In 1983, four years out of college, I was living in Rochester, New York, covering part of western New York for the Associated Press. I had a meager social life, which left time for serious reading. That year, I bought a book that challenged and thrilled me. It was Douglas Hofstadter\u2019s 777-page G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid<\/a>.<\/p>\n I read G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach closely and patiently. When I got stuck on a complicated passage, I powered through it; there was no other option. I entered Hofstadter\u2019s world and didn\u2019t leave it until I got to the last page.<\/p>\n GEB, as its fans call it, is about the miracle of consciousness: how our sense of \u201cI\u201d can arise from the workings of neurons and axons that are individually unintelligent. Hofstadter said systems (including brains) gain awareness when they become self-referential in a certain way. According to him, the emergence of \u201cI\u201d comes from a \u201cstrange loop,\u201d where you traverse levels of a hierarchy and wind up back where you started. To get the tricky idea across, he appealed to M.C. Escher\u2019s hands<\/a>, which draw each other into existence; Bach\u2019s fugues, which loop back on themselves, as though the music were listening to itself; and the mathematician Kurt G\u00f6del<\/a>, who cleverly manipulated formulas into making statements about their own provability.<\/p>\n The sentence \u201cI am a liar,\u201d for example, is self-referential and paradoxical. If you really are a liar, then you must not be a liar, whereas if you\u2019re really not a liar, then you must be a liar. GEB is filled with this kind of material.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546955,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-546954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/d3d74580-f75a-4b55-990a-671f052f73f8_1320.png\" "\\"\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n