#Gödel Escher Bach

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[patronsaintofdemons]

gödel escher bach: an eternal golden braid achilles/tortoise when

[art-of-mathematics]

Recently I travelled with the tram and started to draw the letter sculptures depicted on the cover of the of the book "Gödel Escher Bach".

... close enough...

It was a fun lil exercise.

[idroolinmysleep]

I would say that that text, in sharp contrast to what I myself wrote in the book’s 20th-anniversary preface, consists only in generic platitudes and fluffy handwaving. The prose has virtually nothing in common with my writing style and what it says does not agree at all with the actual story that underlies the book’s genesis. … The text is a travesty from top to bottom.

Douglas Hofstadter, whose book Gödel, Escher, Bach inspired a generation of students to study computer science, is not impressed when GPT-4 pretends to be him.

Personally, I think this iteration of artificial intelligence (repackaging scraped text into clouds of bullshit) is garbage and hope the mania over it collapses like the crypto bubble did.

[randomwalkingshoes]

There's a whole chapter about this in Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

Currently thinking about non-English translations of Jabberwocky, because it has to be so hard translating a nonsense poem.

And it’s not just making the nonsense words fit the translated language’s morphology, you have to have most of the nonsense words mean something for a later chapter in the book where Humpty Dumpty explains the portmanteau words. So in one Japanese translation, “frumious,” which is a portmanteau of “fuming” and “furious,” is translated as “takeburu,” which draws on the words “takeru,” fierce, and “keburu”, to smoke.

But I also just love the names of the Jabberwock in other languages. In French he’s le Jaseroque, der Jammerwoch in German, Barmaglot in Russian, and at least one Danish translation named him Kloppervok. It’s the one word you could very justifiably keep untranslated, but everyone wants to make the name fit, make it feel at home in the translation.

I have no point here, I just think it’s neat.

[lifesfeelings]

New Thesis Topic

My last post was just me basically listing everything I need to do for myself this summer lol! BUT, with that, I also really wanted to talk about my thesis! While I don't really know what I want to do yet, I'm narrowing in a good way and I am getting REALLY excited to do this type of work! My initial topic was about interdisciplinarity and how we navigate contact points between scientists of different fields but it's slowly changed completely in ways that I'm getting ecstatic about writing about! I made that post about "Gödel, Escher, Bach" and I have been making my way further through that. I got to Hofstadter's first conversation on Isomorphic systems and I had just a complete moment of "clarity" (though, we'll see lol!). Me and my advisor had talked a lot last meeting about deconstruction and this idea that scientists use a lot of words that don't inherently mean anything (like, what does it mean to do something "urgently"?). So she wanted me to study God Terms and I myself found the term "floating signifiers" which both led me down some really great trains of thought. When I got to isomorphism with Hofstadter though I had this really great thought that I could almost use isomorphic systems as a framework of sorts to look at how different scientific organizations or disciplines discuss climate change. Obviously, if the science is accurate and up to date, the arguments that are built by independent scientists should be essentially 1:1 with the same information but with different signifiers and God Terms to better achieve their goal rhetorically. With that, if there is this perfect matching of concepts or data sets between two systems then I can map some sort of translation between their terms and then use God/Devil Terms and floating signifiers to explain why their systems appear different yet use the same data sets and information. I don't have all the kinks worked out and I really don't even know if something like this will work (especially as a thesis compared to like a dissertation), BUT conceptually I am SO fascinated about how I can iron this out and make these concepts work! ESPECIALLY since I'm interested in interdisciplinarity, I'm ECSTATIC that I might be able to use a metamath theory as a framework for rhetorical analysis!

008.06.24

[pussydeluxe]

dose anyone want to read a book with me

im trying to read godel escher bach again and im still not smart enough to do it. lets read a chapter a week and discuss together so we dont get lost we can make a discord GC or something :thumbsup: message me if interested

wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

the entire book on the IA: https://archive.org/details/godelescherbachaneternalgoldenbraiddouglasr.hofstadter/mode/2up

^ image of a catboy to get your attenton. hes unrelated but i think itd be his favorite book

[amanonthecorner]

I'm typically pro-piracy, except when this guy is pirating a 200 page book one page at a time at the library when I NEED THE SCANNER

[doorsangel]

A: Una tartaruga che si dia all'ippica sarebbe...

T: Un'anomalia naturalmente. Ma non divaghi: pensi a Z. Prima occupiamoci di Z e poi ci daremo all'ippica!

[jokerlennon]

litreally society if i still had the time to grab completely random books off the shelf and read them in one sitting i miss being 11

[trdsf]

Chaotic good. Neutral evil if I'm stepping away from a text for less then two or three minutes.

alignment chart: bookmark edition. tag yourself i’m scrap paper

[schibborasso]

–GÖDEL–ESCHER–BACH–

[andmaybegayer]

Guns Gödel Germs Escher Steel and Bach

[aperiodofhistory]

Books to read in autumn

Historical novels

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: England in the 1520s

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett: Building the most splendid Gothic cathedral the world has ever known

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon: A back-in-time Scottish romance

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland: A novel of the plague in the year 1348

The underground railroad by Colson Whitehead: Enslavement of African Americans through escape and flight

The God of small things by Arundhati Roy: A family drama in the 60s located in India

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank: A powerful reminder of the horrors of world war II

Fantasy

A Game of thrones by George R. R. Martin: A Fantasy epic run by politics, strong families, dragons

Red rising by Pierce Brown: A dystopian science fiction novel set in a future colony on Mars

Babel by R.F. Kuang: Student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree: A fresh take on fantasy staring an orc and a mercenary

Jade City by Fonda Lee: A gripping Godfather-esque saga of intergenerational blood feuds, vicious politics, magic, and kungfu

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik: A tale of hope and magic, with brave maidens and scary monsters

The Atlas six by Olivie Blake: A dark academic sensation following six magicians

Mysteries & Horror

The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror by various authors: Short stories perfect for the Halloween mood

Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon: The story of Vern, a pregnant teenager who escapes the cult Cainland

The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher: A noted cultural critic unearths the weird, the eerie, and the horrific in 20th-century culture through a wide range of literature, film, and music

Holly by Stephen King: Disappearances in a midwestern town

Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas: Supernatural western

The good house by Tananarive Due: A classic New England tale that lays bare the secrets of one little town

Nonfiction

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey: The trail of America's ghosts

What moves the dead by T. Kingfisher: A gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry: A journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America

All the living and the dead by Hayley Campbell: An exploration of the death industry and the people―morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners―who work in it and what led them there

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more

[azspot]

Gödel proved in 1931 that mathematics is not decidable, an earth-shattering result. He proved that there are statements in mathematics, which are true but not provable within the system. Worse yet, it turns out that you can’t build a more powerful mathematical system. Once a system becomes sufficiently complex, there will always be statements which are undecidable. You’re left with a choice: either have weak system of mathematics or accept that there will always be theorems out of reach. A rough analogy to incompleteness Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which shows that physics makes it impossible to determine both the position and velocity of a particle with exact precision.

Why Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life.

[dandelionmoss]

ok maybe Gödel, Escher, Bach isn't quite as deep or insightful as i thought the first time i read it