Preface to GEB's

Twentieth-anniversary Edition
SO WHAT IS this book, GOdel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - usually
known by its acronym, "GEB" - really all about?
That question has hounded me ever since I was scribbling its first drafts
in pen, way back in 1973. Friends would inquire, of course, what I was so
gripped by, but I was hard pressed to explain it concisely. A few years later,
in 1980, when GEB found itself for a while on the bestseller list of The New
York Times, the obligatory one-sentence summary printed underneath the
tide said the following, for several weeks running: "A scientist argues that
reality is a system of interconnected braids." Mter I protested vehemently
about this utter hogwash, they finally substituted something a little better,
just barely accurate enough to keep me from howling again.
Many people think the title tells it all: a book about a mathematician,
an artist, and a musician. But the most casual look will show that these three
individuals per se, august though they undeniably are, play but tiny roles in
the book's content. There's no way the book is about those three people!
Well, then, how about describing GEB as "a book that shows how math,
art, and music are really all the same thing at their core"? Again, this is a
million miles off - and yet I've heard it over and over again, not only from
nonreaders but also from readers, even very ardent readers, of the book.
And in bookstores, I have run across GEB gracing the shelves of many
diverse sections, including not only math, general.science, philosophy, and
cognitive science (which are all fine), but also religion, the occult, and God
knows what else. Why is it so hard to figure out what this book is about?
Certainly it's not just its length. No, it must be in part that GEB delves, and
not just superficially, into so many motley topics - fugues and canons, logic
and truth, geometry, recursion, syntactic structures, the nature of meaning,
Zen Buddhism, paradoxes, brain and mind, reductionism and holism, ant
colonies, concepts and mental representations, translation, computers and
their languages, DNA, proteins, the genetic code, artificial intelligence,
creativity, consciousness and free will - sometimes even art and music, of
all things! - that many people find it impossible to locate the core focus.

The Key Images and Ideas that Lie at the Core of GEB

Needless to say, this widespread confusion has been quite frustrating to me

over the years, since I felt sure I had spelled out my aims over and over in
the text itself. Clearly, however, I didn't do it sufficiently often, or
sufficiently clearly. But since now I've got the chance to do it once more -
and in a prominent spot in the book, to boot - let me try one last time to
say why I wrote this book, what it is about, and what its principal thesis is.

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-l

 In a word, GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate
beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self
come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle? What is an "I",
and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as
poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread
and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps
encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam
the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy,jointed stilts?
GEB approaches these questions by slowly building up an analogy that
likens inanimate molecules to meaningless symbols, and further likens selves
(or 'T"s or "souls", if you prefer - whatever it is that distinguishes animate
from inanimate matter) to certain special swirly, twisty, vortex-like, and
meaningful patterns that arise only in particular types of systems of
meaningless symbols. It is these strange, twisty patterns that the book
spends so much time on, because they are little known, little appreciated,
counterintuitive, and quite filled with mystery. And for reasons that should
not be too difficult to fathom, I call such strange, loopy patterns "strange
loops" throughout the book, although in later chapters, I also use the
phrase "tangled hierarchies" to describe basically the same idea.
This is in many ways why M. C. Escher - or more precisely, his art - is
prominent in the "golden braid", because Escher, in his own special way, was
just as fascinated as I am by strange loops, and in fact he drew them in a
variety of contexts, all wonderfully disorienting and fascinating. When I was
first working on my book, however, Escher was totally out of the picture (or
out of the loop, as we now say); my working title was the rather mundane
phrase "G6del's Theorem and the Human Brain", and I gave no thought to
inserting paradoxical pictures, let alone playful dialogues. It's just that time
and again, while writing about my notion of strange loops, I would catch
fleeting glimpses of this or that Escher print flashing almost subliminally
before my mind's eye, and finally one day I realized that these images were
so connected in my own mind with the ideas that I was writing about that for
me to deprive my readers of the connection that I myself felt so strongly
would be nothing less than perverse. And so Escher's art was welcomed on
board. As for Bach, I'll come back to his entry into my "metaphorical fugue
on minds and machines" a little later.
Back to strange loops, right now. GEB was inspired by my long-held
conviction that the "strange loop" notion holds the key to unraveling the
mystery that we conscious beings call "being" or "consciousness". I was first
hit by this idea when, as a teen-ager, I found myself obsessedly pondering
the quintessential strange loop that lies at the core of the proof of Kurt
G6del's famous incompleteness theorem in mathematical logic - a rather
arcane place, one might well think, to stumble across the secret behind the
nature of selves and "I''' s, and yet I practically heard it screaming up at me
from the pages of Nagel and Newman that this was what it was all about.
This preface is not the time and place to go into details - indeed, that's
why the tome you're holding was written, so it would be a bit presumptuous
of me to think I could outdo its author in just these few pages! - but one

P-2 Twentieth-anniversary Preface

thing has to be said straight off: the G6delian strange loop that arises in
formal systems in mathematics (i.e., collections of rules for churning out an
endless series of mathematical truths solely by mechanical symbol-shunting
without any regard to meanings or ideas hidden in the shapes being
manipulated) is a loop that allows such a system to "perceive itself", to talk
about itself, to become "self-aware", and in a sense it would not be going too
far to say that by virtue of having such a loop, a formal system acquires a self.

Meaningless Symbols Acquire Meaning Despite Themselves

What is so weird in this is that the formal systems where these skeletal
"selves" come to exist are built out of nothing but meaningless symbols. The
self, such as it is, arises solely because of a special type of swirly, tangled
pattern among the meaningless symbols. But now a confession: I am being a
bit coy when I repeatedly type the phrase "meaningless symbols" (as at the
ends of both of the previous sentences), because a crucial part of my book's
argument rests on the idea that meaning cannot be kept out of formal
systems when sufficiently complex isomorphisms arise. Meaning comes in
despite one's best efforts to keep symbols meaningless!
Let me rephrase these last couple of sentences without using the slightly
technical term "isomorphism". When a system of "meaningless" symbols has
patterns in it that accurately track, or mirror, various phenomena in the
world, then that tracking or mirroring imbues the symbols with some degree
of meaning - indeed, such tracking or mirroring is no less and no more
than what meaning is. Depending on how complex and subtle and reliable
the tracking is, different degrees of meaningfulness arise. I won't go further
into this here, for it's a thesis that is taken up quite often in the text, most of
all in Chapters 2, 4, 6, 9, and II.
Compared to a typical formal system, human language is unbelievably
fluid and subtle in its patterns of tracking reality, and for that reason the
symbols in formal systems can seem quite arid; indeed, without too much
trouble, one can look at them as totally devoid of meaning. But then again,
one can look at a newspaper written in an unfamiliar writing system, and the
strange shapes seem like nothing more than wondrously intricate but totally
meaningless patterns. Thus even human language, rich though it is, can be
drained of its seeming significance.
As a matter of fact, there are still quite a few philosophers, scientists,
and so forth who believe that patterns of symbols per se (such as books or
movies or libraries or CD-ROM's or computer programs, no matter how
complex or dynamic) never have meaning on their own, but that meaning
instead, in some most mysterious manner, springs only from the organic
chemistry, or perhaps the quantum mechanics, of processes that take place
in carbon-based biological brains. Although I have no patience with this
parochial, bio-chauvinistic view, I nonetheless have a pretty clear sense of its
intuitive appeal. Trying to don the hat of a believer in the primacy, indeed
the uniqueness, of brains, I can see where such people are coming from.

