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Title: Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern by Douglas R. Hofstadter ISBN: 0-465-04566-9 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: March, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.56 (16 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Better than GEB?
Comment: Perhaps it is sacrilege, or stretching things a bit, but in my view this book tops GEB. Admittedly, I have read GEB several times, so maybe somebody who hasn't read GEB won't get the full benefit of Metamagical Themas. Here are my reasons for my opinion:
1) Hofstadter doesn't spend so much time being cute. Sure, all the jokes in GEB were funny, but they can get old, especially when you're going through the book a second time trying to delve deeper into an idea.
2) The variety of topics. Everything from Chopin to self reference to nuclear proliferation. Yet as the title might suggest, a common thread runs through all the topics. Hofstadter emphasizes this with his addendums to the original articles; he also has several new essays.
3) A great summary of Hofstadter's views on AI. If you read GEB and weren't really sure what he's about, reading the new Achilles and Tortoise dialogue, "Who shoves whom around in the careenium?", will clear things up. It did for me. Also, there's an article on Hofstadter's criticisms of the approaches that have been taken by AI experts (up to 1985, when the book was written).
In summary, GEB was an amazing work that was diluted to make it more palatable to non-technical people. Metamagical Themas is Hofstadter at full strength.
Rating: 5
Summary: Hofstadter's approachable collection
Comment: When I was in high school I discovered the joys of reading Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. After a few years of pleasure he was replaced by someone else who (among other things) wrote on the joys of Rubik's cube and I found myself wasting weeks of time and filling notebooks with my quest to explore and solve the cube.
That columnist was Douglas Hofstadter, who brought the same skill at sharing his enthusiam for his topic that created the amazing, mind shattering 'Godel, Escher, Bach'. His column, that occupied the same place as "Mathemetical Games", was called "Metamagical Themas" (looking closely at those two names will tell you a lot about Douglas Hofstadter) and lasted for 13 issues.
This book is a compilation of those columns, each with a new endnote by Hofstadter and some letters received by the magazine and his reply.
Together they cover a large range of topics while keeping to the central concerns of most of Hofstadter's work; consciousness, patterns, music, language and computer systems.
The combination works superbly. This volume is much more easily approached than 'Godel, Escher, Bach' while raising similar questions in the mind of the reader. For those that have read the earlier work there is not just the joy of more of Hofstadter's writing on diverse topics but the sheer pleasure of discovering another dialogue involving Achilles and the Tortoise.
I find it hard to define the set of people who would enjoy this book, but it would be a large and varied one.
Rating: 4
Summary: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Comment: This collection of essays previously published as a column in Scientific American is very uneven. There are some true gems like he discussion of the game Nomic in which rule changes are part of ordinary play or the sections on self referential sentences. Basically everything is readable, but not all chapters make much sense.
Some parts are really bad. In chapter 5 he wonders why one can judge the intellectual content of magazines by their cover, not seeing the obvious solution that these magazines try to attract different audiences. He spends some time discussing the prisoners dilemma and he get's it completely wrong. He argues that a rational person would know that other rational persons would think along the same lines and therefore act the same way. So a rational person can use this knowledge to influence another person. This is complete bogus of course. People are rational when they act rational, if I cooperate in the prisoners dilemma, I am not changing the definition of rationality, I'm simply irrational. Hofstadter also discusses Axelrod's famous computer tournaments. A more realistic view on the topic is provided by a review of Axelrod's book by Ken Binmore. That review can be found on the web.
The book is still valuable for the good parts, but one should read the book with a sceptical eye. Hofstadter is a layman on many things he discusses, and sometimes this shines through. Another problem is that some issues like the cold war anren't really interesting anymore. People who like Hofstadter will surely like it and find enough pearls to make the buy worth it though.
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Title: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter ISBN: 0465026567 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: January, 1999 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas R. Hofstadter ISBN: 0465024750 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: March, 1996 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett, Doug Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett ISBN: 0465030912 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: January, 2001 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: The Mind's I : Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul by Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett ISBN: 0553345842 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 April, 1985 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter ISBN: 0465086454 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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