Gödel Escher Bach by

Douglas R. Hofstadter:
Summary, Notes, and
Lessons

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High-Level Thoughts
This book stretched my mind more than almost any other book
I’ve read. It’s tough at parts, it’s long, but you’ll come out of it
thinking about brains, minds, intelligence, and AI in an entirely
new way.
Summary Notes
Introduction: A Musico-Logical Offering
In the Musical Offering, Bach includes an inscriptions whose
first letters combine to spell “RICERCAR”, and Italian word
meaning “to seek”
The Offering has a three part fugue, a six part fugue, ten canons,
and a trio sonata.
Canons: In a canon, a single theme is played against itself. Like
Row Row Row Your Boat. In the basic canon, the first voice
enters, and after a period, the second voice enters at the same
beginning as the first, layering on top of each other. There are
also more complicated canons, where the second voice may
enter at a different pitch as well.
Fugue: A fugue is like a canon, in that it’s based on one theme
which gets played in different voices, but the notation is much
less rigid and you can play with it more.
Bach created an “endlessly rising canon,” in which it ends and
immediately restarts but a note up. The transition is seamless,
and allows it to continue rising forever. This is the first
example in the book of a “Strange Loop,” a loop whereby
moving through it we unexpectedly find ourselves right back
where we started. Such as in the famous Escher paintings like
the infinite staircase.
Epimenides Paradox: Another form of strange loop, contained
in statements like “This statement is false.” It is a “one step
strange loop.”
Godel’s Incompleteness:
  Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem deals with strange loops,
asserting that any attempt for a number theory to define
itself will fail. “All consistent axiomatic formulations of
number theory include undecidable propositions.”
 The Godel sentence G could be better written as “This
statement of number theory does not have any proof in the
system of Principia Mathematica.”
 The real conclusion is that the system is incomplete, there
are true statements which its methods of proof are too weak
to demonstrate.
Russell’s Paradox: Most sets are not members of themselves.
For example, the set of all walruses is not itself a walrus. Or,
they are self-swallowing, such as the set of all things that are no
Joan of Arc. So sets are either run of the mill, or self-
swallowing, but we can define a set as The Set of All Run of the
Mill Sets which must be neither self-swallowing or run of the
mill. The culprit in these paradoxes is self reference, or
strange loopiness. Such as in the pair of statements “The
following sentence is false.” “The preceding sentence is true.”
To get rid of strange loops, you have to get rid of self reference.
But a complete system requires self reference, thus, strange
loops.

I: The Mu Puzzle
Requirement of Formality: You must not do anything outside
the rules of the system.
In formal systems, theorems are merely produced according to
certain rules of the system. These are called the “rules of
production.” A “free” theorem that we know to be true is an
“axiom” of the system. A “derivation” is an explicit, line by line
explanation of how to arrive at a theorem according to the
formal rules of the system.
One big difference between machines and humans is that it is
possible to program a machine to do a routine task, while
noticing no higher order to what it’s doing. Humans will
always recognize these patterns when they’re sufficiently
obvious. A car will never pick up the idea that it is supposed to
avoid other cars.
Jumping Out of the System: A property of intelligence is that
it can “jump out” of the system it’s in, such as by noticing that
it’s repeating the number “1” every time it presses the
calculator. We all perceive systems at different levels, and may
try to convince others that they’re operating within systems that
they’re blind to but that we observe. (Finite / Infinite Games)
It is necessary to distinguish between operating within the
system and making observations or statements about the
system. This is the M-Mode (mechanical mode) and the I-Mode
(intelligent mode).

II: Meaning and Form in Mathematics

Philosophical Problem: do words and language follow formal
rules, or do they not?
Isomorphism: An information-preserving transformation. It
applies when two complex structures can be mapped onto each
other, in such a way that to each part of one structure there is a
corresponding part in the other corresponding structure, where
the two parts play similar roles in their respective structures.
The perception of an isomorphism between two known
structures is an advance in knowledge, and the source of
creating meanings in people’s minds.