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-3

 Such people feel that some kind of "semantic magic" takes place only
inside our "teetering bulbs", somewhere behind pairs of eyeballs, even
though they can never quite put their finger on how or why this is so;
moreover, they believe that this semantic magic is what is responsible for the
existence of human selves, souls, consciousness, "I"'s. And I, as a matter of
fact, quite agree with such thinkers that selves and semantics - in other
words, that me's and meanings - do spring from one and the same source;
where 1 take issue with these people is over their contention that such
phenomena are due entirely to some special, though as yet undiscovered,
properties of the microscopic hardware of brains.
As 1 see it, the only way of overcoming this magical view of what "I" and
consciousness are is to keep on reminding oneself, unpleasant though it
may seem, that the "teetering bulb of dread and dream" that nestles safely
inside one's own cranium is a purely physical object made up of completely
sterile and inanimate components, all of which obey exactly the same laws as
those that govern all the rest of the universe, such as pieces of text, or CD-
ROM's, or computers. Only if one keeps on bashing up against this
disturbing fact can one slowly begin to develop a feel for the way out of the
mystery of consciousness: that the key is not the stuffout of which brains are
made, but the patterns that can come 1.0 exist inside the stuff of a brain.
This is a liberating shift, because it allows one to move to a different
level of considering what brains are: as media that support complex patterns
that mirror, albeit far from perfectly, the world, of which, needless to say,
those brains are themselves denizens - and it is in the inevitable self-
mirroring that arises, however impartial or imperfect it may be, that the
strange loops of consciousness start to swirl.

Kurt Godel Smashes through Bertrand Russell's Maginot Line

I've just claimed that the shift of focus from material components to abstract
patterns allows the quasi-magical leap from inanimate to animate, from
nonsemantic to semantic, from meaningless to meaningful, to take place.
But how does this happen? Mter all, not all jumps from matter to pattern
give rise to consciousness or soul or self, quite obviously: in a word, not all
patterns are conscious. What kind of pattern is it, then, that is the telltale
mark of a self? GEB's answer is: a strange loop.
The irony is that the first strange loop ever found - and my model for
the concept in general - was found in a system tailor-made to keep loopiness
out. 1 speak of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's famous
treatise Principia Mathematica, a gigantic, forbidding work laced with dense,
prickly symbolism filling up volume after volume, whose creation in the
years 1910-1913 was sparked primarily by its first author's desperate quest
for a way to circumvent paradoxes of self-reference in mathematics.
At the heart of Principia Mathematica lay Russell's so-called "theory of
types", which, much like the roughly contemporaneous Maginot line, was
designed to keep "the enemy" out in a most staunch and watertight manner.

P-4 Twentieth-anniversary Preface

For the French, the enemy was Germany; for Russell, it was self-reference.
Russell believed that for a mathematical system to be able to talk about itself
in any way whatsoever was the kiss of death, for self-reference would - so he
thought - necessarily open the door to self-contradiction, and thereby send
all of mathematics crashing to the ground. In order to forestall this dire
fate, he invented an elaborate (and infinite) hierarchy of levels, all sealed
off from each other in such a manner as to definitively - so he thought -
block the dreaded virus of self-reference from infecting the fragile system.
It took a couple of decades, but eventually the young Austrian logician
Kurt G6del realized that Russell and Whitehead's mathematical Maginot
Line against self-reference could be most deftly circumvented (just as the
Germans in World War II would soon wind up deftly sidestepping the real
Maginot Line), and that self-reference not only had lurked from Day One in
Principia Mathematica, but in fact plagued poor PM in a totally unremovable
manner. Moreover, as G6del made brutally clear, this thorough riddling of
the system by self-reference was not due to some weakness in PM, but quite
to the contrary, it was due to its strength. Any similar system would have
exactly the same "defect". The reason it had taken so long for the world to
realize this astonishing fact is that it depended on making a leap somewhat
analogous to that from a brain to a self, that famous leap from inanimate
constituents to animate patterns.
For G6del, it all came into focus in 1930 or so, thanks to a simple but
wonderfully rich discovery that came to be known as "G6del numbering" -
a mapping whereby the long linear arrangements of strings of symbols in
any formal system are mirrored precisely by mathematical relationships
among certain (usually astronomically large) whole numbers. Using his
mapping between elaborate patterns of meaningless symbols (to use that
dubious term once again) and huge numbers, G6del showed how a
statement about any mathematical formal system (such as the assertion that
Principia Mathematica is contradiction-free) can be translated into a
mathematical statement inside number theory (the study of whole numbers).
In other words, any metamathematical statement can be imported into
mathematics, and in its new guise the statement simply asserts (as do all
statements of number theory) that certain whole numbers have certain
properties or relationships to each other. But on another level, it also has a
vastly different meaning that, on its surface, seems as far removed from a
statement of number theory as would be a sentence in a Dostoevsky novel.
By means of G6del's mapping, any formal system designed to spew forth
truths about "mere" numbers would also wind up spewing forth truths -
inadvertently but inexorably - about its own properties, and would thereby
become "self-aware", in a manner of speaking. And of all the clandestine
instances of self-referentiality plaguing PM and brought to light by G6del,
the most concentrated doses lurked in those sentences that talked about
their own G6del numbers, and in particular said some very odd things about
themselves, such as "I am not provable inside PM". And let me repeat: such
twisting-back, such looping-around, such self-enfolding, far from being an
eliminable defect, was an inevitable by-product of the system's vast power.

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-5

 Not too surprisingly, revolutionary mathematical and philosophical
consequences tumbled out of Godel's sudden revelation that self-reference
abounded in the bosom of the bastion so carefully designed by Russell to
keep it out at all costs; the most famous such consequence was the so-called
"essential incompleteness" of formalized mathematics. That notion will be
carefully covered in the chapters to come, and yet, fascinating though it is,
incompleteness is not in itself central to GEB's thesis. For GEB, the most
crucial aspect of Godel's work is its demonstration that a statement's
meaning can have deep consequencc~s, even in a supposedly meaningless
universe. Thus it is the meaning of Giidel's sentence G (the one that asserts
"G is not provable inside PM") that guarantees that G is not provable inside
PM (which is precisely what G itself claims). It is as if the sentence's hidden
Godelian meaning had some kind of power over the vacuous symbol-
shunting, meaning-impervious rules of the system, preventing them from
ever putting together a demonstration of G, no matter what they do.

Upside-down Causality and the Emergence of an "I"

This kind of effect gives one a sense of crazily twisted, or upside-down,

causality. Mter all, shouldn't meanings that one chooses to read into strings
of meaningless symbols be totally without consequence? Even stranger is
that the only reason sentence G is not provable inside PM is its self-referential
meaning; indeed, it would seem that G, being a true statement about whole
numbers, ought to be provable, but - thanks to its extra level of meaning as
a statement about itself, asserting its own non provability - it is not.
Something very strange thus emerges from the Godelian loop: the
revelation of the causal power of meaning in a rule-bound but meaning-free
universe. And this is where my analogy to brains and selves comes back in,
suggesting that the twisted loop of seifhood trapped inside an inanimate bulb
called a "brain" also has causal power - or, put another way, that a mere
pattern called "I" can shove around inanimate particles in the brain no less
than inanimate particles in the brain can shove around patterns. In short,
an "I" comes about - in my view, at least - via a kind of vortex whereby
patterns in a brain mirror the brain's mirroring of the world, and eventually
mirror themselves, whereupon the vortex of "I" becomes a real, causal
entity. For an imperfect but vivid concrete analogue to this curious abstract
phenomenon, think of what happens when a 1V camera is pointed at a 1V
screen so as to display the screen on itself (and that screen on itself, etc.) -
what in GEB I called a "self-engulfing television", and in my later writings I
sometimes call a "level-crossing feedback loop".
When and only when such a loop arises in a brain or in any other
substrate, is a person - a unique new "I" - brought into being. Moreover,
the more self-referentially rich such a loop is, the more conscious is the self
to which it gives rise. Yes, shocking though this might sound, consciousness
is not an on/off phenomenon, but admits of degrees, grades, shades. Or, to
put it more bluntly, there are bigger souls and smaller souls.

