- OK, I read his preface for the 20th Anniv edition and I'm hooked again. I immediately ordered a copy from Amazon.
In the preface, he clearly says that the book is not really about any three of them. It is about the strange loop, the self-reference phenomenon he believes exhibited in the works of the three and he further believes that this self-referential loop is the key to understand the emergence of "self" or conscious being. It is this that bridges the animate and the inanimate.
I can sense you need more or less a leap of faith in here and hard-core logician might have problem with this. But he is dead serious and does not sound New Ageish to me. Given my life-long interest in theory I am going to read the whole thing word by word if leisure permits and hope to gain more insights into either Godel or Bach along the way.
I read the Chinese baby version of the book in the old days and I had the excitement without much understanding. The Chinese abridger, Le Xiucheng, a math major and a friend's friend, died in a gas leak incident while a student here in the States many years ago.
gadfly