Gödel, Escher, Bach

Winner of the Pulitzer prize and beloved by critics, this book by Douglas Hofstadter is a major work in the field of artificial intelligence. It is concerned directly with the nature of maps or links between formal systems. According to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. One of Hofstadter's most famous ideas is that if life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence.