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All too rarely we encounter a work that literally opens up whole
new worlds for us through the breadth of its learning, the beauty and creative
playfulness of its style, and, above all, its ability to connect and make comprehensible
widely disparate and hitherto unrelated perspectives and fields of knowledge.
Godel, Escher, Bach -- already the subject of considerable prepublication
excitement -- is such a book. Here a brilliant young computer scientist uses dialogues,
the drawings of Escher, and the music of Bach, as well as ideas drawn from such
diverse fields as logic, biology, psychology, physics, and linguistics, to illuminate
one of the deepest mysteries of modern scientific philosophy -- our seeming inability
to understand the nature of our own thought processes. This quest is intimately
linked to paradoxes that go back to the Greeks, and in our own day, to the revolutionary
work of the Austrian mathematician Godel, and derives from the ability of any
human language, mathematical system, computer program, or thought process to talk
about itself in an unending "mirroring" of reality. In
developing these profound ideas, which have challenged some of the greatest minds
of our century, and applying them to all symbol-manipulating systems from mathematical
logic and computer science to the thought processes of the human mind itself,
the author writes both as an artist and as the scientist he is. Douglas Hofstadter
has written a book that, like the works of Lewis Carroll, will at one and the
same time enchant, entertain, and permanently enrich the reader while providing
important new insights into the mechanisms underlying human thought. Douglas
R. Hofstadter is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Indiana University. |
