One line in the article piqued my interest, as it echoes something I read somewhere else. Seeing as it comes from someone who is an absolute expert on the subject makes it even more interesting.
> "In both books, dense narrative tensions are never fully resolved..."
It has been noted that this type of recursion/layering is something that we can't help but be intrigued by. This subject is explored in great detail, and unparalleled depth, in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach[0] by Douglas Hofstadter.
He notes that this doesn't only happen in stories and is a common theme in music as well and may even be the root of what we call 'intelligence'. I think he's definitively on the right track, and I thoroughly recommend his book to anyone that has even a passing interest in mathematics, logic, philosophy, programming, music or psychology.
Of all the books I have read GEB has had the most profound impact on my life in terms of how much it made me think and evaluate the world around me and the ideas inside the book.
I've found that GEB is a great book to read and re-read. Not only will the math be more accessible the second time around, but the text also conceals numerous "easter eggs" that you might only find on subsequent readings, or might never find.
I've done in-person GEB reading groups where I learned lots of things from my co-readers. I've tried to replicate that experience online at http://www.reddit.com/r/geb, and there have been cases where other people have pointed out interesting things, but it's hard to get discussion going beyond the beginning of the book.
Unfortunately, it seems right now that people who want to follow-up on GEB ideas go to YouTube, where the conversation is disconnected enough that facile and wrong conclusions thrive. (No, a crab canon is not a Mobius strip. Some dude on YouTube made that up. It's not real.)
i've read Gödel, Escher, Bach cover-to-cover three times.
the first time, in high school, it opened my eyes to a bunch of cool ideas, and jump-started my interested in computer science. i didn't 'get it' at all. i knew there was a bunch of neat topics, but the idea that there was any overall theme was lost.
the second time, in college, i started to understand the musical content a bit more, and started understanding that there was a 'bigger picture' the author was trying to paint. i still wasn't sure what that was.
the third time, after college, I think i finally understood what the author was getting at - his model for consciousness. this was also the second time i'd read the introduction.
that book has done a lot to help me understand the world, and particularly the structure of my own thoughts. i don't know if consciousness _always_ works the way he suggests it does, but i've found a lot of utility in viewing myself as a recursive tangled loop, where physical symbols reflecting the external world started reflecting their reflection of it.
> "In both books, dense narrative tensions are never fully resolved..."
It has been noted that this type of recursion/layering is something that we can't help but be intrigued by. This subject is explored in great detail, and unparalleled depth, in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach[0] by Douglas Hofstadter.
He notes that this doesn't only happen in stories and is a common theme in music as well and may even be the root of what we call 'intelligence'. I think he's definitively on the right track, and I thoroughly recommend his book to anyone that has even a passing interest in mathematics, logic, philosophy, programming, music or psychology.
Of all the books I have read GEB has had the most profound impact on my life in terms of how much it made me think and evaluate the world around me and the ideas inside the book.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach