by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Notable Quote:
“Perhaps what differentiates highly creative ideas from ordinary ones is some combined sense of beauty, simplicity, and harmony.”
When my boys were very young, I would sometimes amuse them with a bedtime story of my own making. I began by clapping my open hands together and then slowly spreading them open like a book, saying, “Once upon a time, there was a little boy who wanted his dad to tell him a bedtime story. So his dad tucked him in bed, clapped his hands together, and slowly opened them like a book, saying, ‘Once upon a time, there was a little boy who wanted his dad to tell him a bedtime story. So his dad tucked him in bed, clapped his hands together, and slowly opened them like a book, saying…’”
You get the idea.
Even a five-year-old catches on to this old schtick after a while, and so I would add more and more elaborations. But no matter what, and sometimes in surprising ways, the story always came back to a dad telling his son the very same bedtime story that I was telling my son.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a 742 page, densely intellectual, heavily illustrated, and beautifully harmonic version of my simple recursive bedtime story. But, [spoiler alert!] you don’t realize it until the very end when the Author inserts himself into a dialog with his recurring characters, Achilles and Tortoise, in which they (along with other characters picked up along the way) goad the Author into telling them the story of the book in which they appear. And just before the Author can do so, the book ends with a veiled insinuation to go back to the very beginning. When the reader obliges, he discovers what he missed the first time around, namely that the book opens with a single word and punctuation mark: “Author:”.
The entire book, including the final dialog, is the Author’s retelling of the book that the characters begged for! That realization made me wonder, which retelling was my copy?
The central thesis of the book is that recursive, self-referencing loops, of the type that Hofstadter termed “strange loops,” are like perpetual motion machines that both create meaning and take us to higher levels of abstraction where we can access that meaning. Strange loops are riddles that encode their own solutions.
While Hofstadter explores all the implications from every angle, and especially using the music of J.S. Bach, the art of M.C. Escher, and Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (more on those here), what Hofstadter is ultimately aiming at is an explanation for human consciousness. The reader can decide if he accomplished his task.
Although it was awarded the Pulizer Prize in 1980 in the category of General Nonfiction, much of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is frustratingly inaccessible to most people. But the parts that are accessible are too beautiful to leave unexplored. For example, vignettes appear after each chapter in which Achilles and Tortoise, along with other characters, share delightfully raucous dialog to illustrate the major themes. And the 742 pages are peppered with over 150 illustrations, including many of M.C. Escher’s famous works.
So give the book a try, if you dare. You might find that it ignites in you a passion for paradox in the same way it did for me.