The original review post focuses on Gödel, but you cannot truly review GEB without Escher and Bach. Yes, self-referentiality is a key theme of Hofstadter, but also recursion, symmetry and the foreground/background ambiguity in visual arts and music, after all the whole book is essentially a recursive, self-similiar poem (alternating chapters with prose and dialogues, one dialogue has palindrome form).
Despite that I disagree about his fundamental view of AI, namely that AI is an emergent epiphenomenon, it is still the most-read and most-appreciated book ever for me. I read it first in German and then in English, and given the playfulness with form versus function/content, it is also the best-translated work that I have ever encountered. I'm grateful that I bought it when I was sixteen, simply because it was mentioned in a computer magazine and in a completely different context, so I got curious. I know many people that deeply appreciate it, or that went into AI careers because of it.
The original review post focuses on Gödel, but you cannot truly review GEB without Escher and Bach. Yes, self-referentiality is a key theme of Hofstadter, but also recursion, symmetry and the foreground/background ambiguity in visual arts and music, after all the whole book is essentially a recursive, self-similiar poem (alternating chapters with prose and dialogues, one dialogue has palindrome form).
Despite that I disagree about his fundamental view of AI, namely that AI is an emergent epiphenomenon, it is still the most-read and most-appreciated book ever for me. I read it first in German and then in English, and given the playfulness with form versus function/content, it is also the best-translated work that I have ever encountered. I'm grateful that I bought it when I was sixteen, simply because it was mentioned in a computer magazine and in a completely different context, so I got curious. I know many people that deeply appreciate it, or that went into AI careers because of it.