Thanks for thinking of me, first. Have a great day.

You cannot learn about music or visual art by just reading text! Sure Hoftstader seems to know some stuff about Bach, but unless you augment the book with some serious listening and/or music reading he might as well just be making it all up.

This is laughable. Many authors of many books _could_ be fabricating all of everything that they write. This book, GEB, like many of its kind, gather, survey and condense many subjects, references and ideas in a neat package for consumption, each piece of which one can seek out for himself if he chooses. The real question is... Is Hofstadter making it all up? Of course not. If he was, people would be screaming bloody murder by now.

Sssh. Quite now. Do you hear anything?

Neither do I. Although I think I heard someone on Slashdot griping about "lip-service." If I may be so bold as to anticipate Hofstadter's point in writing GEB (although I think he makes it quite clear in the twentieth aniversary edition's preface), it was NOT to teach anyone anything about visual art or music or meta- math and logic. That, if anything, is an unavoidable consequence of the meat of the book, a setup for a serious discussion about the nature of consciousness, creativity, etc, when we assume that are both computational and subject to its conditions and restrictions.

As for Penrose...

And Escher's art, as you can conclude from how well it sells, is more pop than profound: sure he had an amazing intuition for the Golden Ratio and similar mathematical series, but the recursion is all pretty basic. (If you want to learn about advanced tesselation, you're better off reading The Emperor's New Mind.)

Of Escher's works, since when are profundity and popularity irreconcilable? I could easily imagine that art which reveals a universely profound statement could be universally popular. A lot of people like Magritte too...

Ah, but that's the whole point, the whole point of the book -- not all of the recursion is basic -- sometimes there are hidden and not-so-hidden strange loops that can occur in the presence of isomorphisms which, as Hofstadter argues quite elloquently, lie at the heart of some of Godel, Escher and Bach's most interesting works, and are the foundation of human creativity and consciousness.

As for Penrose... *screams bloody murder*