Gödel, Escher, Bach

I Am a Strange Loop

by Douglas R. Hofstadter  · 21 Feb 2011  · 626pp  · 181,434 words

to care for . . . I Am a Strange Loop is a work of rigorous thinking.” — Time “Almost thirty years after the publication of his well-loved Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter revisits some of the same themes. The purpose of the new book is to make inroads into the nexus of self, self-awareness and

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look at the world, inside or out, in the same way again.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review “Nearly thirty years after his best-selling book Gödel, Escher, Bach, cognitive scientist and polymath Douglas Hofstadter has returned to his extraordinary theory of self.” — New Scientist “I Am a Strange Loop is thoughtful, amusing and

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substrates consisting of inanimate matter so compelling that I was convinced that here lay the secret of our sense of “I”, and thus my book Gödel, Escher, Bach came about (and acquired a catchier title). That book, which appeared in 1979, couldn’t have enjoyed a greater success, and indeed yours truly owes

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the standard phrase I always use to describe my teaching style, my speaking style, and my writing style. In part because of the success of Gödel, Escher, Bach, I have had the good fortune of being given a great deal of freedom by the two universities on whose faculties I have served — Indiana

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few months later, my appreciation of the phenomenon deepened considerably when I decided to explore it in detail as a visual study for my book Gödel, Escher, Bach. I made an appointment at the Stanford University television studios, and upon arriving I found that the very friendly fellow there had already set up

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and popularized by Marvin Minsky around 1980). Telepresence versus “Real” Presence Perhaps my most vivid experience of telepresence occurred when I was typesetting my book Gödel, Escher, Bach. This was back in the late 1970’s, when for an author to do any such thing was unheard of, but I had the good

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it is exactly on the mark) that emanated from both composer and performer. I was naturally filled with gratification when the popularity of my book Gödel, Escher, Bach linked my name in some fashion in the musical community with that of Bach (this was a true honor), and in Bach’s 300th birthyear

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, 1985. Hennie, Fred. Introduction to Computability. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1977. Hoffmann, Banesh. Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel. New York: Viking, 1972. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. (Twentieth-anniversary edition published in 1999.) — — — . “Analogies and Metaphors to Explain Gödel’s Theorem”. The Two

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-orientedness of systems, blurriness of goals of living creatures goals, shared God: elusiveness of mathematical truth and; not a player of dice; reality of Göd Gödel, Escher, Bach: central message of; dialogues in; linking author with Bach; typesetting of; video feedback photos in; writing of Gödel, Kurt; arithmetizes PM; believer in PM ’s

Complexity: A Guided Tour

by Melanie Mitchell  · 31 Mar 2009  · 524pp  · 120,182 words

Mitchell The author is grateful to the following publishers for permission to reprint excerpts from the following works that appear as epigraphs in the book. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter, copyright © 1979 by Basic Books and reprinted by permission of the publisher. The Dreams of Reason by Heinz

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be understood completely if you understand its parts, and the nature of their ‘sum.’ ” No one in her left brain could reject reductionism. —Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid REDUCTIONISM HAS BEEN THE DOMINANT approach to science since the 1600s. René Descartes, one of reductionism’s earliest proponents, described his

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produce creatures with such an enormous contrast between their individual simplicity and their collective sophistication? The Brain The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach, makes an extended analogy between ant colonies and brains, both being complex systems in which relatively simple components with only limited communication among themselves collectively

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of those strings, and the paradoxes that self-reference can produce, are discussed in a detailed and very entertaining way in Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Similarly, this kind of dual use of information is key to Turing’s proof of the undecidability of the Halting problem

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purchases. But one purchase I did make was a relatively new book written by a computer science professor at Indiana University, with the odd title Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Having majored in math and having visited a lot of museums, I knew who Gödel and Escher were, and being a

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shore.” Readers, I look forward to the day when we can together tour those new territories of complexity. NOTES Preface “REDUCTIONISM is”: Hofstadter, D. R., Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979, p. 312. “to divide all the difficulties under examination”: Descartes, R., A Discourse on the Method

