> In March of 1977, I met the great AI pioneer Marvin Minsky for the first time. It was an unforgettable experience. One of the most memorable remarks he made to me was this one: "Gödel should just have thought up Lisp; it would have made the proof of his theorem much easier." I knew exactly what Minsky meant by that, I could see a grain of truth in it, and moreover I knew it had been made with tongue semi in cheek. Still, something about this remark drove me crazy. It made me itch to say a million things at once, and thus left me practically speechless. Finally today, after my seven-year itch, I will say some of the things I would have loved to say then.
> [4 pages of detailed discussion of relationship between Gödel's methods and Lisp elided]
> It was for all these reasons that Minsky's pseudo-joke struck my intellectual funnybone. One answer I wanted to make was: "I disagree: Gödel shouldn't have and couldn't have invented Lisp, because his work was a necessary precursor to the invention of Lisp, and anyway, he was out to destroy PM, not Lisp." Another answer was: "Your innuendo is wrong, because any type of reference has to be grounded in a code, and Gödel's way of doing it involved no more coding machinery grounding its referential capacity than any other efficient way would have." The final answer I badly wanted to blurt out was: "No, no, no—Gödel did invent Lisp!" You see why I was tongue-tied?
That book helped me reach the conclusion that Hofstadter's self-references were annoying to the point that I wished to avoid them (and his writing in general) in the future.
> In March of 1977, I met the great AI pioneer Marvin Minsky for the first time. It was an unforgettable experience. One of the most memorable remarks he made to me was this one: "Gödel should just have thought up Lisp; it would have made the proof of his theorem much easier." I knew exactly what Minsky meant by that, I could see a grain of truth in it, and moreover I knew it had been made with tongue semi in cheek. Still, something about this remark drove me crazy. It made me itch to say a million things at once, and thus left me practically speechless. Finally today, after my seven-year itch, I will say some of the things I would have loved to say then.
> [4 pages of detailed discussion of relationship between Gödel's methods and Lisp elided]
> It was for all these reasons that Minsky's pseudo-joke struck my intellectual funnybone. One answer I wanted to make was: "I disagree: Gödel shouldn't have and couldn't have invented Lisp, because his work was a necessary precursor to the invention of Lisp, and anyway, he was out to destroy PM, not Lisp." Another answer was: "Your innuendo is wrong, because any type of reference has to be grounded in a code, and Gödel's way of doing it involved no more coding machinery grounding its referential capacity than any other efficient way would have." The final answer I badly wanted to blurt out was: "No, no, no—Gödel did invent Lisp!" You see why I was tongue-tied?