{"id":373,"date":"2007-05-18T22:55:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-18T22:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2007\/05\/18\/373\/"},"modified":"2011-08-06T16:55:12","modified_gmt":"2011-08-06T21:55:12","slug":"373","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=373","title":{"rendered":"Book Report, Godel-Escher-Bach"},"content":{"rendered":"

I finally started digging into \u201cGodel, Escher, Bach\u201d<\/span> by Douglas Hofstadter. This is a big book; over 700 pages. And it\u2019s mostly about math. Well, really it\u2019s about \u201cmeta-math\u201d: the bigger ideas behind math. But in order to get to the bigger ideas, the reader has to wade thru a lot of stuff about ordinary math, the kind of stuff that you sat thru in high school and freshman year in college, bored out of your skull. Mr. Hofstadter tries to make it as un-boring as possible by telling entertaining stories and presenting little ‘brain-tickler’ puzzles and hosting a fairly wide sample of artistic works by Escher (those crazy drawings that defy the normal rules of dimensionality and gravity). And he wants to convince you that math is the foundation of human consciousness. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m only at page 110, but so far I can\u2019t see how a group of conventions regarding sets and axioms and theorems are going to explain why I think there is a \u2018me\u2019 inside of me. But that\u2019s just it, Hofstadter would say. Consciousness is all about chasing your tail, about looping around without any starting or ending points. And that\u2019s just what a lot of mathematicians have been thinking about over the past 100 years or so. Well, all this recursive math stuff is pretty interesting, but I\u2019m still not sure that it\u2019s going to bring me any closer to the mystery of subjective mental experience than the various neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers, whose books about the mind and consciousness line some of my shelves. (Or sit on my floor \u2013 I don\u2019t exactly have a nice, neat library here in my dinky apartment).<\/p>\n

Hofstadter is enthralled with Bach\u2019s musical works, because of the complex relationships between the various musical patterns that interweave cleverly through many of his compositions. I can\u2019t say that I\u2019m a big classical music fan; and even the Bach that I have heard . . . . well, let\u2019s just say that I\u2019ve thus far failed to appreciate the genius behind it. <\/p>\n

The best song that I know of which deftly intermixes a group of wandering musical elements is a guitar instrumental by The Ventures<\/a>, from their Live in Japan \u201965 album. The song in question is a 3 and \u00bd minute medley of three Ventures hit songs from the early 60\u2019s: Walk, Don\u2019t Run; Perfedia; and Lullaby of the Leaves. It uses the standard 4-man pop tune setup typical of the mid-60\u2019s: drums, lead guitar, rhythm guitar and base, i.e. the same line-up that the Beatles and their imitators made famous. But I\u2019ve never heard a song where each musical element is so distinctive and independent, and yet plays off the other three so well. When listening to Medley, you can easily pick out one instrument and follow it all the way through. Even rhythm guitar, something that you hardly notice on most \u201cfab four\u201d songs, is a distinctive contributor to Medley. Each player gets his moment in the spotlight (even Bob Bogle on bass fills in the weak spots with some fantastic rides). But at just about every point in the record, each player is present, working away. I\u2019m not sure about the math behind the notes on Medley. But my conscious mind tells me that there was some real genius at work in putting it together. <\/p>\n

One more thing about the Ventures versus Bach: most classical work is quite complex but rather slow tempoed. Medley moves along at a lively clip. There isn\u2019t much room for error. It\u2019s kind-of like a race car ballet, moving along at 150, everyone hoping that everyone else gets the moves right and doesn\u2019t crash. Maybe that\u2019s not a bad way to think about how our minds work \u2013 at least when they work right. Every now and then they go crash, and all the notes in life are off-key. At least three-fifths of my typical work-week goes like that! And not like Godel, Escher, Bach, and The Ventures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finally started digging into \u201cGodel, Escher, Bach\u201d by Douglas Hofstadter. This is a big book; over 700 pages. And it\u2019s mostly about math. Well, really it\u2019s about \u201cmeta-math\u201d: the bigger ideas behind math. But in order to get to the bigger ideas, the reader has to wade thru a lot of stuff about ordinary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2255,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions\/2255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}