By Douglas hofstadter? I’m wondering what people opinions are on the book as I finished it after a few months of reading it and it was quite a journey.
I had issues regarding the mathematics equations for a big part and honestly skipped over a lot of them but didn’t find them to be needed to understand the main points of the book but maybe someone can clue me into that.
I’m more interested in if it changed anyones preconceived notions or beliefs they once held.
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.