III: Figure and Ground

Artists distinguish between “figure and ground.” Usually the
figure is the focus, but sometimes there will be more meaning
hidden in the background.
“There exist formal systems whose negative space (set of non-
theorems) is not the positive space (set of theorems) of any
formal system.”
Contracrostipunctus
In this dialogue, they’re discussing the Tortoise’s record that
broke Crab’s record player by playing a sound that disassembled
it.
The clever element here is how there is meaning “above” the
discussions. The first letters of the different lines in the dialogue
spell out a sentence that is itself self-referential.

IV: Consistency, Completeness, and

Geometry
There is more to meaning than what’s obvious. People attribute
inherent meaning to words, when their context is just as
important. Or you might attribute “sound” as a necessary
element of a collision between two objects, but there would be
no sound if they collided in a vacuum. The noise requires a
certain medium.
In the dialogue, the Tortoise is saying that there can be no
sufficiently strong record player to withstand any record’s
ability to vibrate at the rate that will destroy it.
Consistency: When every theorem, upon interpretation, comes
out true (in some imaginable world).
Completeness: When all statements which are true (in some
imaginable world), and which can be expressed as well-formed
strings of the system, are theorems.
Little Harmonic Labyrinth
In this dialogue, Tortoise and Achilles end up being abducted
into a hot air balloon off of the ferris wheel. They arrive at their
captor’s “lair” and end up going into a book he has about
Achilles and the Tortoise, in which they find an Escher painting.
They then go in a step further to the alligator painting. Then
there’s a genie who can grant wishes, but has to ask “up the
chain” if he can grant a meta wish. Then they go down one more
story into the labyrinth. Eventually they pop back up a number
of levels, but they still haven’t “exited” the house of their captor,
despite the story ending.

V: Recursive Structures and Processes

To push means to suspend operation on what you’re currently
doing and take on a new task. This new task is said to be “on a
lower level” than the previous task. To “pop” is to jump back
out to the previous task you were doing.
In a recursive definition there’s always a “bottom,” a way out.
But in circular definitions it continues forever.
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even
when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Canon by Intervallic Augmentation
In this dialogue, they discuss modifying a tune to get different
tunes but with the same ratio of note changes, e.g. -1, +3, -1 and
-3, +10, -3

VI: The Location of Meaning

You can think of a record as an information bearer and the
record player as an information revealer. Alternatively, a
molecule of DNA is a set of information (genotype) which is
converted into a physical organism (phenotype).
Can a text have enough inner logic that its meaning is fully
restored whenever intelligence comes into contact with it? Or
must there always be some element of the information revealer
bestowing meaning to it?
We can say that meaning is part of an object to the extent that it
acts upon intelligence in a predictable way.
Three Layers to Every Message: We can say that a message
has three layers: the frame, the inner message, and the outer
message.
 To understand the inner message is to understand the
message intended by the sender
 To understand the frame is to recognize that there is some
need for a decoding mechanism
  To understand the outer message is to build, or know how
to build, the proper decoding mechanism for the message
 Consider a bottle on a beach: the frame is found when you
pick up the bottle and see it contains a message. Then when
you open it and see that there is language on it, you’ve
found the outer message, the need to decode it (you may
also need to figure out what language to decode by
recognizing the language), and then you can figure out the
inner message, what it meant to say.
There’s a potential infinite trap: believing that you need a
greater message to understand the included message, like
needing a rule to understand the rule.

Chromatic Fantasy, and Feud

This is the dialogue where the Tortoise insists on challenging
things Achilles repeats that the Tortoise has just said, e.g. “My
shell is green.”

VII: The Propositional Calculus

This chapter starts by outlining most of the rules of logic,
putting them into a new structure DH calls “TNT.”
Crab Canon
In this canon, Achilles and the Tortoise are having a
conversation in which they’re interrupted by Crab, after which
they repeat their statements in reverse order switching rules
(basically, a conversational palindrome).

VIII: Typographical Number Theory

This expands on the TNT explanations, bringing in more
elements of logic and mathematics.
“Any system that is strong enough to prove TNT’s consistency
is at least as strong as TNT itself.” So circularity is inevitable.

