This guy clearly states: "I'm a senior math major at MIT".. he's 22 .. he's an undergrad .. he's visibly a young whippersnapper .. yet, comments take him to task for his flaws and shortcomings .. can any of you math geniuses step back and see the obvious .. he's presenting a fully complete set of lectures on a profoundly important and influential and pulitzer prize winning work - and he's doing a pretty damn good job of it .. what's the matter with y'all .. shame ..

'I got through it in seven years'; Good to know it's not just me.

Lecture Notes 1/2: ***Tool for thinking (from non-self to self) 1) Isomorphism - means equal in this course but means something more specific in abstract algebra - [[8:40]] - [[11:02]] e.g. skateboard vs. car, each structure can be mapped onto the other (inverse). But this example is homomorphism since skateboard is missing parts. 2) Recursion - repetitive process that includes self. - [[11:10]] - [[17:14]] - e.g. mixing egg or Fibonacci sequence or fractal [[13:42]] - [[17:14]] - which is the number of dimensions in a doubling process 2^d = N. 3) Paradox a) Veridical (eventually true) b) falsidical c) antinomy - [[17:20]] - [[26:30]] e.g. Birthday paradox a) Veridical (eventually true) e.g. Zeno's paradox & atom movement; b) falsidical e.g. 1+1-1+1-1=0 or 1? illegal moves c) antinomy e.g. the liar in Russell's paradox "This sentence is not true." & barber's paradox cannot shaves his own beard [Omega = {all set that doesn't contain themselves as a member}, so is Omega contains itself?] 4) Infinity integers vs. real numbers[][](kzfaq.info/get/bejne/p62Jd7SI0pqdp4k.html) - [[26:34]] 5) Formal systems - how do things gain meaning and exit the system [[38:35]] which is metathinking - [[27:37]] - [[37:58]] e.g. MIU puzzle from MI to MU -> algebra system with axiom, string, rules, and theorem. ***About the system - [[39:20]] The lecturer's favourite quote on metathinking by Hofstadter (p24 in lecture notes, p37 in book): "Of course, there are cases where only a rare individual will have the vision to perceive a system which governs many people’ lives, a system which had never before even been recognized as a system; then such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there, and that it ought to be exited from!" e.g. Karl Marx and communism exiting bourgeois' system; the media / the government / the church / the school (contrary by Montessori Education). 3 modes of interacting with the system - [[42:33]] 1) mechanical - follow 2) intellegent 3) unmode / zen

Classic...right as he begins to describe what the class is about a student immediately raises his hand and asks "what is the class about." And all the poor guy can do is say "okay, so that's what I'm going to go through right now" as if it wasn't obvious he is trying to begin to describe what the class is about. lol...even at MIT undergrads are undergrads.

Just to clarify on the Birthday Problem mentioned at 17:30 : The lecture refers to the high probability of another person, from a group of 40, sharing your birthday. It should be the high probability of at least two people from the group sharing a birthday. If you constrain beforehand who one of the people will be (ie. yourself) then it becomes a lot less likely. The chance of a unique pair is extremely high, the chance of you being part of that pair is relatively low.

After I knew him Kurt Gödel by the book written by Rebecca Goldstein, I met this book by chance in the local bookstore year ago. And now, I even hesitate to open it because i cannot imagine from what he says while reading. I just know it is profound work but, It makes me terrible if i can't reach his thought so that i think i should stop reading and need to read something else that help my depth of thought be deep+my English speaking. I didn't imagine these kind of lecture talking about such a book and get impression of people and you professor. Thank you for offering these video. Now these are my guider to understand it with deep depth.

By the time I got to college, my copy of GEB was dogeared. It was my bible. How I would have dreamed to have a class such as this on offer at my university. Finally, in the 90's I had a chance to attend a lecture by Hofstadter himself. The lecture was about computer music and alluding to the Turing test.

i raised my hand for 24 min and he didnt even look at me.

This is brilliant!! thank you for posting this!!! i love lecture videos

I quickly read through the book after high school thinking it was a spiritual book on consciousness. 10 years later, I come to find it was a book on mathematics!

Very instructive, Jason, Thank you for posting. I'll follow on with your four other posts.

I've read GEB 3 times and I recommend it to people all the time. It was very influential on a book I wrote on Forensic Science.

this valuable lesson refreshes my sight on how to observe the mathematical world. Great thanks!

17:22: The birthday paradox is stated incorrectly. If you are in a room with 40 people, the probability that someone shares your birthday is actually low. However, the probability that there are two people in the room with the same birthday is very high. It is this that is called the birthday paradox.

