Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Basic Books (1985), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover, 852 pages
Description
Includes articles, many of which originally appeared in Scientific American, on memes, innumeracy, William Safire, Frederic Chopin, Rubik's Cube, strange attractors, Lisp, Heisenburg's uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, Alan Turing, sphexishness, Prisoner's dilemma, and other topics.
User reviews
LibraryThing member princemuchao
Even though I adored Godel, Escher, Bach (GEB), I had been putting off reading Metamagical Themas because of its immensity (800 small-type pages) for almost a year... but as soon as I read the first essay I realized my mistake and happily finished the book in a week and a half.
This is a collection
Topics covered by these essays include: self-reference, self-replication (memes), games (Nomic, number games), skepticism, understanding large numbers, gender in language, chopin, parquet deformations, nonsense, the nature of creativity, typefaces, rubik's cube, strange attractors and turbulence, recursiveness in programming (LISP), Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, molecular biology, the Prisoner's Dilemma, nuclear war, Turing, and artificial intelligence as it pertains to Turing Tests, creativity, analogy, free will, perception, and pattern recognition. Throughout it all, puzzles, paradox, strange ideas, deep thoughts, and weird concepts are shared.
Hofstadter consistently presents complex ideas in a manner that any intelligent layperson can grasp. Of the 33 chapters, only one deeply mathematical section passed into the zone of inscrutability for me. Most of the time, a careful reading of his clear and precise prose leads you through these complex thoughts gracefully.
Each section opens with a simplified example of what Hofstadter calls “Whirly Art” - a personal creative diversion he has practiced for years in secret. It consists of drawing an image on ticker-tape to reflect an imaginary fugue, or canon. This endlessly fascinating man's closet is filled with these things and they need to somehow be published. I would be first in line for the inevitable 5 foot long coffee table book.
Obviously, I have barely touched on the magic that appears between these covers. Be assured that if you enjoyed GEB, you will enjoy this – but if you have not read that masterpiece, you should do so before reading this book.
Keylawk's review below, "Hofstadter cheerfully extrapolates a gloomy prognosis for human kind because of irrational greed", seems to me to be patently unfair for several reasons:
1. Hofstadter restricts discussion of nuclear war to approx 30 pages of the 800 page book
2. The discussion involves Prisoner's Dilemma, statistics, and cognitive science topics addressed throughout the book
3. Hofstadter is overly optimistic throughout the book, and the only time he is "gloomy" is when real world experiments with the Prisoner's Dilemma contradict his optimistic outlook
4. Any residual gloominess can be excused by the fact that this was written in the early to mid eighties, the height of the Cold War, when nuclear war was a fear that was shared by most rational people.
This is a collection
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of Hofstadter's Scientific American articles, published between 1981 and 1983, with an additional seven essays. Each piece comes complete with an newly-published postscript of considerable length.Topics covered by these essays include: self-reference, self-replication (memes), games (Nomic, number games), skepticism, understanding large numbers, gender in language, chopin, parquet deformations, nonsense, the nature of creativity, typefaces, rubik's cube, strange attractors and turbulence, recursiveness in programming (LISP), Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, molecular biology, the Prisoner's Dilemma, nuclear war, Turing, and artificial intelligence as it pertains to Turing Tests, creativity, analogy, free will, perception, and pattern recognition. Throughout it all, puzzles, paradox, strange ideas, deep thoughts, and weird concepts are shared.
Hofstadter consistently presents complex ideas in a manner that any intelligent layperson can grasp. Of the 33 chapters, only one deeply mathematical section passed into the zone of inscrutability for me. Most of the time, a careful reading of his clear and precise prose leads you through these complex thoughts gracefully.
Each section opens with a simplified example of what Hofstadter calls “Whirly Art” - a personal creative diversion he has practiced for years in secret. It consists of drawing an image on ticker-tape to reflect an imaginary fugue, or canon. This endlessly fascinating man's closet is filled with these things and they need to somehow be published. I would be first in line for the inevitable 5 foot long coffee table book.
Obviously, I have barely touched on the magic that appears between these covers. Be assured that if you enjoyed GEB, you will enjoy this – but if you have not read that masterpiece, you should do so before reading this book.
