This hypothetical award-winning book introduces you to metamathematics and a bunch of stuff about what the future of AI was imagined to be in the past, interspersed with play-by-play pinball matches between world-class pinball players, where what happens in the game is a metaphor for the math in the next chapter.

It presents the extraordinary claim that the sequence of positions of the diverter on Swords of Fury is a mathematical encoding of the proposition "The diverter will not work correctly on this Swords of Fury".

ps anyone have the full text of this? lmaooo

Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI - The Atlantic

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

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"

ps anyone have the full text of this? lmaooo

Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI - The Atlantic

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