Metamagical Themas
Toen 'Godel, Escher, Bach' verscheen in 1979 was Hofstadter in een klap wereldberoemd. Het is maar weinigen gegeven zo met taal en kennis te spelen: briljant, erudiet, creatief, humoristisch, en didaktisch van zeer hoog niveau. Dezelfde kwaliteiten bepalen het gezicht van 'Metamagische thema's'. Het is een bundeling van artikelen die in de jaren 1981-1983 in de Scientific American verschenen en die nu met behulp van uitvoerige naschriften tot een geheel verweven zijn. De onderwerpen bestrijken ruwweg hetzelfde brede gebied dat we kennen uit 'Godel, Escher, Bach': kunstmatige intelligentie, creativiteit, muziek, zelfverwijzing, en ook Achilles en de schildpad zijn van de partij. Een intellectuele delicatesse. Bevat register en een uitvoerige bibliografie met toelichting. (NBD|Biblion recensie, Drs. D.G. van der Steen.)
Stats for nerds
45recommend
98mentions
84people
2007–2026years
49% recommend50% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've always wanted to set up automation that updates the text for the book every so often to preserve original intent, by changing the language around quantities to <whatever would make a contemporary reader be impressed>
Replace "megabyte" with "exabyte" or whatever.
As an aside, there's a great essay I think in Metamagical Themas about the fuzzy task of translating literary works, which takes up the question of whether it would be valid and how to translate say Dickens into French, by relocating from London to Paris.
Part of the premise is that this is an impossible task because the referential systems are not truly analogous; the cultures aren't identical so some concepts literally have no direct translation...
...in Neuromancer the mere existence of a bank of pay phones has stood out as one of those things which even my little updater would break hard.
Also related: I've seen a slowly increasing number of complaints in book forums about text from relatively recent novels being silently updated, to change references from e.g. Myspace to Tik Tok or whatever, to try to keep the text feeling current... a perilous slope.
- Two classic books by Douglas R Hofstadter
andGödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Both are heavy reads. But I would recommend looking at Wiki article before buying, available used. Just to make sure they fit your style of brain.Metamagical Themas - I got a lot more out of his Metamagical Themas (scientific american columns) collection book. Eg Lisp and making self-referential sentences (“This sentence contains three a’s, one b, …”)
- > I hope you enjoyed Hofstadter's idiosyncratic tour of Lisp. You can find more like this re-printed in his book Metamagical Themas.
This seems like an interesting book.
- I loved Hofstadter's writing on Lisp in Metamagical Themas and adapted the code in the last article of the series to Clojure for a study group at work, written up here[1].
[1] http://johnj.com/posts/oodles/
edit: clarification
- Well said. It won Pulizer for a reason. It's not for learning facts, its for thinking. GEB ponders and it's masterfully written.
I can also recommend Metamagical Themas from Hofstadter. It's a collection of articles he wrote for Scientific American.
Related
Gödel, Escher, Bach
505 recommend · 1,439
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
17 recommend · 45
Socratic logic
2 recommend · 7
The Mind's I
36 recommend · 73
I Am a Strange Loop
101 recommend · 249
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
62 recommend · 101
