So, my friend Charlie at a recent outing happened to have a copy of this super geeky book under his arm – and after I asked what he was reading, he gave me enough of a description to get me interested.
It’s called Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. I guess it was published about 20 years ago.
Anyway – Lone Gunman, who I read almost daily, posts about this book just a few days after I was chatting about it with Charlie. Mr. Gunman describes the book as “on cognition” and it “defies categorisation”, which is kinda intriguing (as is Mr. Gunman’s British spelling of “categorisation”, not that I follow all the rules I learned in “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”). Hmm.
Specifically, he posts about a video lecture series MIT has made available here. The videos are pretty interesting – what I’ve seen so far, and what I can follow. The first lecture looks to be run by Daniel Faraday from Lost, which is entertaining.
Might be worth tracking down this book. A few other books I’ve enjoyed relating to the study of (I guess) cognition: An Argument for Mind, The Joyous Cosmology, Beat Zen, Squared Zen and Zen (I think that’s actually just an essay), and, wow, I guess just about any Zen or Buddhist text – may as well include Words of My Perfect Teacher and especially The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. These are less math-y, though.