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E. burchelli”: Franks, N. R., Army ants: A collective intelligence. American Scientist, 77(2), 1989, p. 140. “Douglas Hofstadter, in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach”: Hofstadter, D. R., Ant fugue. In Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Chapter 2 “It makes me so happy”: Stoppard, T., Arcadia. New York: Faber

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excellent expositions of the proof, see Nagel, E. and Newman, J. R., Gödel’s Proof. New York: New York University, 1958; and Hofstadter, D. R., Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. “This was an amazing new turn”: Hodges, A., Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Simon & Schuster

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-VCH. For an account of self-replication in DNA and how it relates to mathematical logic and self-copying computer programs, see Hofstadter, D. R., Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979, pp. 495–548. “reproductive potentialities of the machines of the future’ ”: Quoted in Heims, S. J

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what actually perceives the meaning”: Some of the many books and articles addressing these issues from a philosophical standpoint are the following: Hofstadter, D. R., Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979; Dennett, D. R., Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991; Bickhard, M. H., The biological foundations of

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). Material Faith: Thoreau on Science. New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 28. “a relatively new book written by a Computer Science professor”: Hofstadter, D. R., Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. “an even more impressive array of successor programs”: For descriptions of several of these programs, including

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Press, 2001. Hofmeyr, S. A. and Forrest, S. Architecture for an artificial immune system. Evolutionary Computation, 8(4), 2000, pp. 443–473. Hofstadter, D. R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Hofstadter, D. R. Mathematical chaos and strange attractors. Chapter 16 in Metamagical Themas. New York: Basic

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

by Brian Christian  · 1 Mar 2011  · 370pp  · 94,968 words

players, all chess players are artists.” The scientific community, by and large, seemed to agree with that sentiment. Douglas Hofstadter’s 1980 Pulitzer Prize–winning Gödel, Escher, Bach, written at a time when computer chess was over twenty-five years old, advocates “the conclusion that profoundly insightful chess-playing draws intrinsically on central

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to the core of human nature itself,” Hofstadter says, that computers’ “mere brute-force … [will] not be able to circumvent or shortcut that fact.” Indeed, Gödel, Escher, Bach places chess alongside things like music and poetry as one of the most uniquely and expressively human activities of life. Hofstadter argues, rather emphatically, that

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. (There are ten thousand billion billion billion billion possible games of chess for every atom in the universe.) As the New York Times explained: In “Gödel, Escher, Bach” [Hofstadter] held chess-playing to be a creative endeavor with the unrestrained threshold of excellence that pertains to arts like musical composition or literature. Now

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up there, too. If music or literature were created at an artistic level by a computer, I would feel this is a terrible thing.” In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter writes, “Once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of ‘real thinking.’ ” It’s a great

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, necessarily, but to force a sort of three-card monte where one never becomes sure which envelope one’s in.15 Douglas Hofstadter muses in Gödel, Escher, Bach, “Perhaps works of art are trying to convey their style more than anything else.” I think that when we’re reading a book or watching

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D. Norman, “Defensive Tool Use in a Coconut-Carrying Octopus,” Current Biology 19, no. 23 (December 15, 2009), pp. 1069–70. 16 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 17 Noam Chomsky, email correspondence (emphasis mine). 18 John Lucas, “Commentary on Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery

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Chess Association; see Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), p. 131. 6 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 7 “the conclusion that profoundly insightful chess-playing”: Douglas Hofstadter, summarizing the position taken by

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Gödel, Escher, Bach in the essay “Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye—and Doing My Best Not to Flinch,” in David Cope, Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical

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Terminator, directed by James Cameron (Orion Pictures, 1984). 6 The Matrix, directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski (Warner Bros., 1999). 7 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 8 Mark Humphrys, “How My Program Passed the Turing Test,” in Parsing the Turing Test, edited

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,” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 48, no. 2 (2005), pp. 147–60. 4 “unasking” of the question: This phrasing comes from both Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), and Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Morrow, 1974). Pirsig also

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. 21 Three Colors: White, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski (Miramax, 1994). 22 David Bellos, “I, Translator,” New York Times, March 20, 2010. 23 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 24 “Six Years Later: The Children of September 11,” The Oprah Winfrey Show, September 11, 2007

