💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › mbays › 20980 captured on 2024-12-17 at 15:56:26. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Re: "Anyone interested in doing a Godel, Escher, Bach book club..."
It's a lovely book. If you're specifically interested (perhaps after reading it) in the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, I would recommend reading a straightforward treatment afterwards (e.g. Peter Smith's "Gödel without tears"), because Hofstadter's treatment isn't actually that good once you boil away the (wonderful) digressions. But the digressions are the main point of the book, of course.
Oct 18 · 2 months ago
As I observed for some 40 years+, the book is not conducive to reading through sequentially.
I would suggest picking random chapters and discussing.
On the scale of Turing's proof of the exsitence of none-halting Turing machine to Wiles's proof of fermat's last, how complex is the proof of the incompleteness thorem? formal logic class was a long long time ago for me.
@decant if those are 1 and 100 respectively, I'd estimate it's around 7. The ideas aren't too complicated, but the details are a bit detailed.
I'll try to join in. I've now tried to pull through the book 4 times over the last 15 years or so, maybe five times is the charm.
I don't know my reading schedule, but I think it'll go along the lines of "whenever I take an extended bath", so I don't know yet whether I can keep up with y'all.
@greg @vi
@satch I joined your Bubble instance as @vi. At the moment, I am unable to post or comment due to account permissions.
@vi account approved
Anyone interested in doing a Godel, Escher, Bach book club over the next ~23 weeks? — I made a pledge to finally read through the entirety of GEB instead of just getting a few chapters in and stopping over and over again. From others I have talked to, they seem to have this same issue as well of only getting a few chapters in. While I work on reading this book, would anyone else like to join me? I plan on reading 1 chapter a week at the very least. I don't know how interested I am in...