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I finally got around to reading a Douglas Hofstadter book. It isn't his most famous book "Godel, Escher, Bach" but a much later book called "I Am A Strange Loop". I figured that I kind of should figure out what all these geeks who like making references to Hofstadter are talking about. Not to be too negative, but he seems to be really taken with the idea of loops, paradoxes, recursion and "the meta". Its kind of interesting when he is just talking about math, but he tries to explain all of human affairs with his pet theories. After a while he is kind of like Thomas Friedman: only with "recursive loops" as the glib answer for everything instead of "Global Connectivity". Am I missing something, or is Hofstadter just one of those things that some geeks get excited about that really isn't that great?
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Aug 4, 2014 21:59
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What's the "Cretan Paradox"?
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Aug 4, 2014 22:00
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redshirt posted:What's the "Cretan Paradox"? All Cretans are liars, therefore if a Cretan tells you he is lying, is he lying or telling the truth? AKA the thing that Captain Kirk used to blow up megalomaniac computers on at least one occasion.
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Aug 4, 2014 22:01
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is dude from Big Bang named after him?
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Aug 4, 2014 22:02
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I know a Cretan and he is not a liar.
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Aug 4, 2014 22:02
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glowing-fish posted:All Cretans are liars, therefore if a Cretan tells you he is lying, is he lying or telling the truth? I've been to Crete, man. Everyone was really nice and I don't think there was constant lying. Maybe a few lies, but not always.
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Aug 4, 2014 22:02
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redshirt posted:I've been to Crete, man. Everyone was really nice and I don't think there was constant lying. Maybe a few lies, but not always. I guess it is kind of problematic for me to say that all Cretans are liars, then.
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Aug 4, 2014 22:04
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glowing-fish posted:I guess it is kind of problematic for me to say that all Cretans are liars, then. Totally. Now, if you'd said "Russians", right there with you man.
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Aug 4, 2014 22:05
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Also, the french. Don't bother asking anybody for directions in France.
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Aug 4, 2014 22:34
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there is no such thing as a paradox and no such thing as a good book
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Aug 4, 2014 22:35
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Lollerich posted:Also, the french. Don't bother asking anybody for directions in France. I try to introduce some intelligent conversation in GBS, and what do we get? More racism! 
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Aug 4, 2014 22:38
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i don't always put them on my salads, sometimes i just eat them out of the bag
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Aug 4, 2014 22:39
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I haven't read any of his books but I read an article on gawker or io9 or something about this and don't strange loops have something to do with overlapping hierarchical structures where there are two equally valid but mutually exclusive approaches? the idea isn't that it's unresolvable, but a sufficiently complex system will organically require and gain a resolution where no objectively superior choice is present. that was my takeaway anyway
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Aug 4, 2014 22:46
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glowing-fish posted:I try to introduce some intelligent conversation in GBS this was your first mistake your second mistake was not actually introducing intelligent conversation
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Aug 4, 2014 22:48
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glowing-fish posted:All Cretans are liars, therefore if a Cretan tells you he is lying, is he lying or telling the truth? When in fact all it does is cause nerds to emit shrill giggles. The eyeroll is our species secret weapon against all of this.
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Aug 4, 2014 22:51
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glowing-fish posted:I finally got around to reading a Douglas Hofstadter book. It isn't his most famous book "Godel, Escher, Bach" but a much later book called "I Am A Strange Loop". I figured that I kind of should figure out what all these geeks who like making references to Hofstadter are talking about. yeah it's good to know what irrelevant poo poo the other faux intellectual idiots are circlejerking about so you can fit in even better than before. this thread is a really good start on your journey
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Aug 4, 2014 22:58
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Cubone posted:I haven't read any of his books but I read an article on gawker or io9 or something about this and don't strange loops have something to do with overlapping hierarchical structures where there are two equally valid but mutually exclusive approaches? the idea isn't that it's unresolvable, but a sufficiently complex system will organically require and gain a resolution where no objectively superior choice is present. A Strange Loop is something where following the premises proves the conclusion, or sometimes the other way around. For example, "Aliens control our society secretly but you don't know that they do because they control the media" is a strange loop of sorts. That at least is a practical way to phrase it. In a more lighthearted example, a paper with two messages on either side "The message on the other side is true" and "The message on the other side is false" would be a strange loop. Sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are interesting, but also there are sections of nerdery that just go wild about them. And Hofstadter is one of them. (There is probably a better mathematical definition of a strange loop and that is why Hofstadter writes all those big books)
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Aug 4, 2014 23:01
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they're interesting things to think about but ultimately so what
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Aug 4, 2014 23:04
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Moridin920 posted:they're interesting things to think about but ultimately so what this is my thought about everything except food and sex.
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Aug 4, 2014 23:07
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the so what is that I get to eat and have sex
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Aug 4, 2014 23:07
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Moridin920 posted:so what Moridin920 posted:they're interesting things to think about
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Aug 4, 2014 23:11
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N. Senada posted:this is my thought about everything except food and sex. Have you tried drugs? Not trying to be a bad influence, but that might work at least a little for you.
