Gödel, Escher, Bach: Chapter 2

This chapter was a little bit more complex for me to understand; reading it again when I am older will definitely give me new insights. A main theme of GEB Hofstadter discussed in the introduction was that meaningful knowledge can be drawn out of meaningless constructs. For an example, the pq- formal system by itself is meaningless symbols with rules attached. 

– – p – – – q – – – – – 

But when the p is assigned the meaning plus, the q is assigned the meaning equals, and each dash represents a unit, the meaning suddenly becomes clear.

2 plus 3 equals 5. 

A literary connection I made when going through this chapter is with His Dark Materials, my favorite book series. The concept of Dust in HDM is a stand in for dark matter, which in this fantasy world, is attracted to anything conscious, which means more than just people. If you take a rock simply found on the ground, it wouldn’t attract Dust. But a chess piece made from rock would attract Dust. When an artist carves the stone, they are assigning a sort of consciousness to the inanimate matter, just like how Hofstadter turns the pq- formal system into meaningful addition. This is a fascinating similarity, and I wonder if Philip Pullman read GEB before writing His Dark Materials. 

The segment with Achilles and the Tortoise keeps getting stranger…

The tortoise is not saying anything, and I wonder if (and why) the author suddenly decided to make the animal realistic. Additionally, I have no idea what the ADAC puzzle is supposed to be. I guess I’ll find out later!