Godel and Escher and Bach! Oh My!

The book is like some rite of passage. At some point you see the book enough times and you think “I should probably read that.” Godel! Escher! Bach! A philosopher, an artist, and a composer walk into a bar! Fill in the rest! It’s like the promise of the Key to All Things that will unlock the secrets of the Universe. Escher with those funny reality distorting pictures and Bach with his O So Precisely Beautiful music and Godel with those accusations of Incompleteness. Surely this book contains the secrets to the Universe. Read it and you enter the secret society of those who know things! And did I mention it won a Pulitzer? So it must be good, right? All the blurbs on the back say it is great!

So, for you Dear Reader who have not read the whole book and wonder about the secrets of the Universe, I am here to tell you all! But first, the amusing bit.

The copy I have is the 20^th Anniversary Edition. (You can work out what year this was printed using the hidden clue above.) It has a new Preface written for this edition. As always, I waited to read the Anniversary Preface (which was obviously written after the book) until after I had finished the book (did I mention I read the whole book?). So, finishing page 742, I turned back to the 20th Anniversary Preface, started reading and instantly started laughing out loud. Really. The Preface is hysterically funny.

Hofstadter begins the 20^th Anniversary Preface by Complaining that Nobody Understood what his book was all about. The whole first page is Hofstadter noting all the people who thoroughly missed the point of the book. He complains about all the people who summarized his book and missed the point. He complains that bookstores would put the book in all sorts of crazy sections of the bookstore—they didn’t even know where it belonged. He spent 20 years collecting Royalty Checks and being Frustrated, yes Frustrated!, that nobody seemed to understand the point of the book.

So, he takes advantage of this opportunity to tell the world what his book was about. Here is the funny part. He then reveals the point of the book…and it was totally anticlimactic. I knew that was the point of the book. If he had asked me, I would have said the point of the book was exactly what he said the point of the book was. It was not that hard to figure out. In fact it was really obvious.

So, why did I know the point of the book and all those people who were frustrating Hofstadter did not? Here is my secret: I read the whole book. You see, Hofstadter doesn’t actually get to the point of his book in the first chapter. Or the second chapter. Or the third chapter…or… well, Hofstadter only gets to the point of his book in the chapter beginning on page 684. So, if you hurled the book across the room in disgust and frustration on page 683, you would not know what the book was about!

What was the book about? “In a word, GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter.” Yep. That is exactly what I learned in the chapter beginning on page 684!

Now if Hofstadter wanted people to know that was the point of his book, then he really should have given it a different title. Note, nothing about that point has anything to do with Escher or Bach, and the argument leading to the conclusion only has an indirect relationship to Godel. Then, he should have stuck to the parts of the book that actually led to that conclusion. That might have been about 150 page book entitled Mind From Matter or something like that. Some people might have read that book. It probably doesn’t win the Pulitzer, though. There is no 20^th Anniversary edition. Hofstadter isn’t Frustrated, but he also gets a lot less in royalty checks.

What happened? Hofstadter is apparently a very very undisciplined thinker and writer. He starts with his idea and then realizes there is this tangent and so he spins out a whole paragraph on that tangent. Then there is this other really interesting tangent, so he writes about that. Then there is this idea of telling stories with conversations between the Tortoise and Achilles and they can explain philosophical ideas in a whimsical way. Then along comes Crab and Sloth and we have even more whimsical conversations about record players that are destroyed when specially designed records are placed upon them. Then we get wandering off into music theory and all sorts of explorations of how clever Bach was. Escher is also really clever, so we get all sorts of explorations of Escher’s art.

Then Number Theory makes an appearance. Discussions about infinity. Zen koans. Lewis Carroll. John Cage. Lots of philosophers. DNA. Then computer programming language and long discussions about how computers work (remember this came out in 1979).

Opening up to three pages at random (really, I will now open up to three pages at random):

1. A discussion of Bach’s Crab Canon, which you can see visualized here. Escher also has a picture of Crab Canon.

2. An explanation of how to code loops into a program.

3. The transcript of a “conversation” with an early Artificial Intelligence Program, SHRDLU

As I guessed would happen before I picked those three pages at random, that is a perfect summary of the book. The first passage was really fun and incredibly interesting. The second one was a tedious explanation of something that anyone who has ever used computer code would know; if you know it, there is nothing new; if you didn’t know it, it was a pretty lengthy explanation of a pretty simple idea. The third thing was just tedious and rather dull and really I have no idea why Hofstadter decided we would all benefit from reading it.

All of which points to the Big Question. I read the whole book! Should you?

The answer depends on your determination and your tolerance for mental whiplash. There are all sorts of fun and interesting things scattered through the book. Some evenings, you’ll settle in and enjoy the ride. But other evenings, you’ll be staring at the book wondering if there is really any point to wading through the minutiae. Then there are the moments when you are startled because Hofstadter just gave you a full page of homework problems to work out. My favorite problem: “Strangely this one takes great cleverness to render in our notation. I would caution you to try it only if you are willing to spend hours and hours on it—and you know quite a bit of number theory!” Yeah, I skipped that homework assignment.

So, if you like books where you never really know what is coming next and you enjoy learning all sorts of random things along the way and you like looking at Escher pictures, thinking about music theory, and pondering philosophical conundrums and you like fantastical conversations between Tortoises and Crabs, well this book is right up your alley as long as you are willing to also spend many pages wondering what the point of all this is.

If you want to read a book about the thesis of this book, a book about how the self can arise from unthinking matter, then this book is only worth picking up if you are willing to spend 683 pages reading background material, only some of which is actually relevant to the thesis.

I realize that the above description has not convinced many people to read this book. Therein lies the problem. Godel, Escher, Bach falls into the category of “Books lots of people buy with the intention of reading it but then give up on the book long before the end because it just doesn’t seem worth the bother.” The few people who will actually finish this book roughly fall into two categories: 1) people who are fascinated with historical artifacts showing how someone in the late 1970s thought artificial intelligence might work, and 2) people who tell graduating seniors they should make a list of six books to read in the next year and then read those books and because they tell seniors to do that they feel obligated to make their own list of six books and happen to put this book on their list.

Hofstadter should not have been surprised that nobody knew the point of his book. If he wanted people to get that point, he should have, you know, written a book about that point rather than a meandering mess of a book in which he poked into every interesting nook and cranny he came across.

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