I read it a few years ago. It was really hard work to get through, and also quite a lot of fun - I loved how playful it was. I’ll definitely re-read it some day.

I wouldn’t say it changed any of my beliefs, but I’m not sure that was the intention . It presented an idea - a weird, wonderful, complex idea - but without any evidence to back it up.

For what it’s worth, I think there’s a subreddit which is devoted to the book, and I seem to recall they do a sort of ongoing book club for it.

I have. Recommended by an old anthropology prof/mentor in the late 90s. He said it got him through his divorce (heh). It was a slog for me at times (weak with math) but worth the investment. Among the most important books I’ve ever read.

I have. Interesting but way too long.

I’ve read it. I found it extremely interesting and entertaining.

I’ve also taken graduate level logic courses from Larry Sklar, who, after spending two weeks talking us through the completeness and correctness theorems, announced, “there, we covered one of the more interesting and unintuitive aspects of the intersections of predicate logic and set theory. Now we can apply them, and nobody needs to bring up anything involving a 400 page completely vacuous book as a part of the conversation.”

And he was right.

I’m glad you said you were able to skip over some of the mathematical parts and still understand the rest of the book, I read about 100 pages like a year ago and loved it but was getting frustrated with my inability to understand some of these parts, I was spending 20 minutes on some pages just trying to make sense of them before moving on because I really wanted to understand. I think I’ll give it another try and out less pressure on myself.

I read it some 35 years ago. Parts of it I found challenging, and parts (Zeno’s paradoxes) weren’t new to me, which tells me that my dad must have taken philosophy in college.

Read it when it first came out and it was a sensation - nothing like it had appeared begfore and people went bananas.

Hofstadter is a good writer but he badly needs an editor - he takes twice as long as necessary to say something (usually because he thinks of several cool examples and includes all of them)

I have read it.

As it overlaps with my PhD studies I can say I could follow the math, and it makes sense. Hofstaedter is kind of trying to create a layman version of a lot of theories that one will encounter when trying to understand calculability, and what computers can do (or not). As a musician, I could also follow his references to Bach; I had some issues with the genetics part, but my basic understanding in that field got me through OKish.

It’s a well written book aiming to provide some understanding to some curious issues our logic has with self-reference, without the need to, well, work on a PhD for a few years.

It wasn’t a total eye-opener as I knew most of the stuff from the science thingys I do, but it provides some interesting parallels in different fields that might be easily ignored as they fall in, well, different fields.

It was assigned reading in a philosophy class I took in college (philosophy major). It was very entertaining and did impact how I see the world a bit. Another good one is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn.

I read it 20 years ago and loved it at the time. I have a degree in math, so those aspects were interesting and relatively simple. The music and programming parts were more interesting to me, but I fear that the programming won’t age well.

The parts that stuck with me the most though were the Zen koans. Stepping outside the duality of things, finding anti logical statements, and appreciating the “little A, little B” of reality impacted my approach to life.

This past weekend I decided to begin this book. I wanted to in the 1980s but I don’t think I was intellectually up for the challenge. I feel that I am now, maybe… I am also “taking” the MIT Opencourseware that has 8 lectures from years ago…2007(?) . I find that attending the grad students lectures while reading the book, makes it more of an event, like an academic learning journey. Plus, I am older (is older than 50 older?). Now, my main problem is that over the years I have gotten so used to my Kindle. Why, oh why, won’t they relent to putting this on an ebook format. I have read from others, “Oh, it does not translate to an ebook format and the author won’t relent on allowing it.” Seriously?! Come on! I am not anti-hardcopy but this is a book that you need to be able to stare at while you are out and about… when you have some sudden spark of understanding. Maybe I am wrong… but maybe not.