint corresponds to an identical line past the midpoint. The conversation still makes sense due to uses of common phrases that can be used as either greetings or farewells ("Good day") and the positioning of lines that double as an answer to a question in the next line. Another is a sloth canon, where one character repeats the lines of another, but slower and negated.
The book contains many instances ofrecursion andself-reference, where objects and ideas speak about or refer back to themselves. One isQuining, a term Hofstadter invented in homage toWillard Van Orman Quine, referring to programs that produce their ownsource code. Another is the presence of a fictional author in the index,Egbert B. Gebstadter, a man with initials E, G, and B and a surname that partially matches Hofstadter. A phonograph dubbed "Record Player X" destroys itself by playing a record titledI Cannot Be Played on Record Player X (an analogy toGödel's incompleteness theorems), an examination ofcanon form inmusic, and a discussion of Escher'slithograph of two hands drawing each other.
To describe such self-referencing objects, Hofstadter coins the term "strange loop", a concept he examines in more depth in his follow-up bookI Am a Strange Loop. To escape many of the logical contradictions brought about by these self-referencing objects, Hofstadter discussesZenkoans. He attempts to show readers how to perceive reality outside their own experience and embrace such paradoxical questions by rejecting the premise, a strategy also called "unasking".
Elements ofcomputer science such ascall stacks are also discussed inGödel, Escher, Bach, as one dialogue describes the adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise as they make use of "pushing potion" and "popping tonic" involving entering and leaving different layers of reality. The same dialogue has a genie with a lamp containing another genie with another lamp and so on. Subsequent sections discuss the basic tenets of logic, self-referring statements, ("typeless") systems, and even programming. Hofstadter further createsBlooP and FlooP, two simpleprogramming languages, to illustrate his point.
The book is filled with puzzles, including Hofstadter'sMU puzzle, which contrasts reasoning within a defined logical system with reasoning about that system. Another example can be found in the chapter titledContracrostipunctus, which combines the wordsacrostic andcontrapunctus (counterpoint). In this dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise, the author hints that there is a contrapunctal acrostic in the chapter that refers both to the author (Hofstadter) and Bach. This can be spelled out by taking the first word of each paragraph, to reveal "Hofstadter's Contracrostipunctus Acrostically Backwards Spells J. S. Bach". The second acrostic is found by taking the first letters of the words of the first, and reading them backwards to get "J S Bach", as the acrostic sentence self-referentially states.
Gödel, Escher, Bach won thePulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and theNational Book Award for Science Hardcover.
Martin Gardner's July 1979 column inScientific American stated, "Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event."[5]
For Summer 2007, theMassachusetts Institute of Technology created an online course for high school students built around the book.[6]
In its February 19, 2010, investigative summary on the2001 anthrax attacks, theFederal Bureau of Investigation suggested thatBruce Edwards Ivins was inspired by the book to hide secret codes based uponnucleotide sequences in theanthrax-laced letters he allegedly sent in September and October 2001,[7] using bold letters, as suggested on page 404 of the book.[8][9] It was also suggested that he attempted to hide the book from investigators by throwing it in the trash.[10]
In 2019, British mathematicianMarcus du Sautoy curated a series of events at London'sBarbican Centre to celebrate the book's fortieth anniversary.[11]
Hofstadter has expressed some frustration with howGödel, Escher, Bach was received. He felt that readers did not fully grasp thatstrange loops were supposed to be the central theme of the book, and attributed this confusion to the length of the book and the breadth of the topics covered.[12][13]
To remedy this issue, Hofstadter publishedI Am a Strange Loop in 2007, which had a more focused discussion of the idea.[13]
Hofstadter claims the idea of translating his book "never crossed [his] mind" when he was writing it—but when his publisher brought it up, he was "very excited about seeing [the] book in other languages, especially… French." He knew, however, that "there were a million issues to consider" when translating,[14] since the book relies not only on word-play, but on "structural puns" as well—writing where the form and content of the work mirror each other (such as the "Crab canon" dialogue, which reads almost exactly the same forwards as backwards).
Hofstadter gives an example of translation trouble in the paragraph "Mr. Tortoise, Meet Madame Tortue", saying translators "instantly ran headlong into the conflict between the feminine gender of the French nountortue and the masculinity of my character, the Tortoise."[14] Hofstadter agreed to the translators' suggestions of naming the French characterMadame Tortue, and the Italian versionSignorina Tartaruga.[15] Because of other troubles translators might have retaining meaning, Hofstadter "painstakingly went through every sentence ofGödel, Escher, Bach, annotating a copy for translators into any language that might be targeted."[14]
Translation also gave Hofstadter a way to add new meaning and puns. For instance, inChinese, the subtitle is not a translation ofan Eternal Golden Braid, but a seemingly unrelated phraseJí Yì Bì (集异璧, literally "collection of exotic jades"), which ishomophonic toGEB in Chinese. Some material regarding this interplay is in Hofstadter's later book,Le Ton beau de Marot, which is mainly about translation.
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