A Mu Offering
This is the discussion of Koans and zen strings. Discusses how
koans can let the practitioner “step out” of normal logical
reality.

IX: Mumon and Godel

The monk Mumon collected 48 koans with poems and short
commentaries that accompanied them.
A concise explanation of enlightenment: transcending dualism.
As soon as you perceive an object, you draw a line between it
and the rest of the world. You divide the world, artificially, into
parts and thereby miss the Way.
Zen strives for Ism, an anti-philosophy, a way of being without
thinking. It is the fate of us as higher beings to have to strive for
ism without ever being able to attain it fully.
Escher’s paintings in making us ask “are those birds? or planes?
or frogs?” make us step out a bit towards ism, recognizing the
inherent absurdity that they’re not anything at all.
There is no such thing as an uncoded message, only a message
written in a more familiar code.
Prelude…
This is a self-referential dialogue where they’ve constructed a
lost Bach piece from thin air, deriving it using mathematics. It’s
talking about how there are different “modes” we can consider
something (such as an Escher painting, a fugue, or the dialogue
itself).

X: Levels of Description and Computer

Systems
Intelligence depends on the ability to create high-level
descriptions of complex arrays, such as chess boards, printed
pages, or paintings.
You can “bootstrap” a language by acquiring enough of it to
keep teaching yourself more of it. That’s a certain inflection
point beyond which you no longer need to “step out” of the
language to keep growing in the language.
You don’t have to know everything about quarks to understand
the molecules that they compose.
There are certain epiphenomena, consequences of the system
that are not contained in the system. Nowhere in your body is
the number “9.3” coded if you can run 100 yards in 9.3 seconds.
Similarly in the game Go, the “two eye” rule isn’t coded in the
rules anywhere, it’s a consequence of the other rules.
Perhaps the mind can be understood without understanding the
lower levels on which it both depends and does not depend. Is
consciousness an epiphenomenon? Or do you have to go down
to the level of the nerve cell to understand the mind?
… Ant Fugue
The anteater is on good terms with the ant colonies, just not
specific ants, since he eats ants, but doing so helps the colonies.
Aunt Hillary is made up of ants, the individual ants don’t have
thoughts or intelligence but they combine to an intelligent
system. Just as every individual neuron need not be intelligent to
create an intelligent being.
You might think of your brain as an ant colony.
There are emergent pieces of a system. You don’t read every
individual letter and then put them together into words, you can
read whole words at once, despite the composite letters having
no inherent meaning.

XI: Brains and Thoughts

There is a “calculus of thinking” where concepts can suddenly
merge and split, such as when you find out that the person next
to you in the bathroom is also your friend from the gym. It is
said to be intensional instead of extensional, which means the
descriptions can float without being anchored to specific objects.
The intensionality of thought gives it its flexibility, it lets us
imagine new worlds and combine and chop up descriptions.
A single neuron can only respond by firing or not firing.
Symbols comprise larger groups of neurons firing in certain
ways, it’s a level above.
There are two challenges: one is to explain how the low-level
traffic of neuron firings gives rise to the high-level traffic of
symbol activation. The other is to explain the high-level traffic
of symbol activation in its own terms, to make a theory which
does not talk about the low-level neural events. If the latter is
possible, then intelligence can be realized on non-brain
hardware.
If you imagine a car skidding on a mountain rode, you’ll
imagine the mountain as bigger than the car, but you’ve never
explicitly laid out that comparison, most likely. Rather, it
happens naturally from your stored symbols of cars and
mountains, without being explicitly declared. Knowledge is not
stored explicitly, but implicitly, in a spread out manner, rather
than as a local packet of information. Simple facts such as
relative sizes of objects have to be assembled rather than merely
retrieved.

English French German Suite

This dialogue contains the poem “Jabberwocky” in three
different languages, notable since the poem is mostly gibberish
and so that gibberish can’t translate all that well.

