Monday, February 11, 2008

Gödel, Escher, Bach

I've finaly managed to get through Douglas R. Hofstader's quite thick book, "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (the library demanded it back so I had to rush through the last 150 pages this weekend). Even though Hofstader wrote this back in the 80´s, it still feels pretty modern, even though some of his thoughts have been proved uterly wrong in the last two decades.

So what is it about? Well, many people seem to have misunderstand this book. Why that is, I can't say. Sure, Hofstader talks about quite a few different topics, ranging from logic and mathematical history to molecular biology and the collevtive behaviour of ant collonies, but It´s always presented in a context of the main theme which is intelligence, thinking and conscioussness. However, allthough many surmises that the book tries to explain how conscioussness comes about, that isn't my understanding of it. Rather, I see it as a generall theory about the content of conscioussness, which is a completly different subject. In short, what Hofstader says, and I apoligize if I've completly missunderstood him, is this:

The human mind is a piece of machine which consist of billions of neurons. It can be understood on different levels, in the same way a computer can be. In the later case, you can interpret a program in terms of different functions and commands, but you could also break down every bit of these parts and get down to a much more basic level, physically describing every change that takes part in the systems hardware. Conscioussness is basicly the high level understanding of what goes on in our heads. For example: When you read this text, you don't have to concentrate on every single letter. Every letter is lumped togheter with the ones around it to create a word, every word is lumped together with the ones around it to create a sentence and every sentence is lumped togheter with the ones around it to create some kind of meaning. Now, every part of this process isn't conscioussly percieved. It's only the high level lumping that takes part conscioussly.


M.C. Escher's "Print Gallery"

So, what does Gödel, Escher and Bach has to do with anything? Well, the main theme Hofstader draws from these three different men is the notion of self reference. Gödel's theorem is posible thanks to self reference, Escher has created a lot of paintings where self reference is in focus (see the picture below) and Bach created music which often experimented with self reference. Combining all these mens work, Hofstader eventually tries to present the idea that conscioussness is something that forms when the mind starts to represent itself inside itself. When the perception is turned from the outside world, onto itself.

If Hofstader's goal with this book was to give a plausible metaphysical account of how conscioussness comes about, I'm not impressed. However, I don't think that that's what he tries to accomplish. Rather, he's done a quite good job on giving the reader an introductory set of tools and ideas for further investigations of the minds inner workings. I can't say that the book contained the huge climax I expected it to have, but hopefully it managed to equip me with directions to some new viewpoints that probably will prove to be fruitful in the future.