P-6 Twentieth-anniversary Preface

 Small-souled Men, Beware!

I can't help but recall, at this point, a horribly elitist but very droll remark by
one of my favorite writers, the American "critic of the seven arts", James
Huneker, in his scintillating biography of Frederic Chopin, on the subject of
Chopin's etude Op. 25, No. 11 in A minor, which for me, and for Huneker,
is one of the most stirring and most sublime pieces of music ever written:
"Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid it."
"Small-souled men"?! Whew! Does that phrase ever run against the
grain of American democracy! And yet, leaving aside its offensive, archaic
sexism (a crime I, too, commit in GEB, to my great regret), I would suggest
that it is only because we all tacitly do believe in something like Huneker's
shocking distinction that most of us are willing to eat animals of one sort or
another, to smash flies, swat mosquitos, fight bacteria with antibiotics, and
so forth. We generally concur that "men" such as a cow, a turkey, a frog,
and a fish all possess some spark of consciousness, some kind of primitive
"soul", but by God, it's a good deal smaller than ours is - and that, no more
and no less, is why we "men" feel that we have the perfect right to extinguish
the dim lights in the heads of these fractionally-souled beasts and to gobble
down their once warm and wiggling, now chilled and stilled protoplasm with
limitless gusto, and not to feel a trace of guilt while doing so.
Enough sermonizing! The real point here is that not all strange loops
give rise to souls as grand and glorious as yours and mine, dear reader.
Thus, for example, I would not want you or anyone else to walk away from
reading all or part of GEB, shake their head and say with sadness, 'That
weird Hofstadter guy has convinced himself that Russell and Whitehead's
Principia Mathematica is a conscious person with a soul!" Horsefeathers!
Balderdash! Poppycock! G6del's strange loop, though it is my paragon for
the concept, is nonetheless only the most bare-bones strange loop, and it
resides in a system whose complexity is pathetic, relative to that of an
organic brain. Moreover, a formal system is static; it doesn't change or grow
over time. A formal system does not live in a society of other formal systems,
mirroring them inside itself, and being mirrored in turn inside its "friends".
Well, I retract that last remark, at least a bit: any formal system as powerful
as PM does in fact contain models not just of itself but of an infinite number
of other formal systems, some like it, some very much unlike it. That is
essentially what G6del realized. But still, there is no counterpart to time, no
counterpart to development, let alone to birth and death.
And so whatever I say about "selves" coming to exist in mathematical
formal systems has to be taken with the proper grain of salt. Strange loops
are an abstract structure that crops up in various media and in varying
degrees of richness. GEB is in essence a long proposal of strange loops as a
metaphor for how selfhood originates, a metaphor by which to begin to
grab a hold of just what it is that makes an "I" seem, at one and the same
time, so terribly real and tangible to its own possessor, and yet also so vague,
so impenetrable, so deeply elusive.

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-7

 I personally cannot imagine that consciousness will be fully understood
without reference to Godelian strange loops or level-crossing feedback
loops. For that reason, I must say, I have been surprised and puzzled that
the past few years' flurry of books trying to unravel the mysteries of
consciousness almost never mention anything along these lines. Many of
these books' authors have even read and savored GEB, yet nowhere is its
core thesis echoed. It sometimes feels as if I had shouted a deeply cherished
message out into an empty chasm and nobody heard me.

The Earliest Seeds of GEB

Why, one might wonder, if the author's aim was merely to propose a theory
of strange loops as the crux of our consciousness and the source of our
irrepressible "I "-feeling, did he wind up writing such a vast book with so
many seeming digressions in it? Why on earth did he drag in fugues and
canons? Why recursion? And Zen? And molecular biology? Et cetera ...
The truth of the matter is, when I started out, I didn't have the foggiest
idea that I would wind up talking about these kinds of things. Nor did I
dream that my future book would include dialogues, let alone dialogues
based on musical forms. The complex and ambitious nature of my project
evolved only gradually. In broad strokes, it came about this way.
I earlier alluded to my reading, as a teen-ager, of Ernest Nagel and
James R. Newman's little book COde/'s Proof Well, that book just radiated
excitement and depth to me, and it propelled me like an arrow straight into
the study of symbolic logic. Thus, as an undergraduate math major at
Stanford and a few years later, in my short-lived career as a graduate student
in math at Berkeley, I took several advanced logic courses, but to my bitter
disappointment, all of them were arcane, technical, and utterly devoid of
the magic I'd known in Nagel and Newman. The upshot of my taking these
highbrow courses was that my keen teen interest in Godel's wondrous proof
and its "strange loopiness" was nearly killed off. Indeed, I was left with such
a feeling of sterility that in late 1967, almost in desperation, I dropped out
of math grad school in Berkeley and took up a new identity as physics grad
student at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where my once-ardent
fascination with logic and metamathematics went into deep dormancy.
Several years passed, and then one day in May of 1972, while browsing
the math shelves in the University of Oregon bookstore, I stumbled across
philosopher Howard DeLong's superb book A Profile of Mathematical Logic,
took a chance on buying it, and within weeks, myoid love for the great
Godelian mysteries and all they touch on was reawakened. Ideas started
churning around like mad inside my teetering bulb of dread and dream.
Despite this joy, I was very discouraged with the way my physics studies
and my life in general were going, so in July I packed all my belongings into
a dozen or so cardboard boxes and set out on an eastward trek across the
vast American continent in Quicksilver, my faithful 1956 Mercury. Where I
was headed, I wasn't sure. All I knew is that I was looking for a new life.

P-8 Twentieth-anniversary Preface

 Mter crossing the beautiful Cascades and eastern Oregon's desert, I
wound up in Moscow, Idaho. Since Quicksilver had a little engine trouble
and needed some repair, I took advantage of the spare time and went to the
University of Idaho's library to look up some of the articles about Godel's
proof in DeLong's annotated bibliography. I photocopied several of them,
and in a day or so headed off toward Montana and Alberta. Each night I
would stop and pitch my little tent, sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a
lake, and then I would eagerly plunge by flashlight into these articles until I
fell asleep in my sleeping bag. I was starting to understand many G6delian
matters ever more clearly, and what I was learning was truly enthralling.

From Letter to Pamphlet to Seminar

Mter a few days in the Canadian Rockies, I headed south again and
eventually reached Boulder, Colorado. There, one afternoon, a host of
fresh ideas started gushing out in a spontaneous letter to myoId friend
Robert Boeninger. Mter several hours of writing, I saw that although my
letter was longer than I'd expected - thirty handwritten pages or so - I'd
said only about half of what I'd wanted to say. This made me think that
maybe I should write a pamphlet, not a letter, and to this day, Robert has
never received my unfinished missive.
From Boulder I headed further east, bouncing from one university town
to another, and eventually, almost as if it had been beckoning me the whole
time, New York City loomed as my ultimate goal. Indeed, I wound up
spending several months in Manhattan, taking graduate courses at City
College and teaching elementary physics to nurses at Hunter College, but as
1973 rolled around, I faced the fact that despite loving New York in many
ways, I was even more agitated than I had been in Eugene, and I decided it
would be wiser to return to Oregon and to finish graduate school there.
Although my hoped-for "new life" had failed to materialize, in certain
respe~ts I was relieved to be back. For one thing, the U of 0 in those days
had the enlightened policy that any community member could invent and
teach a for-credit "SEARCH" course, as long as one or more departments
approved it. And so I petitioned the philosophy and math departments to
sponsor a spring-quarter SEARCH course centered on Godel's theorem, and
my request was granted. Things were looking up.
My intuition told me that my personal fascination with strange loops -
not only with their philosophical importance but also with their esthetic
charm - was not just some unique little neurotic obsession of mine, but
could well be infectious, if only I could get across to my students that these
notions were anything but dull and dry, as in those frigid, sterile logic
courses I'd taken, but rather - as Nagel and Newman had hinted - were
intimately related to a slew of profound and beautiful ideas in mathematics,
physics, computer science, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and so on.
I gave my course the half-dippy, half-romantic title 'The Mystery of the
Undecidable" in the hopes that I might attract students from wildly diverse

