Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, one of the books recommended to me by readers, and, until now, a surprising omission on my part. I’m enjoying it very much. I’m also reading Gensler’s Introduction to Logic (‘You should have done that before you started blogging’, I hear you all say), from which I’m hoping to tighten up my understanding of modal logic.
Today I went to Southbank to see the Bonnard exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery. As a successor to the Impressionists, Bonnard was among the last painters who filled the role created by the 19th century notion of the artist in a fairly unselfconscious fashion, making some innovations in technique without adopting innovation for its own sake. After about 1910, we get the disaster of ‘modern art’, based on the assumption that formal innovations are necessary to artistic greatness and that success in the game of ‘epater le bourgeois’ (shock the middle-classes) is the test of sufficiency.
Finally, this afternoon I took my son and a friend to see ‘The Matrix Reloaded’. Good fun, in a RoadRunner vs Wile E Coyote kind of way, but, as so often, a good argument against sequels.
John Quiggin 
I never could finish that Hofstadter book. Hofstadter is evidently a genius, but good Christ his intellectual showing off wore very thin very quickly. I was too irritated by it to get more than halfway through, although there came a point where my intellectual capacities started to lag too far behind Hofstadter’s and I started ceasing to understand it anyway (which tends to happen when an author starts talking in mathematical symbology).
As far as logic goes, I remember buying a small “introduction to logic” type of book because I wanted to teach myself about the subject. By the end of the second page I had discovered that logic is not interested in the factual truth of statements, only the logical truth of them. I stopped reading the book there and then.
(preaching to the converted in my off hours)
Logic’s a system of reasoning, and by its very nature reasoning (without external input) cannot determine the factual truth or falsity of a thing — otherwise e.g. the court system wouldn’t need witnesses…
But without the help of logic, you can’t reason very well about what facts you do collect.
It’s a verification system, if you like; `we know that people say *blah*; is it internally consistent? If it’s not, then something *must* be wrong.’
That same lack of reliance upon external input is a strength, not a weakness, in a sense; if logic relied upon external input, you’d need some more fundamental system which did not rely upon external input, to check the internal consistency of whatever you had; and, hey, why not call that system `logic’?