Finish reading Godel, Escher, Bach

After months of laziness. It’s a very dated section about the brain, which contains all sorts of old research. But that’s ok. We get to feel smarter than the book for once.

But it is still going. We are past page 300 and in a pretty good section about computers and levels of description and epiphenomena and it is not provoking crying jags quite as often. I am getting kind of annoyed with D.H.’s tendency to insert (more than what seems to be a strictly necessary number of) wildly speculative analogies and metaphors everywhere which only serve as tangents that make you go, “Um. Ok, dude. Nice idea. But you really don’t need to tell me everything that occurs to you. Editor! Where are you?” Section entitled “Tornados and Quarks,” I am talking to you.

Ahem.

And are now at least in the second section. Things are getting sticky (lots of derivations that take me years to read), but we’re plugging along. I know we’ll get there!

and I think I’m getting used to some of the key concepts so that I don’t have to keep asking Ross to remind me what things mean. I’m still frustrated by what I see as inadequacies or inconsistencies in the writing (it’s almost clear enough for me to follow without any mathematical or logical training, but there are unnecessary areas of confusion), but I’m enjoying them, too—because I get to say, “Ahah! You should have said this, and then it would have been clearer.” And then I feel unreasonably smart and proud of myself.

Reached a place in the book this evening where D.H. is (in my opinion) unnecessarily confusing. Where he lets something go without saying that really shouldn’t (or doesn’t) go without saying for someone not trained in formal logic (i.e.: me). And it made me very mad because he seemed to be contradicting himself (which was oddly appropriate for the chapter) and I hate it when he skips steps, because the entire premise of his book is that he’s creating some kind of thesis step by step by painstaking step.

He needed someone like me (by which I mean untrained in C.S. or math) to comment on his manuscript. :-)

Ross and I worked our merry way through about a dozen more pages this afternoon—an interesting section about the inherency of meaning and layers of meaning in messages. Some questions posed:

How much of the inner meaning of a John Cage recording would an alien intelligence be able to grasp? How much of a Bach recording? (More of the Bach, Hofstadter thinks—the Cage requires way too much context… it almost has no inner meaning.)

What is intelligence, and is our conception of it human-centric? (Of course it is). He suggests a funky analogy between the brain and a jukebox which is kind of pleasing.

Ross and I started reading this together sometime in the fall, taking turns to read it out loud to each other, talking over each section and trying to answer all of our questions by discussion before moving on. We’d let it go for a long time, but I’m determined to pick it up again. We did 13 fascinating pages this evening.