Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach

Professor Hofstadter is sitting in his office at Indiana University, mulling over the nature of consciousness. He appears to have a bit of a cold. Enter his new graduate student, Mis Tre Bor.

Mis Bor: Professor Hofstatder?
Dr. H: de infinik recursion og de Escher painding is an analogy ub de consious ming- Hmm? Oh! Mis Bor, how do you do, what's this you hab for me?
Mis Bor: Oh, it's nothing really, just a short dialogue I wrote about your book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I wonder if you might like to read it.
Dr. H.: Certainly! Let's hab a loog.
Dr H. commences to read..

God, with a long white beard and fierce countenance is seated in a chair. The Almighty is wearing a straightjacket. Enter student and sometimes Zen disciple Robert Sim. Rob Sim: Hey, big-G, how's it going? God: Miserably! My followers continue to tie me up in knots. Every day, someone else throws The Book at me. RS: Which Book is that? God: It's just a figure of speech. Look at me! How can I be the Supreme Being and when all people want me to do is validate their loony religious claims. Who comes up with this stuff, anyways? RS: Beats me. Say, all this talk about books reminds me of a great book I just finished reading. Honestly, it took me longer to finish than your collected works. God: (Closes his eyes.) Wait, let me guess, you've just finished Crime and Punisment. I love those epic Russian novels. RS: Sorry, but you're going to have to work a little harder on your Divination. It was Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Hofstatder investigates the nature of conciousness, music, art, and mathematics and then goes on to speculate about the possibility of AI. God: AI? Actuarial Increases? They happen all the time. (lightning crashes) RS: No, Artificial Intelligence. Dr. H. argues that our own consciousness, which manifests itself out of vastly complicated, but very physical chemical and neural processes, is the living proof that we could implement an intelligent, nay, conscious machine in terms of vastly complicated but very physical electronic processes. I must admit, though, sometimes I found the whole thing to be a bit over my head. God: Hmmm.. I'm not- Suddenly enter god, who flits in and out of visibility like a weak television signal. At times, god appears to take on many faces at once god: My existence is conditional on the truth of Epimenides Paradox: "This statement is false". God: (groans) Oh no, not him again. RS: Hey, little-g, how's it going? god: Miserably! My followers continue to tie me up in knots. Every day, someone throws the book at me. RS: Which book is that? god: Why, Crime and Punishment, of course. My existence, or non-existence, is entirely determined by the inability of mankind to reconcile himself with his human condition. Some days, someone reads Dostoevsky's work as an admonition against humanism, and others, they see it as man's reconciliation with his Buddha-nature. RS: Say, that reminds me; Hofstadter's examination of consciousness has a lot to do with Zen. I love this little Zen koan: Tözan said to his monks, "You monks should know there is an even higher understanding in Buddhism." A monk stepped forward and asked, "What is the higher Buddhism?" Tözan answered, "It is not Buddha." In a feat of Escherian complexity, god cries out and suddenly turns inside out. God looks irritated. God: Oh, stop with your existential crises. RS: Hmm. I wonder, are we inside god, or is god inside us? god: (reverting back to self) Oh, no! Look! God is dead! Truly enough, God appears to have breathed his last. RS: Oh God! Perhaps his straightjacket was too tight. What have I done? god: Why you? It seems to me that God died of natural causes. RS: No, don't you see? I created God to illustrate a point, and now I've committed the ultimate blasphemy- I've murdered God! god: What do you mean, you created God? RS: Well, I wrote this dialogue and put him into a straightjacket to symbolize the rigidity of organized religion. god: How self-referential. RS: Yes, well the pity of it all is that the symbolism has nothing at all to do with the book I was trying to review. god: Which book is that? RS: Why, Great Egrets Bouncing, of course, An Extremely Good Book. god: How fascinating. RS: Yes, well, sadly, I don't think I've done justice to the book, or to God. god: (flickers brightly) I think I see your conundrum. Tell me, how did you compose your dialogue? RS: Why, on a computer, of course. god: Well, then. It's settled. There's no need to feel any guilt, my friend, because your dialogue does not exist. RS: How so? god: Let me show you. (Pulls out a handheld computing device) Look closely at this monitor. What do you see? RS: It's my dialogue!

Dr. H: Suddenly sneezes
Mis Bor: Gezunheit.
Dr. H: Tang Kyu. (continues)

god: Not exactly, it's a computer-generated replica of your dialogue. Or rather, it's a collection of liquid crystal cells whose arrangement and brightness happens to coincide with a representation of your dialogue. And of course, one need only turn off the monitor to destroy this cheap imitation of the real thing. RS: I think I see where you're going with this. Since I wrote the dialogue on a computer, the authentic dialogue simply does not exist- certainly not in any tangible form. It's as fleeting as a thought. god: My point exactly. Suddenly, an Escher vortex opens up and sucks in god and Rob, never to be seen again on this plane of existence. Somewhere a voice whispers: Voice: MU. The handheld continues to display an image of the dialogue. Zooming in, one can see that it is in fact an image of a sheaf of paper in someone's hands. The monitor picks up the narrative...      Professor Hofstadter is sitting in his office at Indiana University, mulling over the nature of consciousness. He appears to have a bit of a cold. Enter his new graduate student, Miss Tre Bor. Mis Bor: Professor Hofstatder? Dr. H: de infinik recursion og de Escher painding is an analogy ub de consious ming- Hmm? Oh! Mis Bor, how do you do, what's this you hab for me? Mis Bor: Oh, it's nothing really, just a short dialogue I wrote about your book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I wonder if you might like to read it. Dr. H.: Certainly! Let's hab a loog. Dr H. commences to read..

5 out of 5 (for the book, not my dialogue!!).