XII: Minds and Thoughts

Surely there won’t be isomorphisms on the neural level, but
could there be on the symbol level? Could we map part of one
mind onto another one? Clearly not entirely, since if it did, there
would be two humans with identical thoughts. Even within
yourself your brain changes, imagine looking at something you
wrote even a few months ago.
The symbols among people with the same native language will
likely be similar, but how does that change in new languages?
We’re all bundles of contradictions, and that’s a natural function
of our brain, being able to hold contradictions comfortably.

Aria with Diverse Variations

Here they introduce the diagonals, first talk about DH himself,
and make allusions to ending the discussion earlier than the
written discussion ends.

XIII: BlooP, FlooP, and GlooP

If you have a sufficiently powerful formalization of number
theory, then Godel’s method is applicable, and your system is
incomplete. But if your system is not sufficiently powerful, then
your system is by virtue incomplete.
Not going to lie, I got a little lost in this section and I didn’t feel
like it ended up being necessary to understand the higher level
takeaways of the book.
Air on G’s String
This dialogue is the “yields falsehoods” one, in which they
discuss self-referential statements that are self destructive
(Epimenides Paradox).
“Is a sentence fragment” is a sentence fragment.

XIV: On Formally Undecidable Propositions

of TNT and Related Systems
Once again, very heavy in math and logic and I didn’t end up
needing the core points that much I felt. Or maybe I just didn’t
focus on them deeply enough.

Birthday Cantatatata….
The Tortoise insists on Achilles proving with increasing
certainty that it’s his birthday, “how can I trust that I can trust
you?” and so on.

XV: Jumping out of the System

Some argue that Godel’s theorem proves that mechanism is
false, that minds cannot be explained as machines.
The male and female argument: “I can see your face which is
something you can’t do” “But I can see your face which you
can’t do!” “Yes but you’re woman-seeing it, not really seeing
it… what you women do and call “seeing” is not what we men
do.”
A program cannot jump out of itself. No matter how much it
twists and turns, it is still following the rules inherent in itself.
Including us. There’s a difference between “seeing” ourselves
and “transcending” ourselves. But you cannot quite break out of
yourself and be outside of yourself.
In zen we can see this idea of self transcendence. The koan helps
you “step out” and break the rules of thought you’re normally
constrained by.
Edifying Thoughts of a Tobacco Smoker
This is the dialogue with the surreal paintings that the Crab
keeps interacting with while talking to Achilles.
XVI: Self-Ref and Self-Rep
It’s challenging to make a self referential sentence without
saying “this sentence.” You can kind of get around it though:
“The sentence “the sentence contains five words” contains five
words.”
Self-Rep: Self reproducing object or entity.
Self-Ref: Self referential object or entity.
A protein is manufactured by a ribosome according to the
blueprint carried from DNA to RNA. But the ribosome doesn’t
know the genetic code, it’s contained in the DNA. DNA sends
off long strings of messenger RNA to the ribosomes in the
cytoplasm, and the ribosomes make use of the “flashcards” of
tRNA hanging out to construct proteins, amino acid by amino
acid.
Incompleteness Theorem and DNA: It is always possible to
design a strand of DNA which, if injected into a cell, would,
upon being transcribed, cause such proteins to be manufactured
as would destroy the cell (or the DNA), and thus result in the
non-reproduction of that DNA.
The Magnificrab, Indeed
This is the dialogue where the crab can play mathematical
statements as music, but they only sound good if they’re true.

XVII: Church, Turing, Tarski, and Others

One of the main theses of the book: every aspect of thinking
can be viewed as a high-level description of a system which,
on a low level, is governed by simple, even formal, rules.
You could say that the brain exhibits no more amazing of a
“process” than the stomach. There’s no magical higher level, it’s
simply following the programmed rules.

SHRDLU, Toy of Man’s Designing

In this dialogue the character Eta Oin is telling the SHRDLU
program to manipulate blocks within a computer simulation.

