basic concepts explained

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid: A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Caroll (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, published in 1979 by Basic Books. A new preface by Hofstadter accompanied a 20th anniversary re-edition (ISBN 0465026567), which was released in 1999.

At one level, it is a book about how the creative achievements of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach interweave.

The central theme of the book is more abstract. Hofstadter asks: "Do words and thoughts follow formal rules, or do they not?" In the preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition, Hofstadter laments that his book has been misperceived as a hodge-podge of neat things with no central theme. He stated: "GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"

(via Wikipedia)

It is a book that attempts to discover what “self” really means. Hofstadter created a whole new form of art. Concepts are presented by the dialogues on two different levels, simultaneously: form and content.

Other issues discussed include self-reference and self-representation, both of which Hofstadter considers to be crucial parts of any attempt to understand what intelligence really is.

The New York Times bestsellers list originally summarized it as “A scientist argues that reality is a system of interconnected brains”.
Eu corrigiria:
“A scientist argues that "reality" is a system of interconnected brains”.

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