Green Oasis

This post will serve two purposes. The first is to subtly notify the world that I’ve finally finished Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. OK, so maybe I’ve blown the subtle part. While I found the book very interesting, enlightening even, it was hard to get through all 700 or so pages before I found something else to read. It just didn’t hold my attention. Every few months, I’d pick it up again. After years of episodic reading, I read the last page in the wee hours of Sunday.

The second purpose is to note an odd bit of synchronicity. This morning, I stumbled upon an example of a striking audio illusion that I had seen mentioned toward the end of Gödel, Escher, Bach only a few days ago.

You can find an even more striking example at the Wikipedia article on Shepard tones.

Canon 5 of Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer is an example of a spiral canon which ends a tone higher than it starts. The canon can then be played at that higher pitch and end one tone higher yet again. This could be done ad infinitum leading to ever higher pitches, though we would eventually be unable to hear the music.

Hofstadter suggests that this audio illusion could transform Bach’s canon into a piece which would only sound as though it were ever rising.

Interestingly, Gödel, Escher, Bach itself takes the form of an endlessly rising prose canon which I suppose means that I’m not finished reading yet.

I recently finished reading The Mind’s I by Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and Daniel C. Dennett, the Santa Claus-like patron saint of the recent publicly resurgent atheism. Sometimes books come into your life at the precise moment when they will have maximal impact. That happened for me with this book.

It is a collection of writings from authors such as Alan Turing, Richard Dawkins, John Searle, StanisÅ‚aw Lem, and Jorge Borges on the subject of mind, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. That’s exactly what I’ve been pondering lately. The authors present conflicting viewpoints (they promise to make everyone think) and then present their responses to the essay. A simple, very effective format.

The authors delivered on their promise. The book caused me to take a long look at what exactly it means to be a conscious, intelligent being. What is the self? Is there a soul? Can consciousness be explained reductively by interactions of neurons? What gives rise to our experience of consciousness? Many were the thought provoking moments that I spent with this book.

By the way, this is the book that I was reading in that Indian bistro a while ago.

An excellent read.