Rito’s Reviews > Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid > Status Update

Having implemented a lot of modern deep learning framework by hand, I can appreciate this work differently. Hofstadter is not a prophet. And he is openly honest.

This book is quite outdated, but still most of the problems mentioned is still unsolved.

The way he does the speculating, is interesting, original, and deep.

Let's see where he goes from here.

Author does a great job of explaining grouping, universality, and separation of neurons in the brain through the analogy of an ant colony. It makes more sense in some places than others. I am always skeptic of usage of analogies.

As the book progresses, it becomes much more stimulating. Just finished Part-I.

The thought of words being formal systems and not being able to convey the whole nature of something has occured in my mind before. And even in its limited nature, languages are not optimal.

Zen is starting to make sense. It makes no sense at all.
A meta sense is evolving, though.

I really liked the egg shell and protective layers analogy.

Seems like chapter 8 would be interesting read.

One of the most astonishing fact about this book is that you always learn new "things". Even though those "things" are merely vehicle of Hofstadter's lessons, those "things" are exciting on their own. Now it is the pq system, moments later it is RNT.

As I read through GEB, music makes more sense to me!

I am finding reading the Recursion chapter less involved than others to read. I think because I am familiar w/ Recursion in programming.

The fun of books such as this is that they teach you a lot of new things about topics that you already know about.

Hofstadter is a really skilled writer, as well!