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-9

areas, and the trick worked. Twenty-five souls were snagged, and all were
enthusiastic. I vividly remember the lovely blossoms I could see out the
window each day as I lectured that spring, but even more vividly I remember
David Justman, who was in art history, Scott Buresh, who was in political
science, and Avril Greenberg, who was an art major. These three simply
devoured the ideas, and we talked and talked endlessly about them. My
course thus turned out very well, both for the snaggees and for the snagger.
Sometime during the summer of 1973, I made a stab at sketching out a
table of contents for my "pamphlet", and at that point, the ambitiousness of
my project started dawning on me, but it still felt more like a pamphlet than
a tome to me. It was only in the fall that I started writing in earnest. I had
never written anything more than a few pages long, but I fearlessly plunged
ahead, figuring it would take me just a few days - maybe a week or two. I
was slightly off, for in fact, the very first draft (done in pen, just like my letter
to Robert, but with more cross-outs) took me about a month - a month
that overlapped in time with the "Yom Kippur war", which made a very deep
impression on me. I realized this first draft was not the final product, but I
felt I had done the major work and now it was just a question of revision.

Experiments with Literary Form Start to Take Place

As I was writing that draft, I certainly wasn't thinking about Escher pictures.
Nor was I thinking about Bach's music. But one day I found myself on fire
with ideas about mind, brain, and human identity, and so, shamelessly
borrowing Lewis Carroll's odd couple of Achilles and the Tortoise, whose
droll personalities amused me no end, I sat down and in absolute white heat
dashed off a long, complex dialogue, all about a fictitious, unimaginably
large book each of whose pages, on a one-by-one basis, contained exhaustive
information on one specific neuron in Einstein's brain. As it happened, the
dialogue featured a short section where the two characters imagined each
other in another dialogue, and each of them said, "You might then say
this ... to which I might well reply as follows ... and then you would go on ... "
and so forth. Because of this unusual structural feature, after I'd finally put
the final period on the final speech, I flipped back to the top of page one
and there, on a whim, typed out the single word "FUGUE".
My Einstein-book dialogue was not r~ally a fugue, of course - not even
close - and yet it somehow reminded me'of one. From earliest childhood,
I had been profoundly moved by the music ~f Bach, and this off-the-wall
idea of marrying Bach-like contrapuntal for~ to lively dialogues with
intellectually rich content grabbed me with a pa~n. Over the next few
weeks, as I tossed the idea around in my head, I realized how much room
for play there was along these lines, and I could imagine how voraciously I as
a teen-ager might have consumed such dialogues. Thus I was led to the idea
of inserting contrapuntal dialogues every so often, partly to break the
tedium of the heavy ideas in my chapters, and partly to allow me to
introduce lighter, more allegorical versions of all the abstruse concepts.

P-IO Twentieth-anniversary Preface

 The long and the short of it is that I eventually decided - but this took
many months - that the optimal structure would be a strict alternation
between chapters and dialogues. Once that was clear, then I had the joyous
task of trying to pinpoint the most crucial ideas that I wanted to get across to
my readers and then somehow embodying them in both the form and the
content of fanciful, often punning dialogues between Achilles and the
Tortoise (plus a few new friends).

CEB Is First Cooled off, Then Reheated

In early 1974, I switched Ph.D. advisors for the fourth and final time, taking
on a totally unfamiliar problem in solid-state physics that smelled very sweet
though it threatened thorniness. My new advisor, Gregory Wannier, wanted
me to plunge in deeply, and I knew in my gut that this time it was sink or
swim for me in the world of physics. If I wanted a Ph.D. - a precious but
horribly elusive goal toward which I had been struggling for almost a decade
by then - it was now or never! And so, with great reluctance, I stowed my
beloved manuscript in a desk drawer and told myself, "Hands off! And no
peeking!" I even instituted food-deprivation punishments if I so much as
opened the drawer and riffled through my book-in-the-making. Thinking
GEB thoughts - or rather, GTATHB thoughts - was strictly verboten.
Speaking of German, Wannier was scheduled to go to Germany for a
six-month period in the fall of 1974, and since I had always loved Europe, I
asked if there was any way I could go along. Very kindly, he arranged for me
to be a wissenschaftlicher Assistent - essentially a teaching assistant - in
physics at the Universitiit Regensburg, and so that's what I did for one
semester spanning the end of 1974 and the start of 1975. It was then that I
got most of the work done for my Ph.D. thesis. Since I had no close friends,
my Regensburg days and nights were long and lonely. In a peculiar sense,
my closest friend during that tough period was Frederic Chopin, since I
tuned in to Radio Warsaw nearly every night at midnight and listened to
various pianists playing many of his pieces that I knew and loved, and others
that were new to me and that I came to love.
That whole stretch was GEE-verboten time, and thus it continued until the
end of 1975, when finally I closed the book on my thesis. Although that
work was all about an exquisite visual structure (see Chapter 5 of this book)
and seemed to offer a good launchpad for a career, I had suffered too many
blows to my ego in graduate school to believe I would make a good physicist.
On the other hand, the rekindling of old intellectual flames and especially
the writing of GTATHB had breathed a new kind of self-confidence into me.
Jobless but highly motivated, I moved to my home town of Stanford, and
there, thanks to my parents' unquestioning and generous financial support
("a two-year Hofstadter Fellowship", I jokingly called it), I set out to "retool
myself" as an artificial-intelligence researcher. Even more important,
though, was that I was able to resume my passionate love affair with the
ideas that had so grabbed me a couple of years earlier.

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-l1

 At Stanford, my erstwhile "pamphlet" bloomed. It was rewritten from
start to finish, because I felt that my earlier drafts, though focused on the
proper ideas, were immature and inconsistent in style. And I enjoyed the
luxury of one of the world's earliest and best word-processing programs, my
new friend Pentti KanelVa's tremendously flexible and user-friendly 1V-Edit.
Thanks to that program, the new version just flowed out, and ever so
smoothly. I just can't imagine how GEB could have been written without it.
Only at this stage did the book's unusual stylistic hallmarks really
emerge - the sometimes-silly playing with words, the concocting of novel
verbal structures that imitate musical forms, the wallowing in analogies of
every sort, the spinning of stories whose very structures exemplify the points
they are talking about, the mixing of oddball personalities in fantastic
scenarios. As I was writing, I certainly knew that my book would be quite
different from other books on related topics, and that I was violating quite a
number of conventions. Nonetheless I blithely continued, because I felt
confident that what I was doing simply had to be done, and that it had an
intrinsic rightness to it. One of the key qualities that made me so believe in
what I was doing is that this was a book in which form was being given equal
billing with content - and that was no accident, since GEB is in large part
about how content is inseparable from form, how semantics is of a piece
with syntax, how inextricable pattern and matter are from each other.
Although I had always known of myself that, in many aspects of life, I
was concerned as much with form as with content, I had never suspected
how deeply I would get caught up, in the writing of my first book, in matters
of visual appearance on all levels. Thus, thanks to the ease of using 1V-Edit,
whatever I wrote underwent polishing to make it look better on the screen,
and though such control would at one time have been considered a luxury
for an author, I was very attached to it and loath to give it up. By the time I
had a solid version of the manuscript ready to send out to publishers, visual
design and conceptual structure were intimately bound up with each other.

