{"id":1732,"date":"2012-03-02T11:03:54","date_gmt":"2012-03-02T18:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=1732"},"modified":"2012-03-02T11:03:54","modified_gmt":"2012-03-02T18:03:54","slug":"godel-escher-bach-an-eternally-inspiring-tome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/02\/godel-escher-bach-an-eternally-inspiring-tome\/","title":{"rendered":"G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach: An Eternally Inspiring Tome"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_20120301_212447.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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 G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach<\/a>, the book which introduced me to the concept.<\/p>\n

At the writing group, the topic of the essay and G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He wrote it in 5 years.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I’m inspired, all over again.<\/p>\n

-the Centaur<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4,19,8,5],"class_list":["post-1732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dragon-writers","tag-hard-science","tag-intelligence","tag-we-call-it-living","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}