Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not my kind of philosophy
Comment: This book is boring. It doesn't really tell you anything, kind of "all form, no substance". A cloud of a book.
I approached it a few times in the past, seeing it on top of many bestseller charts, but each time got scared away by apparent lack of clarity - when you open this book at random, you always face something unexpected - math, music, art, insects, human brains, DNA, viruses, zen, artificial intelligence, talking turtles, you name it, and always in different form.
Anyway, I thought to myself one day - it still must be a special book, it is rated so high, and it looks mysteriously clever, and so I have to read it through to understand. And I did. Geez, was it boring.
This book is 800 pages of chasing its own tail. It is full of curiousities, but no rigor, no plot, no structure. For the first 200 pages or so, reading tales seems fascinating, just imagine (you think to yourself) what the author has to offer when it gets to the point ! Never happens. As you reach page 600, you clench your teeth still hoping that there must be some sort of revelation ahead, even if on the last page. None.
These three things is this book about:
1. Self-reference. The great deal of the book is dedicated to approaching the proof of the Godel's theorem which in some sense says that a system cannot understand itself.
2. Form vs. substance. This ranges from extracting meanings from messages on different levels, to having different levels of interpreting the situation.
3. Infinity and different sorts of infinities. This only helps to fog things up. Can't spit without hitting a paradox. And this is presented rather informally.
Speaking of which, EVERYTHING in this book is presented informally. There is no facts, no proofs, no math, no logical reasoning, no conclusions, just a stream of consciousness, which twirls around and around.
It doesn't ask nor answer any single question straight. It's a philosophy, I see, but even a philosopher has to take sides, but the author does not. There is no side here really.
The discussed topics are indeed interesting and mind-provoking, for the first 200 pages even fascinating, like I said, but then it becomes pointless and boring. The only thing I want to ask after reading this book is "SO WHAT ?".
I wish I spent the time on some other book. Something with a plot.
Customer Rating: Summary: Computer Science
Comment: Godel, Escher and Bach, written by Douglas Hofstadter, while the title would suggest it is discussion of a mathematician, an artist, and a composer, is a complex examination of how human beings develop perception and meaning. More specifically, the book explores, through a series of dialogues and narrations, how symbols, thought and language are all intertwined and how reality is essentially a composition of overlapping meanings and perceptions. The book challenges the reader to observe the system of symbolic meanings around him or her objectively.
