Gödel Escher Bach series — An overview of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems
This is one of my last articles on medium. If you’d like to keep in touch you can find me at https://blog.theengineeringcompass.com/
This is part 1 of a mini-series where we’re aiming to go through the main themes of the “Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas Hofstadter. The first part will concentrate on the main topic of the book and how it relates to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, as well as giving an insight into the relation to Escher’s pictures and Bach’s musical offerings.
Published in 1979 what professor Hofstadter is trying to answer in his book is one primary question: how animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is represented by a “self” and how can a self come out of things that have no self? How come that these bunch of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen elements go from being meaningless to developing into an entity that is aware of its own existence?
Approach
The approach that GEB takes in order to answer these questions is by making an analogy that correlates molecules to meaningless symbols and selves to certain meaningful patterns that arise only in particular types of systems of meaningless symbols. The book mostly concentrates on investigating those patterns that prof. Hofstadter calls…
