I'm going to try and explain why it made a difference in my life as briefly as I can.
I read it in the early 90s as a teenager at a community college in the suburbs, along with the Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, at a point in my life when I was struggling with having a lot of doubt about Catholicism, and the _one_ thing that was keeping me from just giving up on religion entirely was that I just couldn't understand how the experience of _being_ could be anything but a spiritual soul, and those two books gave me the intellectual tools to basically completely rebuild my entire conception of what and who I was -- which is to say that I could finally see consciousness as the an emergent property of ordinary matter, and the relationship between consciousness and computation.
It's an experience you can only have if you read the right books at the right time in your life. You can only be exposed to any particular idea for the first time once in your life, and if they ideas in those books are not new to you, I'm sure you'll find GEB pretentious and ponderous or whatever, but for me it was like fireworks going off on every page. I read it and reread it and took notes on it and used it as a launching point for more reading for years afterwards.
edit with some extra thoughts: Keep in mind this book was written in 1979, when vanishingly few people had access to computers, let alone the internet. There was no wikipedia you could go to to scratch an itch about some topic. GEB is encyclopedic in scope and meandering because it _had to be_, he couldn't expect an audience who were familiar with _computers_ let alone artificial intelligence and set theory. It's really extraordinary that it's accessible as it is, given the breadth that it covered.
Today, given the advances in all the things he was talking about, I would think it's mostly interesting to read for historical reasons.
I read it in the early 90s as a teenager at a community college in the suburbs, along with the Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, at a point in my life when I was struggling with having a lot of doubt about Catholicism, and the _one_ thing that was keeping me from just giving up on religion entirely was that I just couldn't understand how the experience of _being_ could be anything but a spiritual soul, and those two books gave me the intellectual tools to basically completely rebuild my entire conception of what and who I was -- which is to say that I could finally see consciousness as the an emergent property of ordinary matter, and the relationship between consciousness and computation.
It's an experience you can only have if you read the right books at the right time in your life. You can only be exposed to any particular idea for the first time once in your life, and if they ideas in those books are not new to you, I'm sure you'll find GEB pretentious and ponderous or whatever, but for me it was like fireworks going off on every page. I read it and reread it and took notes on it and used it as a launching point for more reading for years afterwards.
edit with some extra thoughts: Keep in mind this book was written in 1979, when vanishingly few people had access to computers, let alone the internet. There was no wikipedia you could go to to scratch an itch about some topic. GEB is encyclopedic in scope and meandering because it _had to be_, he couldn't expect an audience who were familiar with _computers_ let alone artificial intelligence and set theory. It's really extraordinary that it's accessible as it is, given the breadth that it covered.
Today, given the advances in all the things he was talking about, I would think it's mostly interesting to read for historical reasons.