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The following review of "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid," Douglas R. Hofstadter, New York: Basic Books, appeared in "Fusion", Magazine of the Fusion Energy Foundation, Oct. 1979, pp. 61. "Douglas Hofstadter, author of "Godel, Escher, Bach," has not had such a vaired experience with the antiscience movement as Bateson [Bateson, Gregory, "Mind and Nature--A Necessary Unity", preceding review in Fusion], but his brief career, nevertheless, is a clue to the message of his book. Hofstadter is a computer expert in the field of artificial intelligence. This dismal discipline, which emanates from the Bertrand Russell-Karl Korsch networks, has been used primarily to develop brainwashing programs. Hofstadter claims to be part of his network through his close association with Marvin Minsky who, in turn, works closely with linguistician Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Politically these "artificial intelligence" academics link up to the Bateson circles through the various radical groups they mutually support. Artificial intelligence is as nasty a discipline as its use in brainwashing implies. It is based on the premise that the operations of the human mind are essentially compatible with formal Aristotelian logic and thus can be replicated by a sufficiently complex computer. ...... Douglas Hofstadter's interminable driveling (777 pages) reiterates Bateson's point from the perspective on an attack on Kurt Godel's 1931 proof that any system determined by a fixed lawfulness (axiomatic login) is necessarily incomplete, hence incapable of solving problems that can be posed within its limits. The obvious conclusion to be reached from this proof is that there is a higher order of lawfulness (reason) that determines successive, reason-determined locally lawful systems. The British oligarchy never forgave Godel for this insight, which negate Bertrand Russell's attempted destruction of Georg Cantor's introduction of the concept of the transfinite into mathematics. Hofstadter simultaneously slanders Godel and the musical genius Johann Sebasian Bach--whose recognition of the same principle in musical composition made Beethoven's subsequent breakthroughs possible--by lumping them with the psychotic Dutch draftsman M.C. Escher. The paradoxes of formal logic, Hofstadter contends--for example, Epimenides's statement that all Cretans are liars--are really Zen koans. There is nothing new here that the eastern mystics and their systematized irrationality did not discover in bygone millennia. In fact, he says, the solution is to imbed simple axiomatic systems in more complex ones in regress. Once this is accomplished, presto, mind and the universe can be programmed into a computer. (Reviewed by: John Schoonover)