Keylawk's review below, "Hofstadter cheerfully extrapolates a gloomy prognosis for human kind because of irrational greed", seems to me to be patently unfair for several reasons:
1. Hofstadter restricts discussion of nuclear war to approx 30 pages of the 800 page book
2. The discussion involves Prisoner's Dilemma, statistics, and cognitive science topics addressed throughout the book
3. Hofstadter is overly optimistic throughout the book, and the only time he is "gloomy" is when real world experiments with the Prisoner's Dilemma contradict his optimistic outlook
4. Any residual gloominess can be excused by the fact that this was written in the early to mid eighties, the height of the Cold War, when nuclear war was a fear that was shared by most rational people.
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LibraryThing member tlockney
While this is not exactly a review, I thought I'd leave a few comments here. I recently got this on Kindle, so I've been slowly revisiting a few choice bits here and there. For what it's worth, I was dumbfounded to see this was available on Kindle. Given that his most popular and best selling book
Anyway, after downloading this, I started flipping through the chapters wondering which I should reread and was a bit stunned to be reminded that there are 3 chapters on Lisp. What's interesting about this is imagining this text appearing in Scientific American. While I have fond memories of what SciAm used to be, it's hard to gel that with the image of SciAm that I currently have in my head. The days of meaty, tangible material in technical magazine that you could actually sit down and do something with (c.f., Byte), seem so long ago (Make and the recently deceased, in print format, Linux Journal, not withstanding) that it's hard to picture actual articles on Lisp appearing in what was, in fact, a fairly popular science magazine. This is not to say that SciAm is not still of good quality, but it's certainly a very different beast than what it used to be. These days, I would basically call it a nicer version of Discover (again, not to denigrate that magazine, but it certainly lacks depth in most cases).
To be continued...
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Gödel, Escher, Bach is still not available for Kindle, I took it for granted that none of his books were available on Kindle (except, perhaps, I am a Strange Loop, published, if I recall correctly, after Kindles were already on the market).Anyway, after downloading this, I started flipping through the chapters wondering which I should reread and was a bit stunned to be reminded that there are 3 chapters on Lisp. What's interesting about this is imagining this text appearing in Scientific American. While I have fond memories of what SciAm used to be, it's hard to gel that with the image of SciAm that I currently have in my head. The days of meaty, tangible material in technical magazine that you could actually sit down and do something with (c.f., Byte), seem so long ago (Make and the recently deceased, in print format, Linux Journal, not withstanding) that it's hard to picture actual articles on Lisp appearing in what was, in fact, a fairly popular science magazine. This is not to say that SciAm is not still of good quality, but it's certainly a very different beast than what it used to be. These days, I would basically call it a nicer version of Discover (again, not to denigrate that magazine, but it certainly lacks depth in most cases).
To be continued...
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LibraryThing member AlexTheHunn
A continuation of the themes introduced in Godel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter lets the reader confront issues of similarity and difference, which on the surface seem tame enough, yet fundamental principles lurk within.
LibraryThing member hippietrail
Not essential like Gödel, Escher, Bach; but interesting enough.
LibraryThing member szarka
While Hofstadter's Godel Escher & Bach covers most of the same topics more systematically, Metamagical Themas does have the advantage of being easier to snack from. It came out in paperback the summer before I started college, and it warped my fragile young mind.
LibraryThing member keylawk
Hofstadter cheerfully extrapolates a gloomy prognosis for human kind because of irrational greed.
LibraryThing member SimonW11
most of this is covered in Godel, Escher, Bach.
However
"A Person Paper on Purity in Language"
makes this worth reading... or you could just google for that article.
However
"A Person Paper on Purity in Language"
makes this worth reading... or you could just google for that article.
LibraryThing member JenneB
This book has probably influenced my brain chemistry in all sorts of subtle and stealthy ways. I think I've read it at least four times.
LibraryThing member cpg
This is a collection of the columns Douglas Hofstadter wrote for Scientific American when he took over Martin Gardner's regular "Mathematical Games" column. (The name of this book and of Hofstadter's column is an anagram of the name of Gardner's column.) In my opinion, a few of the highlights of
(1) On pages 37-41, at the end of a chapter on self-referential sentences (i.e., sentences that refer to themselves), Hofstadter presents a short story by David Moser entitled "This is the Title of This Story, Which is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself" that is made up of self-referential sentences. I thought this story was hilarious in a Monty-Pythonesque sort of way, but your mileage may vary.
