This is the book that got me started on artificial intelligence … and now has inspired me again to attack my craft with greater vigor. I was writing an essay for The Centaur’s Pen column for the Write to The End site and realized it depended on a concept – true, but unprovable theorems – which isn’t in wide circulation. So I’ve started an essay on that topic for this site, and decided to go reread Gödel, Escher, Bach, the book which introduced me to the concept.
At the writing group, the topic of the essay and Gödel, Escher, Bach came up, and we all started discussing how intricate, how rewarding, and how friendly Hofstadter’s immense tome is. It’s a work of genius that continues to stagger me to this day. And then my writing friends told me that in the new edition there’s a foreward with the entire back story of how the book came to be.
I picked it up last night, and reading the new intro I was gratified to learn that I understood his basic thesis – that conscious intelligence arises from bare matter by grounding its symbols in correspondence to reality, then inexorably turning that grounding inward into a spiral of self-reference with no end. Hofstadter and I might disagree about what’s sufficient to produce conscious intelligence, but we’d just be quibbling about details, because I think he nailed a necessary component.
But after the intro of the foreword, when I began to read the story of how this 750 page long Pulitzer Prize winning book started its life as a 20 page letter that Hofstadter decided needed to be turned into a pamphlet, I was stunned.
He wrote it in 5 years.
Well, it actually took 6 to complete, because he typeset it himself—through a happy-but-not-at-the-time accident, twice—producing an amazing work that was polished far beyond his original intention. But he wrote it while in graduate school, while teaching classes, while traveling cross-country. He put it down for a bit finishing his PhD thesis itself, but basically the book’s a white hot blaze of inspiration polished to pure excellence.
I’m inspired, all over again.
-the Centaur
