Gödel, Escher, Bach - D. Hofstadter

One says of some cities that the best thing about it is the train station, so that you can leave quickly - similarly, there are some books which give you the greatest (not the only, possibly not by far, but the greatest) pleasure when they finally are over. This book has been one such instance for me.

It happens unbelievelably often, while reading, that ones feel like hearing somebody you just met in the pub rambling slightly intoxicated about this one crazy dream he had. The book has many, many interesting points to it, but diluted in more than 700 pages without fathomable reasons - prolisso e ripetitivo. So for me it ends in the Sapiens category of “Good, nice, but please never ever again”.

One of the concepts I liked is the idea that exact knowledge of a system might be rather uninformative - giving e.g. all the position and momentum coordinates (if it even were possible) of a perfect gas contains strictly speaking more information than giving its pressure and temperature, but as a matter of fact the latter description is more informative to understand its behaviour. I guess the point is that pointwise descriptions neglect interactions, while chunked descriptions lose focus but necessarily include them - it’s the old dilemma of having to choose between looking at the trees or at the woods, what I never realized is that the objectively less informative view might be the most informative one.

When it comes to studying the brain, one must then ask himself if studying the behaviour of neurons to try to understand thought is like studying the behaviour of microchips inside a computer to understand the behaviour of google chrome. Penso sia chiaro che dicendo una cosa del genere one plays the role della volpe nella storia della volpe e l’uva - la domanda è piuttosto, e se l’uva veramente fosse acerba? One would always rather get it and then judge about its ripeness. I am conflicted about this approach. Many people say a phd is useless, but the exact very sentence comes very different to one’s ears depending on the person expressing it having a phd or not - including the very ears of the person speaking. This kind of thing.

I guess what I disliked about this book is that it is rather a cloud of ideas than a series of points being expressed. Maybe I miss some structure or direction. The description of Gödel’s theory was something I liked, but again, excruciatingly long. And it’s not like it builds suspence - suspence would be built if the solution was ten pages later, not a hundred and fifty. I will stop rambling. It is in any case worth reading (once).