My dad, without knowing I had this book on my wish list, gave it to me as a birthday present this year. During the past year and a half I’ve undergone a mental revolution reading about the foundations of mathematics and how they relate to my own consciousness. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem has been a recurring theme. Like a cherry on the sundae, this book takes all the elements of that journey and weaves them into a coherent cognitive model of consciousness, expressed with stunning clarity, simplicity, and humor. Hofstadter has really gone out on a limb with this book by presenting his ideas without a shred of pedantry for cover. I’m often amazed that humans have been trying desperately to think up a cognitive model of ourselves for millenia, generating countless dense tomes of discourse, but no widely accepted result. Sometimes I think such musings are a pastime of the privileged, but part of this book is a reminder that we model ourselves whether we want to or not, and the result is crucial to how we all behave in the world. Hofstadter’s model seems to me to be an excellent one to try out, whether or not you are entirely convinced of its accuracy.

Reffered by the Scientific American Review