How does the 1979 classic popular science book hold up today?

There are certain books that, due to their sheer size and peculiar form, appear too daunting to pick off the shelf. Douglas Hofstadter’s sprawling Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid – which spans nearly 800 pages and includes a plethora of diagrams, drawings, musical scores and dialogues – always counted among these volumes for me. But under Hofstadter’s brilliant and playful guidance, I found this singular book, first published in 1979, to be a diverting and elucidating journey to uncover the mystery of consciousness.

Centring itself around an exploration of the commonality between the three titular thinkers, Gödel, Escher, Bach jumps over interdisciplinary boundaries through subjects as wide-ranging as number theory, genetics, artificial intelligence, music theory, neuroscience, literary translation and the visual arts, among others. Driving this quest is Hofstadter’s concern with the mystery of how a self or an “I” arises out of inanimate matter.

The organising concept of the book is drawn from a crisis that transformed mathematics. When mathematician-philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead wrote their multi-volume treatise Principia Mathematica in the early 20th century, they aimed to show that mathematics was essentially a branch of logic and therefore all mathematical truths could be expressed as logical truths. This project sought to free mathematics of self-referential statements that result in slippery paradoxes and could undermine the very foundations of the field. To achieve this, the system defined in the treatise had to be lacking in contradictions (consistent) and able to produce all number-theoretical truths (complete).

In 1931, this ambitious fortification of mathematics was shattered by the irreverent 25-year-old mathematician Kurt Gödel. He produced a mathematical sentence that essentially states: “This theorem is not provable inside Principia Mathematica.” If proven true, the system is false; if false, it is true. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, as it has come to be called, showed that formal systems like the one in Principia Mathematica were essentially open to contradictions and incomplete – that there are true statements that cannot be proven within them. Hofstadter’s takeaway is that the meaning of the phrase produces a self-referentiality that guarantees the phrase is unprovable.

From this theorem, Hofstadter derives the clever analogy of a “strange loop” to describe meaningful patterns inside meaningless systems that allow the system to talk about itself and become “self-aware”. He hunts these strange loops with encyclopaedic reach through the world of science and art: for example, in the lithographs of the graphic artist M.C. Escher, which are laden with paradoxical tricks of the eye. In Drawing Hands (1948), two hands draw each other, toying with causality in the viewer’s mind. And in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Hofstadter identifies a canon that continually changes keys so as to end in the one it began, creating an infinite regression.

But most centrally, Gödel, Escher, Bach posits strange loops as the key to understanding consciousness, which, Hofstadter argues, is a self-reinforcing interaction between the emergent phenomenon of the self and the physical processes that give rise to that phenomenon.

These arguments could easily get lost in technical jargon, which is why Hofstadter pulls out of his magician’s hat an array of demonstrative tools with which to get his point across: there are countless riddles, puzzles, Buddhist koans, paradoxes and thought exercises, hidden acrostics and palindromes. Each explanatory chapter is preceded by a Lewis Carroll-style dialogue, often between the amusing Achilles and the Tortoise, that illustrates the chapter’s main ideas with allegorical scenarios. One such dialogue, cheekily called Contracrostipunctus and modelled after one of Bach’s fugues, contains several comical paraphrases of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and conceals an acrostic of J.S. Bach’s name. It is this creativity of form, which attempts to mirror its content, that makes this book a joy to read – and probably contributed to its winning the Pulitzer prize in 1980.

To modern readers who have seen the leaps of generative AI, the sections on artificial intelligence may appeal as an archaeological tour of the technology’s early days, from whose vantage point the idea of a machine beating a chess grandmaster or composing music may sound, as it did to Hofstadter then, absurd. But this doesn’t detract from the insights in these chapters on creativity, language and abstractions, and indeed points to many of the limitations still faced by AI in approaching human thought.

Gödel, Escher, Bach does not posture as a textbook on the various subjects it covers. Its interest lies more in a philosophical exploration and, like all great books of philosophy, it produces a useful concept. Hofstadter’s strange loop provides us with a symbol to better understand our consciousness as an emergent phenomenon between many physical and phenomenal layers that reinforce each other, and can never be reconciled.

There were moments when reading this book – especially when a didactic and allegorical image fused – where I experienced the pleasure of more astutely perceiving how I think. Walking away from this weighty tome with a greater appreciation for the complexity of being a self made this labyrinthine journey worth the trek.

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