Winner of the Pulitzer Prize A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of "maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.
Índice: 1. The Foundations for a New Kind of Science -- 2. The Crucial Experiment -- 3. The World of Simple Programs -- 4. Systems Based on Numbers -- 5. Two Dimensions and Beyond -- 6. Starting from Randomness -- 7. Mechanisms in Programs and Nature -- 8. Implications for Everyday Systems -- 9. Fundamental Physics -- 10. Processes of Perception and Analysis -- 11. The Notion of Computation -- 12. The Principle of Computational Equivalence.
