Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern @ richardeward.com

Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern
by Douglas Hofstadter
from Basic Books

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

• Not yet finished, but...
  This book seemed menacing when I picked it up for the first time. Its cover is complex and bears a striking resemblance to a great number of occult and metaphysical classics. That said, this book was inviting from the first sentence. I did not at all expect to laugh out loud to a book with a title like this book bears. It is zen via the language and style of thought of a scientist. Another reviewer asked, Who cares if this sentence is false? If you can look at the things we take for granted and set those... more info

• "This sentence is false." So what?!?
  Before I begin, I want to first point that I gave Douglas Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach which won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, five stars.
  His observation that the mathematics of Kurt Godel, the art of Maurits Cornelius Escher and the music of Johann Sabastian Bach which are all "shadows cast by the same source" managed to bring Platonic forms to life in a real and engaging way that, quite frankly, Plato himself failed to do.
  Hofstadter discussed the liars paradox, perhaps most simply rendered in the... more info

• Brilliant and Thought Provoking
  This collection of Hofstadter's columns from Scientific American provides wonderful reading.

  One of the gems is his simple, but brilliant analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma. The usual analysis notes that the Nash equilibrium is for both players to defect. Hofstadter notes (correctly) that if both players are rational, then because the game is symmetrical, both players will choose the same strategy. So, the only choices are for both to cooperate or both defect. Since both cooperating has a higher payoff... more info

• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
  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... more info

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