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). 36 Takeshi Murata, “Monster Movie” (2005). 37 Kanye West, “Welcome to Heartbreak,” directed by Nabil Elderkin (2009). 38 Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being. 39 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach. 40 Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being. 41 Timothy Ferriss, interview with Leon Ho, Stepcase Lifehack, June 1, 2007. 42 Heather McHugh, “In Ten Senses: Some

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence

by George Zarkadakis  · 7 Mar 2016  · 405pp  · 117,219 words

to emerge from meaningless elements. The book created a sensation because, apart from its very serious scientific premise, it was also inspired by art. Entitled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, the book used narratives, paradoxes and logical arguments to explore the connection between the Austrian mathematician who discovered the limits of

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its place in Nature’, University of Skövde, Sweden, 7–11 August 2001. 16Foerster, H. von (1981), Observing Systems. Seaside, Calif.: Intersystems Publications. 17Hofstadter, D. (1979), Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books. 18Hofstadter, D. (2007), I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books. 19Corballis, M. C. (2014), The

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London Mathematical Society, pp. 161–228. The paper was based on Turing’s 1938 PhD thesis of the same title (Princeton University). 22Hofstadter, D. (1979), Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books. 13 The Program 1Or ‘memes’, to use Richard Dawkins’ paradigm, where ideas behave like genes and are

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

by Melanie Mitchell  · 14 Oct 2019  · 350pp  · 98,077 words

select Google AI researchers could hear from and converse with Douglas Hofstadter, a legend in AI and the author of a famous book cryptically titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, or more succinctly, GEB (pronounced “gee-ee-bee”). If you’re a computer scientist, or a computer enthusiast, it’s likely

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upon the book in 1975, was deeply impressed by the hundred problems in the appendix and wrote about them at length in his own book Gödel, Escher, Bach. That’s where I first saw them. Since childhood, I’ve always loved puzzles, especially ones involving logic or patterns; when I read GEB, I

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ConvNets that lack what it takes: no existing AI system has anything close to these fundamental human abilities. Active Symbols and Analogy Making After reading Gödel, Escher, Bach and deciding to pursue research in AI, I sought out Douglas Hofstadter, with the hope that I could work on something like Bongard problems. Happily

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with AI for many years, I am finding the embodiment argument increasingly compelling. 16 Questions, Answers, and Speculations Near the end of his 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter interviewed himself about the future of AI. In a section called “Ten Questions and Speculations,” he posed and answered questions not only about

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of his remarks to the Google group.   3.  Jack Schwartz, quoted in G.-C. Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts (Boston: Berkhäuser, 1997), 22.   4.  D. R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 678.   5.  Ibid., 676.   6.  Quoted in D. R. Hofstadter, “Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye

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with Google Translate’s lack of understanding, see D. R. Hofstadter, “The Shallowness of Google Translate,” The Atlantic, Jan. 30, 2018. 22.  D. R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 603. 23.  E. Davis and G. Marcus, “Commonsense Reasoning and Commonsense Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence,” Communications

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(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). 19.  Hofstadter coined the term conceptual slippage in his discussion of Bongard problems in chapter 19 of D. R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 20.  Ibid., 349–51. 21.  A detailed description of Copycat is given in chapter 5 of

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Intelligence (Basel, Switzerland: Springer, 2016), 555–72. 18.  N. Bostrom, “How Long Before Superintelligence?,” International Journal of Future Studies 2 (1998). 19.  D. R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 677–78. 20.  From “The Myth of AI: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier,” Edge, Nov. 14

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of Life Institute G game tree; in checkers; in chess; in Go Gates, Bill GEB, see Gödel, Escher, Bach general or human-level AI General Problem Solver genetic art geofencing Gershwin, Ira Go (board game); see also AlphaGo Gödel, Escher, Bach (book) GOFAI Good, I. J. Goodfellow, Ian Google DeepMind, see DeepMind Google Translate; see also

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond

by Daniel Susskind  · 14 Jan 2020  · 419pp  · 109,241 words

insurmountable: the researchers merely had to make their own, simple computers more sophisticated.20 As the computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter puts it in his celebrated Gödel, Escher, Bach, it was an “article of faith” for many researchers that “all intelligences are just variations on a single theme; to create true intelligence, AI workers

