|
''Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'', also known as ''GEB'', is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter. The tagline ''"a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll"'' was used by the publisher to describe the book.〔Hofstadter, (cover ).〕 By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, ''GEB'' expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself. In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter has emphasized that ''GEB'' is not about mathematics, art, and music but rather about how cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms. In the book, he presents an analogy about how the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.〔(By Analogy: A talk with the most remarkable researcher in artificial intelligence today, Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach ) Wired Magazine, November 1995〕〔(Consciousness In The Cosmos: Perspective of Mind: Douglas Hofstadter )〕 ==Structure== ''GEB'' takes the form of an interweaving of various narratives. The main chapters alternate with dialogues between imaginary characters, usually Achilles and the tortoise, first used by Zeno of Elea and later by Lewis Carroll in "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles". These origins are related in the first two dialogues, and later ones introduce new characters such as the Crab. These narratives frequently dip into self-reference and metafiction. Word play also features prominently in the work. Puns are occasionally used to connect ideas, such as "the Magnificrab, Indeed" with Bach's ''Magnificat in D''; "SHRDLU, Toy of Man's Designing" with Bach's ''Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring''; and "Typographical Number Theory", or "TNT", which inevitably reacts explosively when it attempts to make statements about itself. One dialogue contains a story about a genie (from the Arabic "Djinn") and various "tonics" (of both the liquid and musical varieties), which is titled "Djinn and Tonic". One dialogue in the book is written in the form of a crab canon, in which every line before the midpoint corresponds to an identical line past the midpoint. The conversation still makes sense due to uses of common phrases that can be used as either greetings or farewells ("Good day") and the positioning of lines which double as an answer to a question in the next line. Another is a sloth canon, where one character repeats the lines of another, but slower and negated. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gödel, Escher, Bach」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|