Wandering through a small bookstore in Burlington, Massachusetts when I was a mere fifteen years old, I stumbled by sheer happenstance across an intriguing book that prove to be the most influential text of my formative teenage years, and which would lead me to untold intellectual treasures in the years to come.

Little did I know that I had picked up a Pulitzer Prize-winning text, nor did I anticipate that this bit of writing would continue to influence me so profoundly over the years that it would make itself known everywhere from my many college papers (and arguably my entire college education) to my music and, well over a decade later, my stage and theater work.

The title of this text? Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979) by Douglas Hofstadter.

Subtitled A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, this magical text begins simply enough as an introduction to the historical figures Johann Sebastian Bach, M.C. Escher and Kurt Gödel, yet even from the opening lines it’s evident that this is more than a mere biographical text.

Utilizing these three creative minds as tools to explore the intricacies of self-reflexive thought, paradox and the fundamental nature of consciousness, Gödel, Escher, Bach quickly becomes a brilliantly constructed treatise operating simultaneously on many levels – from the construction of individual sentences and stories to the overarching format of the book – which may not in every case be immediately apparent but allows for a joyous journey of discovery for its reader that continues well past the first reading.

I cannot recommend this text highly enough, along with another stunning work by Hofstadter entitled Metamagical Themas (and for a more cursory yet nonetheless delightful introduction to this type of thinking, check out the anthology edited by Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett entitled The Minds I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul), but the real news of the day is the announcement of a new book by Hofstadter which could be considered a direct follow-up to his 1979 masterwork – I Am a Strange Loop.

Published by Basic Books just last month (March 2007), I Am a Strange Loop addresses the fact that Hofstadter feels, despite having won the Pulitzer prize for GEB, that the public just didn’t quite understand what it was he was fundamentally addressing. In his own words:

GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?

But his new book “sort of hits everybody over the head with it” – in the hopes of eliminating any doubt or miscommunication.

Smashing us over the head with a message or not, Hofstadter’s writing has always been vibrant and engaging (he’s been directly compared to Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges) and American Scientist tells us that “the new book partakes of some of the same playful metaphors and dialogues as GEB, but it addresses more directly Hofstadter’s conception of the nature of self and consciousness.”

I have yet to pick up a copy (though I’m headed to the bookstore now!), but I have no hesitation whatsoever in urging you, the reader, to seek out a copy for yourself. If the entirety of Hofstadter’s previous work is any indication, (GEB, Metamagical Themas, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, etc…) I Am a Strange Loopwill not disappoint.

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Click here for the 2007 American Scientist interview with Douglas Hofstadter

tags: daniel dennett, j.s. bach, ai, american scientist, basic books, euclidean and non-euclidean geometry, i am a strange loop, kurt gödel, m.c. escher, strange loop, turing test, zen, artificial intelligence, completeness, computers, consistency, figure and ground, form in mathematics, formal systems, history,theories, informal systems, levels of description, machine intelligence, mathematics, minds,thoughts,undecidability,self-reference, neurons, number theory, propositional calculus, recursive structures, self-representation, strange loops,tangled hierarchies, theories of meaning, theory of mind, typographical number theory

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at Apr 23, 07 | 2:43 pm and is filed under Books, Just Noumenon Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.