Gdel, Escher, Bach From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Gdel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid GEBcover.

jpg Front cover design, 20th Anniversary Edition Author Douglas Hofstadter Country United States Language English Subject Consciousness, intelligence Published 1979 (Basic Books) Pages 777 pages ISBN ISBN 978-0-465-02656-2, ISBN 0-14-017997-6 OCLC Number 40724766 Dewey Decimal 510/.1 21 LC Classification QA9.8 .H63 1999 Followed by I Am a Strange Loop Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pronounced ['g?d?l '??? 'bax]), also known as GEB, is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter, described by his publishing company as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Ca rroll".[1] By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gdel, artist M . C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, GEB expounds concepts fundamenta l to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses 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 has emphasized that G EB is not about mathematics, art, and music but rather about how cognition and t hinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms. In the book, he present s an analogy about how the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization di splayed in a colony of ants.[2][3] Contents [hide] 1 Structure 2 Themes 3 Puzzles 4 Impact 5 Translation 6 See also 7 Notes 8 References 9 Bibliography 10 External links Structure[edit] GEB takes the form of an interweaving of various narratives. The main chapters a lternate with dialogues between imaginary characters, usually Achilles and the t ortoise, first used by Zeno of Elea and later by Lewis Carroll in "What the Tort oise Said to Achilles". These origins are related in the first two dialogues, an d later ones introduce new characters such as the Crab. These narratives frequen tly dip into self-reference and metafiction. Word play also features prominently in the work. Puns are occasionally used to c onnect ideas, such as "the Magnificrab, Indeed" with Bach's Magnificat in D; "SH RDLU, Toy of Man's Designing" with Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring; and "Typo graphical 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 the liquid and mus

ical varieties), which is titled "Djinn and Tonic". One dialogue in the book is written in the form of a crab 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 a s either greetings or farewells ("Good day") and the positioning of lines which double as an answer to a question in the next line. Another is a sloth canon, wh ere one character repeats the lines of another, but slower and negated. Themes[edit] GEB contains many instances of recursion and self-reference, where objects and i deas speak about or refer back to themselves. For instance, there is a phonograp h that destroys itself by playing a record titled "I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X" (an analogy to Gdel's incompleteness theorems), an examination of canon form in music, and a discussion of Escher's lithograph of two hands drawing eac h other. To describe such self-referencing objects, Hofstadter coins the term "s trange loop", a concept he examines in more depth in his follow-up book I Am a S trange Loop. To escape many of the logical contradictions brought about by these self-referencing objects, Hofstadter discusses Zen koans. He attempts to show r eaders how to perceive reality outside their own experience and embrace such par adoxical questions by rejecting the premise a strategy also called "unasking". Call stacks are also discussed in GEB, as one dialogue describes the adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise as they make use of "pushing potion" and "popping t onic" involving entering and leaving different layers of reality. Subsequent sec tions discuss the basic tenets of logic, self-referring statements, ("typeless") systems, and even programming. GEB was influenced by the books, ber formal unentscheidbare Stze der Principia Mat hematica und verwandter Systeme I, Minds, Machines and Gdel, Chance and Necessity and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps. Puzzles[edit] The book is filled with puzzles. An example of this is the chapter titled "Contr acrostipunctus", which combines the words acrostic and contrapunctus (counterpoi nt). In a dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise, the author hints that ther e is a contrapunctal acrostic in the chapter that refers both to the author (Hof stadter) and Bach. This can be found 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 first ( in bold) and reading them backwards to get "J. S. Bach" (just as the first acros tic claims). Impact[edit] Gdel, Escher, Bach won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction[4] and the Nati onal Book Award for Science.[5][a] Martin Gardner's July 1979 column in Scientif ic American stated, Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of suc h depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at on ce as a major literary event. [6] For Summer 2007, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created an online cou rse for high school students[7] built around the book. In its February 19, 2010, investigative summary on the 2001 anthrax attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that Bruce Edwards Ivins was inspired by GEB to hide secret codes based upon nucleotide sequences in the anthrax-laced letters he allegedly sent in September and October 2001.[8] He used bold letter s, as suggested on page 404 of the book.[9][10] He attempted to hide the book fr om investigators by throwing it in the trash. Translation[edit] Although Hofstadter claims the idea of translating his book "never crossed [his] mind" when he was writing it, when approached with the idea by his publisher 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 translat

