Let me try to help you. Many people who praise GEB in the highest terms and recommend that everyone read it never finished it. Many read all the dialogues, but only some of the chapters. I have absolutely no data to support turning either of the previous “many” to “most”, but wouldn’t be surprised by either possibility.
GEB’s most important strength, by far, is in giving you a diverse set of metaphors, thought-patterns, paradoxes and ways to resolve them, unexpected connections between heretofore different domains. It enlarges your mental vocabulary—quite forcefully and wonderfully if you haven’t encountered these ideas and metaphors before. It’s like a very, very entertaining and funny dictionary of ideas.
The exposition of various topics in theory of computation, AI, etc. that it also contains is not as important by comparison, and isn’t the best introduction to these topics (it’s still good and may well be very enjoyable, depending on your background and interest).
So there’s no reason to fear reading GEB. You’ll chuckle with recognition at the jokes, metaphors, notions that you’ve already learned elsewhere, and will be delighted at those you’ve never seen before. Read all the dialogues; if some of the chapters bore you, resist guilt tripping and skip a few—you’ll come back to them later if you need them.
I’m about 1⁄2 way through. I am finding the chapters to be much more interesting than the dialogues. The style the dialogues are written in seems to be rather stilted/forced and grates somewhat. They do seem to be useful metaphors for understanding some of the trickier chapters, so I can see the merit in them.
Let me try to help you. Many people who praise GEB in the highest terms and recommend that everyone read it never finished it. Many read all the dialogues, but only some of the chapters. I have absolutely no data to support turning either of the previous “many” to “most”, but wouldn’t be surprised by either possibility.
GEB’s most important strength, by far, is in giving you a diverse set of metaphors, thought-patterns, paradoxes and ways to resolve them, unexpected connections between heretofore different domains. It enlarges your mental vocabulary—quite forcefully and wonderfully if you haven’t encountered these ideas and metaphors before. It’s like a very, very entertaining and funny dictionary of ideas.
The exposition of various topics in theory of computation, AI, etc. that it also contains is not as important by comparison, and isn’t the best introduction to these topics (it’s still good and may well be very enjoyable, depending on your background and interest).
So there’s no reason to fear reading GEB. You’ll chuckle with recognition at the jokes, metaphors, notions that you’ve already learned elsewhere, and will be delighted at those you’ve never seen before. Read all the dialogues; if some of the chapters bore you, resist guilt tripping and skip a few—you’ll come back to them later if you need them.
I’m about 1⁄2 way through. I am finding the chapters to be much more interesting than the dialogues. The style the dialogues are written in seems to be rather stilted/forced and grates somewhat. They do seem to be useful metaphors for understanding some of the trickier chapters, so I can see the merit in them.
/me looks up from the ‘Crab Canon’.
Wait, what?