This book is about me reviewing myself reviewing this book
…or something like that.
I haven't read his more famous Godel, Escher and Bach. I chose this as I figured his ideas could only have matured with time.
I found the book entertaining and stimulating in parts. I like books with a sense of the intellectual, abstract and elegant together. I also found it difficult going and disappointing in parts.
It is nicely written in a gentle and humorous style. His writing is mostly simple, avoiding inaccessible language. However, some of it is still challenging, most notably his attempt to describe Godel's incompleteness theorem, which I found to be like wading through dense fudge. For those who don't love intense logic, I reckon you can pretty much skip this part. Apparently Godel demonstrated how high-level emergent self-referential meanings in a formal mathmatical system can have a causal potency as real as that of the systems rigid low-level rules of inference.
Some of the later part of the book feels like he is exploring ideas and throwing bits and pieces into the pot without presenting something coherent and well-developed.
In summary - “I” is a self-reinforcing illusion that is an inevitable consequence of self-referencing loops of perception, which emerge in the symbol-processing patterns of physical brains.
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consciousness
…or something like that.
I haven't read his more famous Godel, Escher and Bach. I chose this as I figured his ideas could only have matured with time.
I found the book entertaining and stimulating in parts. I like books with a sense of the intellectual, abstract and elegant together. I also found it difficult going and disappointing in parts.
It is nicely written in a gentle and humorous style. His writing is mostly simple, avoiding inaccessible language. However, some of it is still challenging, most notably his attempt to describe Godel's incompleteness theorem, which I found to be like wading through dense fudge. For those who don't love intense logic, I reckon you can pretty much skip this part. Apparently Godel demonstrated how high-level emergent self-referential meanings in a formal mathmatical system can have a causal potency as real as that of the systems rigid low-level rules of inference.
Some of the later part of the book feels like he is exploring ideas and throwing bits and pieces into the pot without presenting something coherent and well-developed.
In summary - “I” is a self-reinforcing illusion that is an inevitable consequence of self-referencing loops of perception, which emerge in the symbol-processing patterns of physical brains.