[(partially) read in Portuguese, thus direct quotes will be in Portuguese]

With the shallow certainty of many years passed, I'd say this book appeared in my awareness somewhere during my college years; my university is equipped with the beautiful English language paperback edition, and I dabbled in reading it for a while. But it is a long book — and so it came and went, leaving just a faint impression of the richness within. I recently retried having it near me, but this time with the Portuguese translation (which is good!) for no other reason than the unavailability of a proper English .epub on the Internet, and its English paperback counterpart.

The appeal of such a work is evident: it lies somewhere in the intersection between philosophy and mathematics via computer science, Gödel's work on logic, the paintings of Escher, music of Bach; some of its key ideas (isomorphisms, conscience, language) are the matter of very serious thinking by a great many intelligent people, but here they're taken lightly, prioritising the elegant presentation of inevitable overlaps among all these (apparently disconnected) areas of human knowledge.

It is a work of curiosity. The print I have with me includes Hofstadter's 20th Anniversary Preface, and there is some context of his journey with Gödel's ideas, and how the writing of the book came to happen; it was a very driven endeavour, with the kind of relentlessness that I had (not first, but more recently) seen depicted in Feynman's (sort of) episodic autobiography.

a consciência e a auto-referência, e uma analogia com uma televisão