The Clarion Call

I've oft been asked if I, an unknown author with an unorthodox manuscript

and an off-the-wall title, had to struggle for years against the monolithic
publishing industry's fear of taking risks. Well, perhaps I was just lucky, but
my experience was far more pleasant than that.
In mid-1977, I sent out a little sample to about fifteen high-quality
publishers, just as a feeler, to which most replied politely that this was "not
the type of thing" they dealt in. Fair enough. But three or four expressed
interest in seeing more, and so, by turns, I let them take a look at the whole
thing. Needless to say, I was disappointed when the first two turned it down
(and in each case the vetting process took a few months, so the loss of time
was frustrating), but on the other hand, I wasn't overly disheartened. Then
near Christmastime, Martin Kessler, head of Basic Books, a publishing outfit
I had always admired, gave me some hopeful though tentative signals.

P-12 Twentieth-anniversary Preface

 The winter of 1977-78 was so severe that Indiana University, where I was
now a fledgling assistant professor, ran out of coal for heating, and in March
the university was forced to close down for three weeks to wait for warmer
weather. I decided to use this free time to drive to New York and points
south to see old friends. Clear as a bell in my oft-blurry memory is my brief
stop in some dingy little diner in the town of Clarion, Pennsylvania, where
from a chilly phone booth I made a quick call to Martin Kessler in New York
to see if he had a verdict yet. It was a great moment in my life when he said
he would be "delighted" to work with me - and it's almost eerie to think
that this signal event occurred in that well-named hamlet, of all places ...

Revenge of the Holey Rollers

Now that I had found a publisher, there came the question of turning the
manuscript from crude computer printout to a finely typeset book. It was a
piece of true luck that Pentti, to enhance 1V-Edit, had just developed one of
the world's first computer typesetting systems, and he strongly encouraged
me to use it. Kessler, ever the adventurer, was also willing to give it a try-
partly, of course, because it would save Basic Books some money, but also
because he was by nature a shrewd risk-taker.
Do-it-yourself typesetting, though for me a great break, was hardly a
piece of cake. Computing then was a lot more primitive than it is today, and
to use Pentti's system, I had to insert into each chapter or dialogue literally
thousands of cryptic typesetting commands, next chop each computer file
into several small pieces - five or six per file, usually - each of which had
to be run through a series of two computer programs, and then each of the
resulting output files had to be punched out physically as a cryptic pattern
of myriad holes on a long, thin roll of paper tape. I myself had to walk the
200 yards to the building where the hole-puncher was located, load the
paper tape, and sit there monitoring it carefully to make sure it didn't jam.
Next, I would carry this batch of oily tapes another quarter-mile to the
building where The Stanford Daily was printed, and if it was free, I would use
their phototypesetting machine myself. Doing so was a long, elaborate
operation involving cartridges of photosensitive paper, darkrooms, chemical
baths with rollers through which the paper had to be passed to get all the
developing chemicals off, and clotheslines on which all the five-foot long
galleys with my text on them would be hung out to dry for a day or two. The
process of actually seeing what my thousands of typesetting commands had
wrought was thus enormously unwieldy and slow. Truth to tell, though, I
didn't mind that; in fact, it was arcane, special, and kind of exciting.
But one day, when nearly all the galleys had been printed - two to
three hundred of them - and I thought I was home free, I made a
horrendous discovery. I'd seen each one emerge with jet-black print from
the developing baths, and yet on some of the more recently-<iried ones, the
text looked brownish. What!? As I checked out others, slightly older, I saw
light-brown print, and on yet older ones, it was orangy, or even pale yellow!

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-13

 I couldn't believe it. How in the world had this happened? The simple
answer left me feeling so angry and helpless: the aging rollers, having worn
unevenly, no longer wiped the galleys clean, so acid was day by day eating
the black print away. For the Daily's purposes, this didn't matter - they
chucked their galleys in a matter of hours - but for a book, it spelled
disaster. No way could a book be printed from yellow galleys! And the
photocopies r d made of them when they were newborn were sharp, but not
sharp enough. What a nightmare! Untold labor had just gone up in smoke.
I was filled with the despair of a football team that's just made a 99-yard
downfield march only to be stopped dead on the opponent's one-yard line.
r d spent almost all summer 1978 producing these galleys, but now
summer was drawing to a close, and I had to go back to Indiana to teach
courses. What on earth to do? How could I salvage GEB? The only solution
I could see was, on my own money, to fly back to Stanford every weekend of
the fall, and redo the whole thing from scratch. Luckily, I was teaching only
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and so each Thursday afternoon I would zoom
from class, catch a plane, arrive at Stanford, work like a maniac until
Monday afternoon, and then dash off to the airport to return to Indiana. I
will never forget the worst of those weekends, when I somehow managed to
work for forty hours straight without a wink of sleep. That's love for you!
In this ordeal there was a saving grace, though, and it was this: I got to
correct all the typesetting errors I'd made in the first batch of galleys. The
original plan had been to use a bunch of correction galleys, which would
have had to be sliced up into little pieces in Basic's New York offices and
pasted in wherever there were glitches - and in that first batch I'd made
glitches galore, that's for sure. Such a process would probably have resulted
in hundreds of errors in the layout. But thanks to my 99-yard drive having
been halted at the one-yard line, I now had the chance to undo all these
glitches, and produce a nearly pristine set of galleys. And thus, although the
chemical catastrophe delayed the actual printing of GEB for a couple of
months, it turned out, in retrospect, to have been a blessing in disguise.

Oops ...
There were of course many ideas that vied with each other for entry into the
book taking shape during those years, and some made it in while others did
not. One of the ironies is that the Einstein-book dialogue, which in its
"fugality" was the inspiration for all dialogues to come, was chopped.
There was another long and intricate dialogue, too, that was chopped,
or more accurately, that wound up getting transmogrified nearly beyond
recognition, and its curious story is connected with an intense debate that
was raging inside my brain at that time.
I had been made acutely aware, by some leaflets I'd read in the student
union at Oregon in 1970, of sexist language and its insidious unconscious
effects. My mind was awakened to the subtle ways that generic "he" and
"man" (and a host of similar words and phrases) contribute to the shaping