XVIII: Artificial Intelligence: Retrospects

The Turing Test imagines a computer and a person in another
room, with you asking them questions trying to figure out which
one is the human and which the computer. If you cannot tell,
then the computer must be conscious.
One objection might be that it puts too much challenge on the
machine. It’s not as if a man could successfully imitate a
computer!
Tesler’s Theorem: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”
When a car has “wash me” drawn on the back, who is this
“me”? Is the car truly speaking? Is it the writer? Is it the phrase
itself? The dust?
Most problems exist in a “problem space” and being able to step
back and consider the space that you’ve put the problem in is a
core function of intelligence. If your dog keeps barking at the
fence, never considering running away from the bone a bit to
get closer to it via a gate, he’ll never get it. He has to reconsider
the problem space.
Representation of knowledge is at the crux of AI. Knowledge
doesn’t come in sentence like “packets,” it’s more abstract.

Contrafactus
This dialogue has the football game and the television that lets
them view counterfactual situations.

XIX: Artificial Intelligence: Prospects

In everyday thought, we are imagining slightly different
versions of situations that happened. Ones where we let some
features stay the same and others “slip” to create a new reality.
Symbols interact via fission and fusion. Fission is where they
gradually separate into multiple new symbols. Fusion is where
they come together to create larger meta symbols.
We all have “conceptual skeletons” for different phrases, like
Vice President and spare tires, but we can merge them in
interesting ways in response to statements like “The Vice
President is the spare tire of the automobile of government.”
Programs can pick up patterns in some areas, but not others,
meanwhile humans will always pick up patterns that appear in
their environment without explicitly looking for them. They just
pop out at us.
DH gives some speculations at the end of this chapter, including
that a computer program will write beautiful music, emotions
will not be explicitly coded into a machine, chess programs will
not be exclusively chess players (and thus could refuse to play
chess), and that AI programs may not become super intelligent.

Sloth Canon
In this dialogue, the music and the piano are backwards, creating
an odd feel to the sound.

XX: Strange Loops, or Tangled Hierarchies

Where does your sense of having a will come from? You’ll
probably say it comes from your brain, a piece of hardware you
neither designed nor chose. You aren’t a “self-programmed
object,” but you still do have a sense of desires and it springs
from the physical substrate of your mentality.
Do words and thoughts follow formal rules? Yes, if you go
down to the lowest level, the hardware, to find the rules.
Certain rule sets are inviolate, they cannot be changed.
Author Z could have author E in a story, who has author T in a
story, who has author Z in a story… but only if there is a fourth
author, author H, who has them all in his own story! They are
the strange loop, or tangled hierarchy, but H is outside of it.
We feel self-programmed, but we have no access to our lower
levels.
Once you begin to question your own sanity, you can get caught
in an ever tightening vortex of self-fulfilling prophecies.
Death, personal non-existence, is incomprehensible. When you
try to imagine your nonexistence you have to try to jump out of
yourself. While you may imagine that you have jumped out of
yourself, you really haven’t, it’s impossible, so most of us just
sweep the whole mess under the rug.
When you see the pipe painting in the pipe painting, you think
that the pipe that’s a level “higher” is “more real,” but that’s
absurd, they’re equally fake since they’re both in the painting
you’re looking at. Yet we still feel drawn to the hierarchy of
realness.
Constant level crossing is what creates our sense of self, it will
be necessary to be able to slip between multiple levels
comfortably to understand the full richness of the mind-brain
system.
What makes us call a system a “choice maker” is whether we
can identify with a high-level description of the process which
takes place when the program runs. On a low (machine
language) level, the program looks like any other program, on a
high (chunked) level, qualities such as “will,” “intuition,”
“creativity,” and “consciousness” can emerge.
Self-reference and loopiness is likely at the core of
understanding minds and developing AI.
We, on the outside, can know that the print gallery image is
incomplete in a way that the man in it can never know. We can
step outside and see the hole in the system, which he can never
observe.
Bach’s endlessly rising canon gives the musical form of strange
loopiness, continuing forever.

Six-Part Ricercar
The book ends on this dialogue involving six characters:
Achilles, Tortoise, Crab, DH, Turing, and Babbage, and ends in
the most appropriate way it possibly could.