Everything got better when I became a green-haired 2D girl. I do fun and unusual things with video games and pinball.

cohost inspired me to do more. Thank you



tati
@tati

Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI - The Atlantic


arborelia
@arborelia

Douglas Hofstadter: hey I wrote this unusual, speculative book about math, art, and artificial intelligence! It's got hidden secrets, puns and a smarmy talking tortoise

Reader: oh I get it! reaches for nearest object or metaphysical concept this is intelligence!

Douglas Hofstadter: Reader what the fuck are you talking about


arborelia
@arborelia

It's an amazing book. Even though it's writing about AI from the perspective of what people thought in 1979. Especially because of that, perhaps, because 1979's idea of AI is way more interesting than 2023's idea of AI.

The phenomenon I'm referring to is real and a little frustrating when you try to talk about the book. When someone has just finished reading Godel, Escher, Bach, they are likely to orient themselves by imprinting on the next concept they come across and saying "oh that must be what intelligence is!" I was guilty of it for a while too.

The smarmy tortoise is essential. Hofstadter wrote a follow-up decades later, "I Am A Strange Loop", where he tried to just say what he meant directly instead of in cute dialogues that people could misunderstand. It's pretty dull without Tortoise.

Also -- check the 1999 introduction -- she's trans now. The French translator made Tortoise female, mostly because of the gender essentialism of the French language tbh, and Hofstadter said "wait a minute this is better"


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in reply to @tati's post:

in reply to @tati's post:

After receiving this book (specifically the 20th anniversary edition) as a gift years ago, I finally got around to reading the foreward a few days ago and as I was reading the AI generated text, I was also struck by the specific ways in which it was wrong, especially how it echoed a notion about what the book was about that I also thought prior to reading that introduction. It feels as though the LLM is, in a sense, tapping into the "collective unconscious" knowledge about things, knowledge which is often wrong, but it speaks about it as if it's absolute truth. And unlike myself, the LLMs are incapable of swiftly realizing and correcting their mistakes when presented with truths that conflict with their models.

in highschool my girlfriend picked a damaged copy of GEB off the library discards shelf and it inspired me to add a philosophy major to my CS degree so i could process it from more angles. i also married the girl who gave it to me so i guess you could call it a life-changing read in more ways than one