GEB is a great book, and I've probably read it at least 3.33333333... times over the years. As a late teen it blew my mind. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a route into Gödel's proofs [1]. The book covers a lot of other ground too, and is notoriously digressive and quirky (looking at you, dialogues).

Instead I'd recommend Gödel's Proof by Nagel and Newman for a conceptual intro.

[1] I'm not a mathematician, so my understanding is necessarily informal.

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gus_massa 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I really like GEB.

Most proof of the Gödel theorem use the primes encoding that is makes all the operations very unintuitive. But GEB uses just ascii and a lot of the side task get obvious. (It uses base 20 instead of 256, but it's the same idea.)

> is¨notoriously digressive and quirky

It is super mega ultra notoriously digressive and quirky.

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bordo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can second this as a wonderful introduction to the proofs. This is the book that got me into logic and formal methods.

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undershirt 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’ll never understand how GEB was using math, art, and music to explain consciousness (and Hofstadter himself still thinks no one understood it), but Nagel and Newman did a great job explaining why logic as a mechanical thing has only a tenuous relationship to concepts we understand, and that helped me crack at least a little bit of the mystery I was after when giving up on GEB.

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siddthesquid 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have not read GEB but I thought his second book, I am a Strange Loop, did a pretty good job of connecting the idea of self referential loops (like in godels proof) to consciousness and art and such.

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riffraff 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I am a Strange Loop is basically GEB but written properly instead of being a random collation of ideas.

Unrusprisingly, since many years went by. But I still love the quirkiness of GEB

(Also, he has other books between the two, I deeply enjoyed Le Ton Beau de Marot, about translations)

	▲	siddthesquid 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for the suggestions. Just checked out some of Le Ton Beau de Marot, will most likely read the rest. Actually, I was recently wondering whether poems can be interpreted as "efficient" computer programs. Words in a sentence/essay just connect different objects in space and time (syntactically and semantically) to form some concept, kind of like a program. A poem just uses higher order abstractions (imagery) to express the same concepts in fewer words. So this book should be great!

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wk_end 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I’ll never understand how GEB was using math, art, and music to explain consciousness

As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "The result of the proper study of a novel should be contemplation of the mystery embodied in it, but this is a contemplation of the mystery in the whole work and not or some proposition or paraphrase. It is not the tracking down of an expressible moral or a statement about life." We don't read literature with the hopes of a book laying out a precise thesis and incontrovertibly demonstrating it.

If you come into GEB expecting a scientific explanation of consciousness (like I did, when I first read it) you walk away confused and maybe disappointed. Hofstadter observed something transcendentally beautiful about self-reference and had a spiritual or religious revelation that, for him, related it to consciousness, and he attempted to convey that beauty and spiritual revelation in - appropriately self-referentially - a book that embodied it. You're meant to appreciate it in your heart and soul, not (just) in your mind. It's literature, not science.