Thank god. I’ve been reading this book forever lol

I have just read David Foster Wallace History of Infinity, finishing Rebecca Goldstine about Godel, and have read few chapters in GEB by Hofstadter. Thank you for this lecture. It is like a candy for the mind :)

What a fascinating and fun lecture!

He goes from logical elements without value and works it to selfawarness. Isolated the most pertinent parts of the text. Read the book for 7 years. I got to know the book from the outside, but never read it myself. It is a book you treat with reverence, it looks like a good book. Godel, Escher, Bach.

Thank you, Dr. Justin Curry, for this wonderful lecture.

Thank You. This is going to be so much fun. You saved me at 27:51. Skipping the first 3 chapters. Ive been stuck in that part of the book.....also you are a very good teacher. I can tell already. This whole course is going to be so fun. ♒♒✨✨✨✨

Jason, thanks so much for posting this video! I am on the last chapter of GEB and thought it would be fun to watch these videos to help me digest the book a little better. It's the most creative book I have ever read, but I never would have tackled it had my software engineering son not encouraged me to (dared me?). These videos are a great summary. Thanks again!

37:51 Great lecture series... I really liked the idea suggested here about the importance of stepping out of a formal system to see the larger truth about it. Justin generalized this idea to breakthroughs happening in human society. He quoted the example of how Carl Marx. For good or for evil, these people stepped out of the cultural formal system and introduced new ones.

Excellent, excellent lecture, thank you.

EXCELLENT, IS WONDERFUL. THANKS

I read the first hundred pages of Godel Escher Bach and struggled a bit. Watching your lecture after really helped.

This content is great! Thanks!

And people say its difficult to learn/educational opportunities are limited. We live in a time when one can get GEB pdf online and take the MIT companion course for free. Instead people decide to put their time into FB and twatting (or is it tweeting?).

The Birthday Paradox concerns the probability of find two people in a room with the same birthday. The probability of a particular person finding another with the same birthday is a different thing and much smaller.

Gravitation can be used to model a physical system that exhibits Godel incompleteness. This gravitational system is the three body problem.

Acabo de comprar el libro, estoy emocionado por empezarlo 😌

Great lecture/lesson 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

This is why we say .. copyrights sucks ! Lets all hope for a free world.

He pushed through the S-triangle example too fast, which is a great shame. A few more minutes would've made the argument clear. The issue is that the S-triangle upon doubling gives an empty triangle in the middle and three triangles that are exactly identical due to a property of fractiles called self-similarity. This is why you have three *identical* S-triangles left after the doubling process. If we had a normal solid triangle, it would have had four copies of the original triangle, yielding a dimension of 2 (log_2(4) = 2). Similarly, if we were looking at the triangle's two dimensional perimeter, it would have twice the number of each edge, for a dimension of log_2(2)=1.

This gets SO much more interesting as it goes on. Even though this guy needs to work on his public speaking skills, he is clearly well-versed on some seriously deep sh*t. More power to ya, boooyyy. I'm watching all these vids. Quantum physics is getting boring. I'm interested in the limits of logic, and how it applies to philosophy and the mind of [the creator of the universe]. Logic, symbols, and how they fit together and break down might define human reality. (Although I think there is much more, somehow.)

I started thinking on such a high level that I can't see the ground any more.

asking students to solve a problem in class, and not giving them time to try it, is more cruel than giving them an unsolvable problem.

Thank you!! Love this lecture. And the work of Hofstadter. Currently reading 'I am a strange loop'. I always enjoyed thinking about that kind of issues. ♥️🧠🤯

Thank you. Love it. Upvote.

Beautiful - thanks for posting this! I partially read GEB two decades ago as a young undergrad, and it was a profound influence. I've taken it up again now that I find myself with lots of spare time (hope I'll read it all this time!...) and it's interesting to see other people's takes on it. Thanks again!

"Finally, there is the concept of infinity. I can't really talk too much about it..." XD (and note "finally" ;)

Thanks for sharing ! Very helpful !

Just started reading the book; really looking forward to these lectures!

at 8:09, someone walked out. This brings me back to my university days. Whilst the lecture is talking, some students gobble up his dictation verbatim. Some listen to his spew, and actually have original thoughts of themselves for themselves . This is a brilliant lecture 😊👌

This was posted ten years ago. It’s 2023 and ai brought me here to gain more insight self. We are in the future

In Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance, Persig talks about dynamic quality ans stratified levels of static order. it is a vision of complexity.