P-14 Twentieth-anniversary Preface

of one's sense of what is a "normal" human being and what is an
"exception", and I welcomed this new perspective. But I was not a writer at
that time - I was a physics grad student - and these issues didn't seem all
that close to my own life. When I started writing dialogues, though, things
changed. There came a point when it dawned on me that the characters in
my dialogues - Achilles, the Tortoise, the Crab, the Anteater, and a couple
of others with cameo roles - were without exception males. I was shocked
at my own having fallen victim to the unconscious pressures pushing against
the introduction of female characters. And yet, when I toyed with the idea
of going back and performing a "sex-change operation" on one or more of
these characters, that really rubbed me the wrong way. How come?
Well, all I could tell myself was, "Bring in females and you wind up
importing the whole confusing world of sexuality into what is essentially a
purely abstract discussion, and that would distract attention from my book's
main purposes." This nonsensical view of mine stemmed from and echoed
many tacit assumptions of western civilization at that time (and still today).
As I forced myself to grapple with my own ugly attitude, a real battle started
up in my mind, with one side of me arguing for going back and making
some characters female, and the other trying to maintain the status quo.
Out of this internal battle suddenly came a long and rather amusing
dialogue in which my various characters, having come to the realization that
they are all males, discuss why this might be so, and decide that, despite
their sense of having free will, they must in fact be merely characters in the
mind of some sexist male author. One way or another, they manage to
summon this Author character into their dialogue - and what does he do
when accused of sexism? He pleads innocent, claiming that what his brain
does is out of his control- the blame for his sexism must instead fallon a
sexist God. And the next thing you know, God poofs into the dialogue -
and guess what? She turns out to be female (ho ho ho). I don't remember
the details of how it went on from there, but the point is, I was deeply tom,
and I was grappling in my own way with these complex issues.
To my regret - that is to say, to the regret of the me of the years that
followed - the side that wound up winning this battle was the sexist side,
with just a few concessions to the other side (e.g., the tower of Djinns in the
dialogue "Little Harmonic Labyrinth", and Aunt Hillary in "Prelude ... Ant
Fugue"). GEB remained a book with a deep sexist bias sewn into its fabric.
Interestingly, it is a bias that very few readers, females or males, have
commented on (which in tum supports my belief that these kinds of things
are very subtle and insidious, and escape nearly everyone's perception).
As for generic "man" and "he", I certainly disliked those usages at that
time, and I tried to avoid them whenever I could (or rather, whenever it was
easy), but on the other hand I wasn't particularly concerned about cleansing
my prose of every last one of them, and as a consequence the book's pages
are also marred, here and there, by that more obvious, more explicit form
of sexism. Today, I cringe whenever I come across sentences in GEB that
talk about the reader as "he", or that casually speak of "mankind" as if
humanity were some huge abstract guy. One lives and learns, I guess.

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-15

 And lastly, as for that soul-searching dialogue in which the Author and
God are summoned up by Achilles and company to face the accusation of
sexism, well, that was somehow transformed, in a series of many, many small
changes, into the dialogue with which GEE concludes: "Six-part Ricercar".
If you read it with its genesis in mind, you may find an extra level of interest.

Mr. Tortoise, Meet Madame Tortue

A few years later, a wholly unexpected chance came along to make amends,
at least in part, for my sexist sin. That opportunity was afforded me by the
challenge of translating GEB into various foreign languages.
When I was writing the book, the idea that it might someday appear in
other languages never crossed my mind. I don't know why, since I loved
languages and loved translation, but somehow it just never occurred to me.
However, as soon as the idea was proposed to me by my publisher, I was very
excited about seeing my book in other languages, especially ones that I
spoke to some extent - most of all French, since that was a language that I
spoke fluently and loved very deeply.
There were a million issues to consider in any potential translation,
since the book is rife not only with explicit wordplay but also with what Scott
Kim dubbed "structural puns" - passages where form and content echo or
reinforce each other in some unexpected manner, and very often thanks to
happy coincidences involving specific English words. Because of these
intricate medium-message tangles, I painstakingly went through every last
sentence of GEB, annotating a copy for translators into any language that
might be targeted. This took me about a year of on-again, off-again toil, but
finally it was done, and just in the nick of time, because contracts with
foreign publishers started flowing thick and fast around 1982. I could write
a short book - a pamphlet? - on the crazy, delightful, knotty puzzles and
dilemmas that arose in translating GEE, but here I will mention just one-
how to render the simple-seeming phrase "Mr. Tortoise" in French.
When in the spring of 1983, Jacqueline Henry and Bob French, the
book's excellent translators into French, began to tackle the dialogues, they
instantly ran headlong into the conflict between the feminine gender of the
French noun tortue and the masculinity of my character, the Tortoise. By
the way, I must ruefully mention that in the malVelous but little-known
Lewis Carroll dialogue from which I borrowed these delightful characters
(reprinted in GEB as 'Two-part Invention"), the Tortoise turns out, if you
look carefully, never to have been attributed either gender. But when I first
read it, the question never entered my mind. This was clearly a he-tortoise.
Otherwise, I would have known not only that it was female but also why it was
female. Mter all, an author only introduces a female character for some
special reason, right? Whereas a male character in a "neutral" context (e.g.,
philosophy) needs no raison d'etre, a female does. And so, given no clue as
to the Tortoise's sex, I unthinkingly and uncritically envisaged it as a male.
Thus does sexism silently pervade well-meaning but susceptible brains.

P-16 Twentieth-anniversary Preface

 But let's not forget Jacqueline and Bob! Although they could simply
have bludgeoned their way through the problem by inventing a "Monsieur
Tortue" character, that route felt distinctly unnatural in French, to their
taste, and so, in one of our many exchanges of letters, they rather gingerly
asked me if I would ever consider letting them switch the Tortoise's sex to
female. To them, of course, it probably seemed pretty far-fetched to
imagine that the author would even give such a proposal the time of day,
but as a matter of fact, the moment I read their idea, I seized upon it with
great enthusiasm. And as a result, the French GEB's pages are graced
throughout with the fresh, fantastic figure of Madame Tortue, who runs
perverse intellectual circles around her male companion Achilles, erstwhile
Greek warrior and amateur philosopher.
There was something so delightful and gratifying to me about this new
vision of "the Tortoise" that I was ecstatic with her. What particularly
amused me were a few bilingual conversations that I had about the Tortoise,
in which I would start out in English using the pronoun "he", then switch to
French and to elle as well. Either pronoun felt perfectly natural, and I even
felt I was referring to the selfsame "person" in both languages. In its own
funny way, this seemed faithful to Carroll's tortoise's sexual neutrality.
And then, redoubling my pleasure, the translators into Italian, another
language that I adored and spoke quite well, chose to follow suit and to
convert my "Mr. Tortoise" into "signorina Tartaruga". Of course these
radical switches in no way affect the perceptions of GEB's purely anglophone
readers, but in some small way, I feel, they help to make up for the
lamentable outcome of my internal battle of a few years earlier.

Zen Buddhism, John Cage, and My VogUish Irrationality

The French translation was greeted, overall, very favorably. One specially
gratifying moment for Bob, Jacqueline, and myself was when a truly glowing
full-page review by Jacques Attali appeared in the most prestigious French
newspaper, Le Monde, not just praising the book for its ideas and style, but
also making a particular point of praising its translation.
A few months later, I received a pair of reviews published in successive
issues of Humanisme, an obscure journal put out by the Society of French
Freemasons. Both had issued from the pen of one author, Alain Houlou,
and I tackled them with interest. The first one was quite lengthy and, like
that in Le Monde, glowed with praise; I was gratified and grateful.
I then went on to the second review, which started out with the poetic
phrase Apres les roses, les epines... ("Mter roses, thorns ... "), and which then
proceeded for several pages, to my amazement, to rip GEB apart as un pwge
tres grave ("a very dangerous trap") in which the mindless bandwagon of Zen
Buddhism was eagerly jumped on, and in which a rabidly antiscientific,
beatnik-influenced, hippie-like irrationality typical of American physicists
was embraced as the supreme path to enlightenment, with the iconoclastic
Zen-influenced American composer John Cage as the patron saint of it all.

