Rating: 
Summary: A headache-inducing book
Review: Don't be fooled by the title. The three named figures are not represented equally is this book! It is essentially about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem - a result only genuinely interesting to professional mathematicians - with the occasional reference to Bach and Escher. As someone who loves music, and happens to have a math degree, I was disappointed about this.Surely what makes Bach's music interesting is not its mathematical nature, but that it is heartfelt and passionate. Compared to it, Hofstadter's child-like world - unarguably impressive as it may be - is tedious, hair-splitting and oddly asexual. No offence, but I was glad to escape from it.
Rating: 
Summary: A definite read for the intellectuals or dreamers...
Review: I love this book because it touches on many universal concepts using examples from art, science, music, math, and more. If you are an intellectual, or you consider yourself intelligent, you should take a few moments to read this. You'll love it...
Rating: 
Summary: What's the big deal?
Review: I'm afraid I must also be one of the naysayers of this work. I found it to be greatly overrated and highly pedantic. I think it gives many people an incorrect idea about what Godel's theorem really means. The major points of this book could have been summed up in under 100 pages, yet it drones on for 700+ pages. In making such a long tome about Godel's theorem, Hofstadter in a sense, set up a huge set of axioms to describe Godel's theorem, which is the very thing Godel showed you cannot do! You've got to love the irony, that this monstrous description of Godel's Theorem is necessarily incomplete because of Godel's Theorem at work. Talk about your "strange loops". Many topics are included that really don't belong, for instance molecular biology and virus assembly. I did my Ph.D. dissertation on viral assembly and I can tell you there is nothing "Godelian" about it. Its a matter of protein-protein interactions and thermodynamics. Another example is Zen buddhism. I am tired of everyone including something about Zen anytime they want their work to have a mystical or undefinable feel. Any Zen master will tell you Zen is nothing special outside of daily life, and that trying to make it extraordinary is to miss the point. Further, I found the dialogues between Mr. Tortoise, Achilles and Mr. Crab to be a bit juvenile. The preface to the 20th anniversary edition sounded more like an excuse not to update the book (the gist of the preface is: "Its perfect now, why ruin perfection?" although it takes Hofstadter 23 pages to say so). Many of the ideas in the book are way out of date (by about 20 years, go figure). I found nothing earth-shattering, life-changing or deeply meaningful about this book. I suspect many people read it because they want to be members of the "I am smart because I read GEB club".
Rating:
Summary: Great Entertaining Book!
Review: I first discovered this book at age 14 while at a welcome home party for my cousin. He was studying education in college and brought a copy along with him. One look at the title had me hooked, I was already a longtime fan of the artist M.C. Escher's paradoxical artwork.Although a lot of the book rode above my head at the time, there were intriguing and sometimes intertwining themes such as zen koans, Lewis Carroll, as well as patterns and self-reference in art and language. Now, 19 years later, I still don't understand some of the more complex ideas, but my copy is well dog eared and I plan on keeping it for a long time.
Rating:
Summary: Can we build intelligent devices?
Review: How do we put the thinking power of the human brain into a man-made device? Godel, Escher, Bach is a jolly tour of this great intellectual challenge. The title of this book is a metaphor for the concept of metaphor. If Hofstadter had called the book "Metaphor, Isomorphism, Mapping" or "Self-reference, Tangled-hierarchies and Strange-loops" it might have sold a few thousand copies. But many millions of people are familiar with Escher or Bach, so the book leaps off of book shelves into people's minds and they can get hooked on the exploration of strange-loops before they realize what they have gotten themselves into. The mathematics of Godel, the art work of Escher, and the music of Bach are related by the fact that they all included examples of what Hofstadter calls a strange-loop. Hofstadter explores these three specific examples of strange-loopiness and then goes on to explain his belief that it is our struggle to understand and codify strange-loopiness that lies at the heart of Artificial Intelligence research. The most concise example of a strange-loop is, "This sentence is false." As a self-referential sentence, it gets itself into trouble and defies our desire that all propositions be either true or false. What is the origin of our desire that human reasoning and human language fit nicely into the binary logic of 0 and 1, false and true? Hofstadter reviews some of the history of this idea and explains how Godel was able to shatter its Platonic purity just at the time when digital electronic computers were being invented. Godel showed that any formal system complex enough to capture the intricacies of number theory must contain propositions that cannot be proven either true or false. Godel accomplished this by showing that such formal systems are inherently self-referential, like the sentence "This sentence is false." Formal systems are capable of not only making statements IN number theory but they can also make self-referential statements ABOUT themselves. What does this mathematical strange-loopiness have to do with computers, artificial intelligence, and human minds? About the same time that Godel was showing that formal systems are irreversibly tainted with strange-loopiness, people like Alan Turing were discovering how to embed formal systems in electronic computers. So the challenge became how to produce creativity and mindfulness out of formal computing systems, systems which seem the ultimate design for only mindless yes-or-no behavior. But, as Hofstadter points out, these seemingly mindless computing devices inherently contain the Godelian power of self-reference and strange-loopiness. So wouldn't it be cool if it is strange-loopiness that turns out to be the basis for human intelligence? If so, then we must be able to exploit the strange-loopiness of computers so as to make true artificial intelligences that are just as intelligent as people. Hofstadter provides a tour of the human brain in an attempt to reveal the sorts