Truth matters to Douglas Hofstadter. Not all kinds of truth hold the same fascination for him though; he drew laughter from an evidently sympathetic audience at the Cambridge Union when he labelled particle physics ugly and mathematics too abstract. As Hofstadter tells me afterwards, "beauty has been a pursuit in my life in various domains…I’ve never found any easy way of characterising it…[but it has] always been so elusive, so mysterious".

His lecture bordered on the arduous at times. Unlike the initiated majority of the audience – I failed to see that the margin of appreciation in a geometric sequence he was mapping always alternated between 2 and a prime number. "It might be a little bit easier to characterise what is beautiful in mathematics because at least one is searching for a pattern where a pattern might not be expected", he tells me, while waving a hand through an unruly mass of silver hair. I try not to give away the fact that I had in fact understood very little of his painstaking explanation of his early research. Apparently it shows. Brows furrowed and the light playing on his craggy skin, he looks tired and mildly irritated.

I try and draw him onto his Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [GEB]. The book uses dialogue to weave together the works of Bach, the 20th Century Dutch artist Escher and the mathematician Godel. I mumble something about the novelty of the structure. He cuts me off. "The first two drafts of GEB were not highly structured. It was only after I evolved the notion of dialogue that the structure started to come in." He explains that "the original title of the book was Godel’s theorem and the Brain. And it had no Escher in it. No Bach. No dialogue".

I can hardly imagine GEB without the sleek tessellation of the dialogue with the broader argument. Hofstadter describes this correspondence as "indirect self reference", insofar as "they would be talking about other things but the phenomena they were talking about would be mirrored isomorphically in the structure of the dialogue". So in GEB we find a phonograph that self-destructs playing the tune "I cannot be played on record player X", alongside commentary on Godel’s incompleteness theorem and a description of Escher’s lithograph ‘drawing hands’ as a metaphor for consciousness.

I point out to Hofstadter that in many ways this aesthetic in GEB is a manifestation of his own view of consciousness. His position seems to be that consciousness is an illusion. The result of a process of accretion, where layers of self reference envelope each other leaving a being that is able to have a unified understanding of themselves in relation to the world.

He suddenly looks animated. He leans forward and tells me "Although people had liked GEB and had been influenced by it … they hadn’t understood what my real concept was. Most people had not really understood the goal of GEB was fundamentally to discuss I or consciousness."

He reflects for a moment on the throng of eager students who mobbed him after the lecture armed with copies of GEB, and adds "when people, just today for example, have said to me it had a very big impact on them. I would like to say to them … what in particular is it that had an impact on you …they just say something that is very generic …so I don’t really know whether they perceived the tension between the structure and content."

For a moment I get a glimpse of the contradiction at the heart of his work. Hofstadter's intoxication with beauty and his dedication as a philosopher and scientist to the truth don’t always sit easily together. Making a book beautiful means allowing for a diffuseness and complexity that doesn’t necessarily make for the best form to communicate with mass audiences. "I am a strange loop", which is Hofstadter’s sequel to GEB, is on my bookshelf. I stopped reading after a couple of pages. It is oblique and far more explicit than GEB. Perhaps I will give it another go.