Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

GEB is mainly a book on recursion and self-reference viewed from a mathematical lens. It’s lengthy and often bounces around freely within topics. The style is idiosyncratic and if not confusing, gives a better look at the author’s odd, sometimes highbrow but frequently endearing personality. At its core, it tries to investigate and elaborate on the work of Kurt Gödel, whose work on the incompleteness theorems showed interesting and disturbing results when pathological statements (like the liar’s paradox, “This sentence is false”) are introduced into mathematical formal systems. I found it to be provocative, but at many points the book feels too long-winded and excessively tangential, but maybe it is to the merit of the style.

One interesting (but somewhat dated) idea mentioned is in the section on consciousness as an epiphenomenon, or an emergent property. The idea is that with enough neural connections within the brain to facilitate intelligence, consciousness is developed as a side effect of these neural connections. Modern functionalism and neuroscience also drives toward the idea that consciousness is a continuous spectrum rather than a discrete is/is not. From this we can posit the degree of consciousness is a function of the complexity and interconnectivity of a system; in our case, it’s the trillions of neurons that allow us a greater degree of consciousness than sea sponges. Of course, it opens possibilities for other systems, like organizations or countries, to have high degrees of consciousness (this idea is inspired by Eric Schwitzgebel’s “If Materialism is True, the United States is Probably Conscious”) since the complexity and interconnections of a state encompasses each human’s consciousness. In any case, the philosophy is fascinating and in the coming age, will probably drive more efficient paradigms of AI and of brain neuro-enhancements alike.