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-17

 All I could do was chuckle, and throw my hands up in bewilderment at
these Tati-esque vacarmes de monsieur Houlou. Somehow, this reviewer saw
me praising Cage to the skies ("Godel, Escher, Cage"?) and managed to
read into my coy allusions to and minor borrowings from Zen an uncritical
acceptance thereof, which in fact is not at all my stance. As I declare at the
start of Chapter 9, I find Zen not only confusing and silly, but on a very deep
level utterly inimical to my core beliefs. However, I also find Zen's silliness
- especially when it gets really silly - quite amusing, even refreshing, and it
was simply fun for me to sprinkle a bit of Eastern spice into my basically very
Western casserole. However, my having sprinkled little traces of Zen here
and there does not mean that I am a Zen monk in sheep's clothing.
As for John Cage, for some odd reason I had felt very sure, up till
reading Houlou's weird about-face, that in my "Canon by Intervallic
Augmentation" and the chapter that follows it, I had unambiguously heaped
scorn on Cage's music, albeit in a somewhat respectful manner. But wait,
wait, wait - isn't "heaping respectful scorn" not a contradiction in terms,
indeed a patent impossibility? And doesn't such coy flirting with self-
contradiction and paradox demonstrate, exactly as Houlou claims, that I am,
deep down, both antiscientific and pro-Zen, after all? Well, so be it.
Even if I feel my book is as often misunderstood as understood, I
certainly can't complain about the size or the enthusiasm of its readership
around the world. The original English-language GEB was and continues to
be very popular, and its translated selves hit the bestseller lists in (at least)
France, Holland, and Japan. The German GEB, in fact, occupied the #1
rank on the nonfiction list for something like five months during 1985, the
300th birthyear of]. S. Bach. It seems a bit absurd to me. But who knows-
that anniversary, aided by the other Germanic names on the cover, may have
crucially sparked GEB's popularity there. GEB has also been lovingly
translated into Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Swedish, and Portuguese, and
- perhaps unexpectedly - with great virtuosity into Chinese. There is also
a fine Russian version all ready, just waiting in the wings until it finds a
publisher. All of this far transcends anything I ever expected, even though I
can't deny that as I was writing it, especially in those heady Stanford days, I
had a growing inner feeling that GEB would make some sort of splash.

My Subsequent Intellectual Path: Decade I

Since sending GEB off to the printers two decades ago, I've somehow
managed to keep myself pretty busy. Aside from striving, with a team of
excellent graduate students, to develop computer models of the mental
mechanisms that underlie analogy and creativity, I've also written several
further books, each of which I'll comment on here, though only very briefly.
The first of these, appearing in late 1981, was The Mind's I, an anthology
co-edited with a new friend, philosopher Daniel Dennett. Our purpose,
closely related to that of GEB, was to force our readers to confront, in the
most vivid and even jolting manner, the fundamental conundrum of human

P-18 Twentieth-anniversary Preface

existence: our deep and almost ineradicable sense of possessing a unique
"I"-ness transcending our physical bodies and mysteriously enabling us to
exercise something we call "free will", without ever quite knowing just what
that is. Dan and I used stories and dialogues from a motley crew of
excellent writers, and one of the pleasures for me was that I finally got to see
my Einstein-book dialogue in print, after all.
During the years 1981-1983, I had the opportunity to write a monthly
column for Scientific American, which I called "Metamagical Themas" (an
anagram of "Mathematical Games", the title of the wonderful column by
Martin Gardner that had occupied the same slot in the magazine for the
preceding 25 years). Although the topics I dealt with in my column were,
on their surface, allover the map, in some sense they were unified by their
incessant quest for "the essence of mind and pattern". I covered such things
as pattern and poetry in the music of Chopin; the question of whether the
genetic code is arbitrary or inevitable; strategies in the never-ending battle
against pseudo-science; the boundary between sense and nonsense in
literature; chaos and strange attractors in mathematics; game theory and the
Prisoner's Dilemma; creative analogies involving simple number patterns;
the insidious effects of sexist language; and many other topics. In addition,
strange loops, self-reference, recursion, and a closely related phenomenon
that I came to call "locking-in" were occasional themes in my columns. In
that sense, as well as in their wandering through many disciplines, my
"Metamagical Themas" essays echoed the flavor of GEB.
Although I stopped writing my column in 1983, I spent the next year
pulling together the essays I'd done and providing each of them with a
substantial "Post Scriptum"; these 25 chapters, along with eight fresh ones,
constituted my 1985 book Metama[Sical Themas: Questing for the Essence ofMind
and Pattern. One of the new pieces was a rather zany Achilles-Tortoise
dialogue called "Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Careenium?", which
I feel captures my personal views on self, soul, and the infamous "I "-word -
namely, "I"! - perhaps better than anything else I've written - maybe even
better than GEB does, though that might be going too far.
For several years during the 1980's, I was afllicted with a severe case of
"ambigrammitis", which I caught from my friend Scott Kim, and out of
which came my 1987 book Ambigrammi. An ambigram (or an "inversion", as
Scott calls them in his own book, Inversions) is a calligraphic design that
manages to squeeze two different readings into the selfsame set of curves. I
found the idea charming and intellectually fascinating, and as I developed
my own skill at this odd but elegant art form, I found that self-observation
gave me many new insights into the nature of creativity, and so Ambigrammi,
aside from showcasing some 200 of my ambigrams, also features a text - in
fact, a dialogue - that is a long, wandering meditation on the creative act,
centered on the making of ambigrams but branching out to include musical
composition, scientific discovery, creative writing, and so on. For reasons
not worth going into, Ambigrammi: Un microcosmo ideate per lo studio della
creativittl was published only in Italian and by a tiny publisher called Hopeful
Monster, and I regret to say that it is no longer available.

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-19

 My Subsequent Intellectual Path: Decade II

As I said above, writing, though crucial, was not my only intellectual focus;
research into cognitive mechanisms was an equally important one. My early
hunches about how to model analogy and creativity are actually set forth
quite clearly in GEB's Chapter 19, in my discussion of Bongard problems,
and although those were just the germs of an actual architecture, I feel it is
fair to say that despite many years of refinement, most of those ideas can be
found in one form or another in the models developed in my research
group at Indiana University and the University of Michigan (where I spent
the years 1984-1988, in the Psychology Department).
Mter a decade and a half of development of computer models, the time
seemed ripe for a book that would pull all the main threads together and
describe the programs' principles and performance in clear and accessible
language. Thus over several years, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies took
shape, and finally appeared in print in 1995. In it are presented a series of
closely related computer programs - Seek-Whence, Jumbo, Numbo,
Copycat, Tabletop, and (still in progress) Metacat and Letter Spirit -
together with philosophical discussions that attempt to set them in context.
Several of its chapters are co-authored by members of the Fluid Analogies
Research Group, and indeed FARG gets its proper billing as my collective
co-author. The book shares much with GEB, but perhaps most important of
all is the basic philosophical article of faith that being an "I" - in other
words, possessing a sense of self so deep and ineradicable that it blurs into
causality - is an inevitable concomitant to, and ingredient of, the flexibility
and power that are synonymous with intelligence, and that the latter is but
another term for conceptual flexibility, which in tum means meaningful symbols.
A very different strand of my intellectual life was my deep involvement
in the translation of GEB into various languages, and this led me, perhaps
inevitably, in retrospect, to the territory of verse translation. It all started in
1987 with my attempt to mimic in English a beautiful French miniature by
sixteenth-century French poet Clement Marot, but from there it spun off in
many directions at once. To make a long story short, I wound up writing a
complex and deeply personal book about translation in its most general and
metaphorical sense, and while writing it, I experienced much the same
feeling of exhilaration as I had twenty years earlier, when writing GEB.
This book, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, winds
through many diverse terrains, including what it means to "think in" a given
language (or a blur of languages); how constraints can enhance creativity;
how meaning germinates, buds, and flowers in minds and might someday
do so in machines; how words, when put together into compounds, often
melt together and lose some or all of their identity; how a language spoken
on a neutron star might or might not resemble human languages; how
poetry written hundreds of years ago should be rendered today; how
translation is intimately related to analogy and to the fundamental human
process of understanding one another; what kinds of passages, if any, are

P-20 Twentieth-anniversary Preface

intrinsically untranslatable; what it means to translate nonsense passages
from one language to another; the absurdity of supposing that today's
mostly money-driven machine-translation gimmickry could handle even the
simplest of poetry; and on and on.
The two middle chapters of Le Ton beau de Marot are devoted to a work
of fiction that I had recently fallen in love with: Alexander Pushkin's novel
in verse, Eugene Onegin. I first came into contact with this work through a
couple of English translations, and then read others, always fascinated by
the translators' different philosophies and styles. From this first flame of
excitement, I slowly was drawn into trying to read the original text, and then
somehow, despite having a poor command of Russian, I could not prevent
myself from trying to translate a stanza or two. Thus started a slippery slope
that I soon slid down, eventually stunning myself by devoting a whole year to
recreating the entire novel - nearly 400 sparkling sonnets - in English
verse. Of course, during that time, my Russian improved by leaps and
bounds, though it still is far from conversationally fluent. As I write, my
Onegin has not yet come out, but it will be appearing at just about the same
time in 1999 as the book you are holding - the twentieth-anniversary
version of Codel, Escher, Bach. And the year 1999 plays an equally important
role in my EO's creation, being the 200th birthyear of Alexander Pushkin.

