Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart. This week, the financial writer Peter Coy reflects on Douglas Hofstadter’s famous book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. He first read the 777-page masterpiece as a young journalist in 1983, when its mysteries seemed to reveal something profound about the human mind. Decades later, in the age of artificial intelligence, he returns to the book and finds both it and himself changed.
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In 1983, four years out of college, I was living in Rochester, New York, covering part of western New York for the Associated Press. I had a meager social life, which left time for serious reading. That year, I bought a book that challenged and thrilled me. It was Douglas Hofstadter’s 777-page Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
I read Gödel, Escher, Bach closely and patiently. When I got stuck on a complicated passage, I powered through it; there was no other option. I entered Hofstadter’s world and didn’t leave it until I got to the last page.
GEB, as its fans call it, is about the miracle of consciousness: how our sense of “I” can arise from the workings of neurons and axons that are individually unintelligent. Hofstadter said systems (including brains) gain awareness when they become self-referential in a certain way. According to him, the emergence of “I” comes from a “strange loop,” where you traverse levels of a hierarchy and wind up back where you started. To get the tricky idea across, he appealed to M.C. Escher’s hands, which draw each other into existence; Bach’s fugues, which loop back on themselves, as though the music were listening to itself; and the mathematician Kurt Gödel, who cleverly manipulated formulas into making statements about their own provability.
The sentence “I am a liar,” for example, is self-referential and paradoxical. If you really are a liar, then you must not be a liar, whereas if you’re really not a liar, then you must be a liar. GEB is filled with this kind of material.