(2) Chapter 29 is a fascinating discussion of "Prisoner's Dilemma Computer Tournaments". The Prisoner's Dilemma is a scenario in which two individuals each make (in secret) a decision to cooperate with the other individual or to "defect" instead. If you both cooperate, you both get rewarded. If one cooperates and the other defects, the defector gets a higher reward and the cooperator receives a penalty. If both
defect, nothing happens. This scenario gets its name from the idea of two suspects being interrogated for a crime for which the police have a moderate amount of circumstantial evidence implicating the pair. Should a suspect rat his accomplice out or keep quiet? This chapter discusses tournaments in which individuals write computer programs to participate in a succession of prisoner's dilemma games with other programs. One of the more successful programs was a fairly simple one called TIT FOR TAT, which would cooperate on its first encounter with another program and then, on all subsequent encounters with that program, would do what the other program did on their immediately preceding encounter.
(3) Chapter 31, entitled "Irrationality is the Square Root of All Evil", reports on the "Luring Lottery" that Hofstadter set up for readers of his column. Hofstadter offered a cash prize to be awarded to one entrant in this contest. Entrants would each send in a number on a postcard which could be thought of as the quantity of lottery tickets being requested by that person. In other words, all else being equal, his/her odds of winning the prize would be proportional to the number he/she submitted. The catch is that the size of the prize would be $1,000,000/W, where W is the sum of all the numbers submitted, so it would have been in the interest of the group of entrants as a whole not to submit outrageously large numbers. This was something of a cooperate-or-defect dilemma like that mentioned in (2), and as might be guessed many entrants defected (some quite spectacularly). Hofstadter was obviously depressed by the results of his contest, feeling that it was a metaphor for many of society's problems. He announced his resignation from his column in the issue of Scientific American in which this chapter originally appeared. (The timing may have been coincidental; I don't recall.)
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this book are:(1) On pages 37-41, at the end of a chapter on self-referential sentences (i.e., sentences that refer to themselves), Hofstadter presents a short story by David Moser entitled "This is the Title of This Story, Which is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself" that is made up of self-referential sentences. I thought this story was hilarious in a Monty-Pythonesque sort of way, but your mileage may vary.
(2) Chapter 29 is a fascinating discussion of "Prisoner's Dilemma Computer Tournaments". The Prisoner's Dilemma is a scenario in which two individuals each make (in secret) a decision to cooperate with the other individual or to "defect" instead. If you both cooperate, you both get rewarded. If one cooperates and the other defects, the defector gets a higher reward and the cooperator receives a penalty. If both
defect, nothing happens. This scenario gets its name from the idea of two suspects being interrogated for a crime for which the police have a moderate amount of circumstantial evidence implicating the pair. Should a suspect rat his accomplice out or keep quiet? This chapter discusses tournaments in which individuals write computer programs to participate in a succession of prisoner's dilemma games with other programs. One of the more successful programs was a fairly simple one called TIT FOR TAT, which would cooperate on its first encounter with another program and then, on all subsequent encounters with that program, would do what the other program did on their immediately preceding encounter.
(3) Chapter 31, entitled "Irrationality is the Square Root of All Evil", reports on the "Luring Lottery" that Hofstadter set up for readers of his column. Hofstadter offered a cash prize to be awarded to one entrant in this contest. Entrants would each send in a number on a postcard which could be thought of as the quantity of lottery tickets being requested by that person. In other words, all else being equal, his/her odds of winning the prize would be proportional to the number he/she submitted. The catch is that the size of the prize would be $1,000,000/W, where W is the sum of all the numbers submitted, so it would have been in the interest of the group of entrants as a whole not to submit outrageously large numbers. This was something of a cooperate-or-defect dilemma like that mentioned in (2), and as might be guessed many entrants defected (some quite spectacularly). Hofstadter was obviously depressed by the results of his contest, feeling that it was a metaphor for many of society's problems. He announced his resignation from his column in the issue of Scientific American in which this chapter originally appeared. (The timing may have been coincidental; I don't recall.)
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Subjects
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1985
Physical description
852 p.
ISBN
0465045405 / 9780465045402