Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. HofstadterMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was a delightful and an intellectual journey. A very long one. A very tough one. For a person who never liked maths and biology, who only loved listening to music, who is part of a conservative (no art I mean) profession and society this book was sort of a nightmare. Noticed paradox in my statements. You wont mind them much after reading this book.
It all started from a curiosity. The curiosity that how a material or physical thing can acquire consciousness. Can we make a formal system for human intelligence? Now these seem like philosophical questions but the Author tried a different approach to answer them which was a fascinating one. So this book covered music, art, maths, biology, AI, computers, psychology, philosophy and some other subjects. It turned out that formal systems are not formal...
All these long winter nights which I have spent on this book. It was all worth it. Although I didn't understand many things in this book, I still learned so much from this book. I love maths now. I love biology now. My knowledge about computers and AI has increased. I know some things about music now. I know Godel, Escher, Bach and many other personalities now. I know about infinities, recursion, incompleteness, self-reference, paradoxes etc.
This book is a masterpiece. I don't remember how I came to know about this book but I am happy that I did.
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