of strange-loopiness that make human intelligence. Hofstadter's goal is to find the essential features of biological strange-loopiness so that we can then return to our digital electronic computers and embed that necessary strange-loopiness in them. One of the main reasons why Hofstadter's book "Godel, Escher, Bach" remains my favorite book is because it chisels out Hofstadter's position so clearly that the shape of the negative space outside of Hofstadter's position is also distinctly defined. His book paradoxically manages to show the importance of just those things he did not want to be important for artificial intelligence research. It is as if he started with a block of marble and chipped off pieces, each of which he describes. What is left standing, the statue, he did not explicitly describe but it is left standing there before our eyes, cleared of all the surrounding waste material. For example, the word "learning" is not even listed in the index yet the book can be taken as a demonstration of the importance of learning for intelligent behavior. Hofstadter does not want to confront the details of brain hardware, in fact, one of HIS major objectives is to convince himself that it is safe to ignore those details. His research program is to "skim off" the essential "high level" symbols (in modern, post-Dawkin's jargon we'd say "memes" where he says "symbols") from the brain, but he does explain that there have to be "low level" hardware features of the brain that make possible the symbols. Hofstadter's goal is for the "symbols" to be put into a computer where they will have a different "low level" foundation (electronic circuits rather than neurons). Hofstadter's research program abandons the brain's "low level" unconscious features because they are an untouchable (mentally) common foundation at the base of every human mind. Most human learning takes place in what George Lakoff calls the "cognitive unconscious". We are unconscious of the means by which humans learn the "semantic content" of symbols. This fact deflects Hofstadter (and most AI researchers) away from trying to make robots that would learn about the world in the way human children learn. If you make this move the only games left to play are: 1) program all the needed semantic content by hand, or 2) implement inefficient trial-and-error learning algorithms. These are the methods that most AI researchers use, but decade after decade they fail to give us man-made devices with human-like intelligence. The alternative, which Hoftadter discusses and then abandons, is to first study the human brain and come to understand how human children learn from their interactions with the world. Once we know that, we will be able to apply that understanding to the task of making robotic devices that can learn the way children learn. This book is a gem in how it draws attention to this road not taken. But it is never too late to take it.
Rating:
Summary: The Book that Swallowed me Whole
Review: I first started reading G, E, B at the recommendation of a friend. I did not start at the conventional beginning, but instead with the TNT chapter. I took my time, insisting that I at least tried to understand everything said. Finishing this chapter with a huge sigh of relief, I read on to the next, and the next. Having finished this outstanding book, I thought about what I had learnt. The Answer? Absolutely nothing useful, except that nothing is definitive, and that there are an infinite number of perceptions. I will read this book again in a year or so, not to understand more, or to learn anything of "real" value, but to be swallowed again and again in the thoughts, and ideas of some of our greatest, most contraversial minds. Don't try to disprove what is said in this book, or you could well succeed. Just allow yourself to be swept away by the magic of the mind.
Rating: 
Summary: I Hate to Be a Naysayer But...
Review: ...this book really isn't all it's cracked up to be. Oh, it's certainly entertaining, and full of provocative ideas, but it ends up being about 10 pages actual content and 500 pages egotistical presumption. I first read it at age 13 and was enthralled. It had a tremendous influence on my thinking. I was fascinated by the way it tied so many ideas together. I am now 16 and picked it up again a few weeks ago to see if I could relive the magic. Well, it just wasn't the same to a more mature me. First, I was irked by the author's repetetive use of "I." Then, I started to get tired of all the superfluous chapters (for example, the one on Zen Buddhism). I was equally frustrated by the author's basing a tremendous portion of his thesis on the questionable idea that meaning resides in the text, not in the mind, with a minimum of support. Finally, I realized that I was being condescended to by an egomaniac of the first order. I put it down without a second thought. Hofstadter states in the introduction that the book was originally intended to be "a mere pamphlet". It would have been better had he kept it that way. GEB is an insult to the reader.
Rating:
Summary: literary style demonstrates book's themes
Review: a cursory glance at a random passage of godel, escher, and bach, will likely appear to be jabberwocky, with its unapologetic, evolving vocabulary and sparkles of inside jokes based on such, this is ironic, because the right arm of this book is recursion, which implies that the whole is implied by each part, far from while reading, one most certainly must read godel, escher, and bach in its sequential order, too funny
Rating:
Summary: Ricercar
Review: This masterpiece has changed the way I think. I pity those have only read it once, or, even worse, didn't finish it. Only on the second reading can you understand that the entire book is itself a glorious ricercar and an endlessly rising canon. If you don't understand what I mean, read the book. And read it again, and again, and. . . .
Rating:
Summary: creative as a robot
Review: I really got bored by this one. If you don't like repetitive patterns (Escher & Bach) you may also.
Someone wrote elsewhere it is a book for teenager.
Well, it may seem scornful, but it seems to me the best punch line for this.
It is a book by someone a little preposterous, who thinks that everyone should like what he likes, and a little fanatic about it.
The cover image say it all.
If you find this sculpture which can be a "G" a "B" or a "E" depending on how you see it something worth to be a cover for a book speaking of arguably three great minds of humanity , then you are ready for hofstadter show off
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