Work
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Overview
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) by Douglas Hofstadter, is a book about the intellectual themes common to the lives and the works of the logician Kurt Gödel, the artist M. C. Escher, and the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, and shows the thematic connections among mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through short stories, illustrations, and analyses, the book explains how systems acquire meaningful context from the "meaningless" elements that compose a system; self-reference and formal rules; isomorphism; the meaning of communication; how knowledge can be represented and stored; the methods and limitations of symbolic representation; and the notion of "meaning".
As a cognitive scientist, Hofstadter said that Gödel, Escher, Bach is not about the relationships of mathematics, art, and music, but about how cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms, e.g. how individual neurons in the brain coordinate to create a coherent mind.
Gödel, Escher, Bach won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award for Science Hardcover.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Philosophers who discussed Gödel, Escher, Bach
Related ideas
- Zeno of Elea
- Kurt Gödel
- Koan
- Mathematics
- Music
- Martin Gardner
- Neuron
- Recursion
- Lewis Carroll
- Self-reference
- Scientific American
- Zen
- Willard Van Orman Quine
- Brain
- Mu (negative)
- Intelligence
- Computer science
- Symmetry
- Chinese language
- Gödel's incompleteness theorems
- Douglas Hofstadter
- Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
- Acrostic
- What the Tortoise Said to Achilles
Place in the tradition
Part of Outline of logic.