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Aug 4, 2014 23:11
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Do not read geb it is long and mostly boring and pretty inconsequential cuz he starts trying to explain consciousness by strange loops but relies on ridiculous reductionist images of consciousness and also super stupid out of date ideas about brain function and cognition that only someone with half a real brain would find at all reliable. Ultimately a huge bullshit flop that only won a Pulitzer because most people excited about pop science are completely dumb about real science (surprise) but does include excellent lay explanations of godels work.
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Aug 4, 2014 23:44
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nomadologique posted:but does include excellent lay explanations of godels work. Yeah, the straight math parts were pretty interesting to me, and even the parts about consciousness and brain function were pretty good at first. It was more than he wanted to explain everything with those things that started to annoy me. It is a lot like "quantum physics" and the people who go on about how quantum physics changes everything. Actually, quantum physics DOES change everything, and it is a very interesting lens to look at the world through. But the people who say "quantum physics explains consciousness" are usually just saying something that they think sounds cool.
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Aug 4, 2014 23:57
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N. Senada posted:this is my thought about everything except food and sex. drugs also
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Aug 5, 2014 10:19
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nomadologique posted:Ultimately a huge bullshit flop that only won a Pulitzer because most people excited about pop science are completely dumb about real science (surprise) but does include excellent lay explanations of godels work. huge bullshit flop is a pretty tenuous appraisal of a book that's, like, mostly about a tortoise and ants and stuff having thought experiment adventures. Can you point to one actual example of stupid out of date notions presented therein? Also, what's wrong with reductionism?
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Aug 5, 2014 10:46
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The end of this sentence
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Aug 5, 2014 10:51
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Godel Escher Bach is a fantastic work that naturalizes the sciences (ps not natural science) A strange loop is a tradegy. His wife died, and he never let go, and turned clear thought into some way to bring her back. its real tragic to read it that way, but he basically went all orson scott card except with his feelings instead of hatred for the jews. He's like a one hit wonder of logic. enjoy what he did right, and just shake your head at the foolishness that was his second book
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Aug 5, 2014 10:55
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Sizone posted:huge bullshit flop is a pretty tenuous appraisal of a book that's, like, mostly about a tortoise and ants and stuff having thought experiment adventures. also to be fair to the book it's 35 years old at this point, so stuff being out of date should be forgiven a bit
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Aug 5, 2014 11:25
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He literally says something like "90% of brain is grey matter, but everybody agrees that poo poo doesn't do anything or matter anyway only neurons count" and then proceeds. Which I recognize was the general idea at the time, and I can't believe anyone believed it. The major reductionist bullshit he's guilty of is that "thoughts" occur as symbol-blocks that are ultimately decodable if we just knew the symbol-system (he gives this picture of an ant colony "talking" by arrangements of ants). As I recall, during this section I came up with nine or ten related but different objections to this pretty idiotic model, which may be applicable to some subset of thoughts but almost certainly can't account for the vast majority of them. He also thinks that all thought is finally linguistic, ie if it's not expressible in words or logic symbols it's not a thought. (These two reductions are related.) The "problem" with reductionism is the problem with special cases, ie special cases represent incredibly uncommon and small-scope exceptions to the general behavior of systems, which is complex. The book is huge bullshit because everything "new" in it, that comes from the author, is bullshit. Where he reviews old work that isn't his, it's very good. If it was just a lay explication of godel it would be a great book but wouldn't have won a Pulitzer because without bullshit pop about hey the brain is xyz nobody would care or read it (think the popularity of guns germs steel, which reduces the hell out of complex history and people gobble up so they can feel scholarly and never have to think about a certain topic ever again, they already know all about it cuz they read guns germs steel). nomadologique fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Aug 5, 2014 |
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Aug 5, 2014 13:49
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Godel Escher Bach was a fun read
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Aug 5, 2014 13:53
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Hofstadter is cooler, smarter, and sexier than the op
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Aug 5, 2014 13:53
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- hi
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nomadologique posted:The book is huge bullshit because everything "new" in it, that comes from the author, is bullshit. Where he reviews old work that isn't his, it's very good. If it was just a lay explication of godel it would be a great book but wouldn't have won a Pulitzer because without bullshit pop about hey the brain is xyz nobody would care or read it (think the popularity of guns germs steel, which reduces the hell out of complex history and people gobble up so they can feel scholarly and never have to think about a certain topic ever again, they already know all about it cuz they read guns germs steel). yeah this pretty much covers most pop science books, usually the author's own ideas are kind of dumb
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Aug 5, 2014 14:11
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Does he try and say that your perspective and conscious experience is influenced by what your brain focuses on therefore you focus on more of that particular thing in your life and it loops back in on itself?
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Aug 5, 2014 14:45
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Also lol @ grey matter being useless. Wtf did they think it was made of? Fat?
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Aug 5, 2014 14:45
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What's Zizek think?
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Aug 5, 2014 15:09
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I read GEB and I liked it. Maybe you are the nerd OP
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Aug 5, 2014 15:16
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cretin paradox
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Aug 5, 2014 15:18
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GEB would be a good book if about 200-300 pages were chopped out of it; he spends way too long digressing into huge rambling sections of "now let's apply this stuff to some other random area of study". "I Am A Strange Loop" is his better book, it even has a way better explanation of Godel's Theorem in it.
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Aug 5, 2014 15:22
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I literally don't remember the brain stuff in GEB, except the bit about the robot arm, which seemed p reasonable and safe.
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Aug 5, 2014 15:24
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