ing,[11] since the book relies not only on word-play but "structural puns" as we ll 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 one example of translation trouble in the paragraph "Mr. Tortoi se, Meet Madame Tortue", saying translators "instantly ran headlong into the con flict between the feminine gender of the French noun tortue and the masculinity of my character, the Tortoise".[11] Hofstadter agreed to the translators' sugges tions of naming the French character "Madame Tortue", and the Italian version "S ignorina Tartaruga".[12] Because of other troubles translators might have retain ing the meaning of the book, Hofstadter "painstakingly went through every last s entence of GEB, annotating a copy for translators into any language that might b e targeted".[11] Translation also gave Hofstadter a way to add new meaning and puns. For instance , in Chinese, the subtitle is not a translation of an Eternal Golden Braid, but a seemingly unrelated phrase J Y B (???, literally "collection of exotic jades"), w hich is homophonic to GEB in Chinese. Some material regarding this interplay is to be found in Hofstadter's later book Le Ton beau de Marot, which is mainly abo ut translation. See also[edit] Computer science Fractals Cognitive science Chinese room Emergence John Lucas Quining BlooP and FlooP Collatz conjecture Indra's net Meta Egbert B. Gebstadter MU puzzle Notes[edit] Jump up ^ This was the award for hardcover Science. From 1980 to 1983 in Nationa l Book Award history there were dual awards for hardcover and paperback books in many categories, including several nonfiction subcategories. Most paperback awa rd-winners were reprints of earlier works; the 1980 Science was eligible for bot h awards as a new book. References[edit] Jump up ^ Hofstadter, cover. Jump up ^ By Analogy: A talk with the most remarkable researcher in artificial i ntelligence today, Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gdel, Escher, Bach Wired Mag azine, November 1995 Jump up ^ Consciousness In The Cosmos: Perspective of Mind: Douglas Hofstadter Jump up ^ The Prizes, Pulitzer, 1980. 1980". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012Jump up ^ "National Book Awards 03-07. Jump up ^ Somers, James. "The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think". The Atlant ic. The Atlantic Media Company. Retrieved 25 October 2013. Jump up ^ GEB, MIT. Jump up ^ "Amerithrax Investigative Summary" (PDF). United States Department of Justice. February 19, 2010. Retrieved 2010-11-10. Jump up ^ "Page 404 of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" (PDF). Unit ed States Department of Justice. Retrieved 2010-11-10. Jump up ^ Willman, David (2011), The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attack s, and America's Rush to War; New York: Bantam Books, pg 300.

^ Jump up to: a b c Hofstadter 1999, p. xxxiv. Jump up ^ Hofstadter 1999, pp. xxxiv xxxv. Bibliography[edit] Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1999) [1979], Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid , Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-02656-7 External links[edit] Gdel, Escher, Bach on Open Library at the Internet Archive GEB video lectures, MIT OpenCourseWare Partial contents of 20th Anniversary Edition Mrten's GEB site Class about GEB, at the University of Michigan Java 3D game based on the GEB triplets [hide] v t e Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (1976 2000) Why Survive? Being Old in America by Robert Neil Butler (1976) Beautiful Swimmer s by William W. Warner (1977) The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan (1978) On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson (1979) Gdel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1980) Fin-de-sicle Vienna by Carl E. Schorske (1981) The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1982) Is There No Place on Earth for Me? by S usan Sheehan (1983) The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr (1984) The Good War by Studs Terkel (1985) Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas / Move Your Shadow by Joseph Lelyveld (1986) * Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land by Dav id K. Shipler (1987) The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1988) A Br ight Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan (1989) And Their Children After Them by Dale Ma haridge and Michael Williamson (1990) The Ants by Bert Hlldobler and Edward O. Wi lson (1991) The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin (1992) Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills (199 3) Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick (1994) The Beak of the Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time by Jonathan Weiner (1995) Th e Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism by Tina Rosenberg (1996) Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger (1997) Guns, Germs, and St eel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (1998) Annals of the Former W orld by John McPhee (1999) Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower (2000) Complete list (1962 1975) (1976 2000) (2001 2025) Categories: 1979 booksCognitive science literatureDialoguesM. C. EscherMathemati cs booksNational Book Award winning worksPhilosophy booksPulitzer Prize for Gene ral Non-Fiction winning worksPuzzle booksMetafictional worksJohann Sebastian Bac hBooks by Douglas HofstadterBasic Books books Navigation menu Create accountLog inArticleTalkReadEditView history Search Main page Contents Featured content Current events Random article Donate to Wikipedia Interaction Help About Wikipedia Community portal Recent changes Contact page Toolbox Print/export Languages

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