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.” Quoted in William Grimes, “Hubert L. Dreyfus, Philosopher of the Limits of Computers, Dies at 87,” New York Times, 2 May 2017. 21.  Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 579. 22.  Daniel Crevier, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (New York: Basic

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,” Popular Mechanics, 10 February 2014.   9.  John Searle, “Watson Doesn’t Know It Won on ‘Jeopardy!’,” Wall Street Journal, 23 February 2011. 10.  Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 601: “There is a related ‘Theorem’ about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people

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’ was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler’s Theorem: ‘AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.’” 11.  Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 678. 12.  Douglas Hofstadter, “Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye—And Doing My Best Not to Flinch” in David Cope, ed., Virtual Music: Computer

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. 95. 40.  George Johnson, “Undiscovered Bach? No, a Computer Wrote It,” New York Times, 11 November 1997. 41.  Hofstadter, “Staring Emmy,” p. 34. 42.  Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 677. 43.  H. A. Shapiro, “‘Heros Theos’: The Death and Apotheosis of Herakles,” Classical World 77, no 1 (1983): 7–18. Quotation is from

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, Glenn W. Most, ed. and trans. Loeb Classical Library 57. London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin, 1999. Hofstadter, Douglas. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. London: Penguin, 2000. ________. “Just Who Will Be We, in 2493?” Indiana University, Bloomington (2003). ________. “Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye—And

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson  · 12 May 2011  · 274pp  · 70,481 words

Being or Nothingness. But I couldn’t work out if he’s a real person or a fictional character. Is he well known?” “He wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach!” she replied, surprised by my lack of knowledge. “It was momentous.” I didn’t reply. “If you’re a geek,” sighed Deborah, “and you’re

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just discovering the Internet, and especially if you’re a boy, Gödel, Escher, Bach would be like your Bible. It was about how you can use Gödel’s mathematic theories and Bach’s canons to make sense of the

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-1960s. Furthermore, Being or Nothingness looked like a Hofstadter book. The clean white cover was reminiscent of the cover of Hofstadter’s follow-up to Gödel, Escher, Bach—the 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop. True, the creation of a fake Indiana University student with a fake Facebook page and an unlikely

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slightly facetious questions and his replies revealed him to be a serious, quite impatient man:Q. You first became known in 1979, when you published “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” a campus classic, which finds parallels between the brains of Bach, M. C. Escher and the mathematician Kurt Gödel. In your new book, “I Am

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

by Ray Kurzweil  · 31 Dec 1998  · 696pp  · 143,736 words

, Jonathan Rées Descartes presents a unified view of Descartes’s philosophy and its relation to other systems of thought. 10 Quoted from Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 11 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (1950): 433-460, reprinted in E. Feigenbaum and J

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often referred to as a word “sense.” It is likely that Shakespeare used more than 100,000 word senses. 20 Quoted from Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 21 Michael Winerip, “Schizophrenia’s Most Zealous Foe,” New York Sunday Times, February 22, 1998. 22

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: Simon and Schuster, 1983. Hoel, Paul G., Sidney C. Port, and Charles J. Stone. Introduction to Stochastic Processes. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1972. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. _________. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Hofstadter

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick  · 1 Mar 2011  · 855pp  · 178,507 words

, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Eclesiasticall and Civill. London: Andrew Crooke, 1660. Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. London: Vintage, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. ———. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. New York: Basic Books, 1985. ———. I

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

by Daniel C. Dennett  · 15 Jan 1995  · 846pp  · 232,630 words

the thinkers I most admire have come out in defense of one or another version of reductionism, carefully circumscribed. The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, in Godel Escher Bach, composed a "Prelude ... Ant Fugue" (Hofstadter 1979, pp. 275-336) that is an analytical hymn to the virtues of reductionism in its proper place. George

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Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

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The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press)

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Team Human

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The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

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Principles of Protocol Design

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The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume

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Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

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Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life

by Steven Johnson  · 2 Jan 1999  · 294pp  · 86,601 words

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?

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AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together

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