Forward-looking and Backward-looking Books

Le Ton beau de Marot is a bit longer than GEB, and on its first page, I go out
on a limb and call it "probably the best book I will ever write". Some of my
readers will maintain that GEB is superior, and I can see why they might do
so. But it's so long since I wrote GEB that perhaps the magical feeling I had
when writing it has faded, while the magic of LeTbM is still vivid. Still,
there's no denying that, at least in the short run, LeTbM has had far less
impact than GEB did, and I confess that that's disappointed me quite a bit.
Permit me to speculate for a moment as to why this might be the case.
In some sense, GEB was a "forward-looking" book, or at least on its surface it
gave that appearance. Many hailed it as something like "the bible of
artificial intelligence", which is of course ridiculous, but the fact is that many
young students read it and caught the bug of my own fascination with the
modeling of mind in all of its elusive aspects, including the evanescent goals
of "I" and free will and consciousness. Although I am the furthest thing in
the world from being a futurist, a science-fiction addict, or a technology
guru, I was often pigeonholed in just that way, simply because I had written
a long treatise that dealt quite a bit with computers and their vast potential
(in the most philosophical of senses), and because my book was quite a hit
among young people interested in computers.
Well, by contrast, Le Ton beau de Marot might be seen as a "backward-
looking" book, not so much because it was inspired by a sixteenth-century
poem and deals with many other authors of the past, such as Dante and
Pushkin, but because there simply is nothing in the book's pages that could

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-21

be confused with glib technological glitz and surreal futuristic promises.
Not that GEB had those either, but many people seemed to see something
vaguely along those lines in it, whereas there's nothing of that sort to latch
onto, in LeTbM. In fact, some might see it almost as technology-bashing, in
that I take many artificial-intelligence researchers and machine-translation
developers to task for wildly exaggerated claims. I am not an enemy of these
fields, but I am against vast oversimplifications and underestimations of the
challenges that they represent, for in the end, that amounts to a vast
underestimation of the human spirit, for which I have the deepest respect.
Anyone who has read GEB with any care should have seen this same
"backward-looking" flavor permeating the book, perhaps most explicitly so
in the key section ''Ten Questions and Speculations" (pp. 676-680), which is
a very romantic way of looking at the depth of the human spirit. Although
my prediction about chess-playing programs put forth there turned out to
be embarrassingly wrong (as the world saw with Deep Blue versus Kasparov
in 1997), those few pages nonetheless express a set of philosophical beliefs
to which I am still committed in the sU'ongest sense.

To Tamper, or to Leave Pristine?

Given that I was quite wrong in a prediction made twenty years ago, why not
rewrite the "Ten Questions and Speculations" section, updating it and
talking about how I feel in light of Deep Blue? Well, of course, this brings
up a much larger issue: that of revising the 1979 book from top to bottom,
and coming out with a spanking new 1999 edition of GEB. What might
militate for, and what might militate against, undertaking such a project?
I don't deny that some delightful, if small, improvements were made in
the translated versions. For example, my magistrally Bach-savvy friend
Bernie Greenberg informed me that the "BACH goblet" I had invented out
of whole cloth in my dialogue "Contracrostipunctus" actually exists! The
real goblet is not (as in my dialogue) a piece of glass blown by Bach, but
rather a gift from one of his prize st.udents; nonetheless, its key feature -
that of having the melody "BACH" etched into the glass itself - is just as I
said in the dialogue! This was such an amazing coincidence that I rewrote
the dialogue for the French version to reflect the real goblet's existence, and
insisted on having a photograph of the BACH goblet in the French GEB.
Another delicious touch in the French GEB was the replacement of the
very formal, character-less photo of Godel by a far more engaging snapshot
in which he's in a spiffy white suit and is strolling with some old codger in a
forest. The latter, decked out in a Hoppy hat and baggy pants held up by
gawky suspenders, looks every inch the quintessential rube, so I rewrote the
caption as Kurt COdel avec un paysan non identifie ("Kurt Godel with unknown
peasant"). But as anyone who has lived in the twentieth century can see in a
split second, the paysan non identifie is none other than A. Einstein.
Why not, then, incorporate those amusing changes into a revised
edition in English? On a more substantial level, why not talk a bit about the

P-22 Twentieth-anniversary Preface

pioneering artificial-intelligence program Hearsay II, whose very subtle
architecture started exerting, only a year or two after GEB came out, a vast
impact on my own computer models, and about which I already knew
something way back in 1976? Why not talk more about machine translation,
and especially its weaknesses? Why not have a whole chapter about the most
promising developments (and/or exaggerated claims) over the past two
decades in artificial intelligence - featuring my own research group as well
as others? Or why not, as some have suggested, come out with a CD-ROM
with Escher pictures and Bach music on it, as well as recordings of all of
GEB's dialogues as performed by top-notch actors?
Well, I can see the arguments for any of these, but unfortunately, I just
don't buy them. The CD-ROM suggestion, the one most often made to me,
is the simplest to dismiss. I intended GEB as a book, not as a multimedia
circus, and book it shall remain - end of story. As for the idea of revising
the text, however, that is more complex. Where would one draw the line?
What would be sacrosanct? What would survive, what would be tossed out?
Were I to take that task on, I might well wind up rewriting every single
sentence - and, let's not forget, reverse-engineering old Mr. T ...
Perhaps I'm just a crazy purist; perhaps I'm just a lazy lout; but stubborn
no doubt, and wouldn't dream of changing my book's Urtext. That's out!
Thus in my sternness, I won't allow myself to add the names of two people
- Donald Kennedy and Howard Edenberg - to my ''Words of Thanks",
despite the fact that for years, I've felt sad at having inadvertently left them
out. I won't even correct the book's typos (and, to my chagrin, I did find,
over the decades, that there are a few, aside from those listed explicitly
under "typos" in the index)! Why on earth am I such a stick-in-the-mud?
Why not bring Codel, Escher, Bach up to date and make it a book worthy of
ushering in the twenty-first century - indeed, the third millenium?

Qurerendo Invenietis ...

Well, the only answer I can give, other than that life is short, is that GEB was
written in one sitting, so to speak. GEB was a clean and pure vision that was
dreamed by someone else - someone who, to be sure, was remarkably
similar to yours truly, but someone who nonetheless had a slightly different
perspective and a slightly different agenda. GEB was that person's labor of
love, and as such - at least so say I - it should not be touched.
Indeed, I somehow feel a strange inner confidence that the true author
of GEB, when one fine day he finally reaches my ripe age, will tender to me
the truest of thanks for not having tampered with the vessel into which he
poured so much of his young and eager soul - the work that he even went
so far as to call, in what some might see as a cryptic or even naively romantic
remark, "a statement of my religion". At least I know what he meant.

REQVIESCAT IN CONSTANTIA, ERGO,

REp&ESENTATIO CvPIDI AVCTORIS REUGIONIS.

Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-23