>>12212915Started reading it a while ago and haven't finished yet. Don't know if I will.
This book doesn't know what it's trying to be.
The author claims the central thesis of the book is to explain his theory about how what he calls "strange loops" (his pretentious term for self-referential structures) somehow give rise to consciousness. In this sense, the book is really a work in the cognitive science genre.
However, he spends a ridiculous amount of time on totally tangential subjects. He's all over the place.
This book is good if you want a broad introduction to a whole lot of trivia in the fields of music (mostly Bach), Godelian incompleteness (dumbed down), logic (some interesting stuff), mathematics, computer science (what you'd learn in a CS1 course), and Escher (what you learned in middle school art class).
He wrote it when he was a PhD student at Oregon doing Physics, and it shows. He comes across as a dilettante, a jack of all trades but master of none. That's the kind of knowledge I think you'll leave with. That said, it's a very well written, creative book, and a thoroughly interesting read.
I think it attracts a lot of pseuds because it looks complex, drops a lot of fancy terms, but doesn't require the expenditure of much energy to understand.
If you want a good book on Godel, read Godel's Proof. If you want a good book on consciousness, read some philosophy. Not just modern assholes like Dennett and Searle, but heavy-hitters like Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, etc. If you want a good book on Bach, read "Music In the Castle of Heaven" by John Elliot Gardiner. If you want to know about Escher, go to a museum and stare at his drawings, maybe read a wikipedia article on the guy.