I could sit down and read this in a day, it wouldn't be hard to read it. Absorbing it will take a long time.

That's smart lecture notes numbered for the use of the refto book

I bought GEB when it came out. Best non-fiction book I have ever read & I treasure it, even if it is only a paperback!

Ever since I read Godel Escher Bach, I have maintained that "isomorphism" is the most important word of our age for properly understanding the universe. Also, I suspect the answer to whether the universe is deterministic or not may be "both".

“When I taught this course two Springs ago…” as a Sophomore. I didn’t get up in front of a class and formally teach a subject until my Senior year, and that was about once every 2-3 class days, since all of us MathEd-majors had to take turns.

The term "fractal" refers to the fact that the set presents many details at many scales (fractionated in the sense of broken set) not to the fact the dimension is not integral. In fact fractals can have integral dimension and when the dimension is not integral it is usually irrational and hence not a fraction.

I started reading this about 6 years ago, got about 1/3 in and stopped for no particular reason. I have been thinking about it again recently...

I feel a lot better now, knowing that the 4 years it took me to finish I'm A Strange Loop is not out of the ordinary

I love provocative topics

I read 90% of the book at age 18 in the eighties and followed up with "The Mind's I" by Hofstädter and Dennett which was similar but different in its form of presentation. Both books deeply influenced me (I called them my personal bible) and when internet came out in the late nineties one on my first e-mails went to Hofstädter asking him about how he could cope with his overwhelming knowledge? He kindly responded that it was no problem for him. I was clearly struggling to find meaning in life and not become a nihilist back then. I'm still around and I'm still fascinated by GEB that uses a twist that AFAIK no one ever mentioned anywhere: SPOILER ALERT!!! The book itself is self-reflecting and it ends where it starts - like an eternal golden braid. Am I the only one who noticed that genius move by Hofstädter?

🛹 and 🚗 - no steering wheel, but you can abstract the function of steering and still map since both systems do have steering - lots of ways to cut and sort

Great lecture

QM-TIME singularity is the context of particular quantitative resonant phase-states of "self-referential" existence, persons, in a content that combined, has the quality of "I", and because all these resonant phase-states are tuned-timing images of the singularity, the individual combinations represent some degree of focus of the whole. (That's a short description in current terms of a very old repeat discovery of a personal self in the context of a Universal self. It is what it is, elaboration doesn't enhance the principle.)

I remember reading in the book of a inferior computer which wood claim defeat in a programmed chess game sooner than a computer of more circuitry so to speak. I myself found a gray area of interest in that determination.

The Monte-Hall 3-Doors Puzzle with only one door being a winner seems to fall under one of the types of apparent paradoxes where the answer seems arbitrary but is absolutely true. The puzzle: You choose one door (1/3 chance of winning), but then Monte opens up one of the remaining doors, which is a loser, and he gives you the chance to choose again between the remaining 2 doors (stand pat or switch to the last non-chosen door). What should you do? The answer is ABSOLUTELY to switch to the non-chosen door since the chance of winning goes way up then. Most people do not see the point, but it seems that the Universe is lazy and if you do nothing, your odds remain 1/3 but if you now choose the other door, the chance now goes up at least to 1/2. But you HAVE to make the switch to change to the new odds since otherwise, the old odds remain. The Lazy Universe Theorem?

Next level MIT OCW.

If that guy that asked the question @1:48; "What's this class about?" wasn't wearing a tanktop I'd be really surprised.

When I read the book in the early nineties it was about the god-feeling, that every piece of the puzzle falls into it's place, but you can't prove it's right, because you need to step out of the framework you just built. Now it's about the "I"... Times and interpretations change. Although this lecture is interesting I highly recommend to stop watching and read the book first.

Does this lecture go into any analysis and further development of the book and subject or does it simply explain it and expand on the concepts that go into it to make it understandable for people who otherwise wouldn't get it?

excellent that is he doing in 2020 .

The atoms, proteins and molecules are not "meaningless" they are just "uncorrelated" into the set we refer to as "I" ...

All intelligence, complex or simple, must be recursive in nature. The feedback loop is necessary for references and definitions to evolve into a human language. Human language is the byproduct of a logical system that is recursive. Biological evolution is a variable, naturally occurring, recursive process(albeit an incredibly slow one) that only stops when the conditions needed for specific DNA mutations are met.

It basicly states that I was a bad maths student because I was always metathinking

Awesome!

Just wow ...

Read the book independently while taking "Computability and Formal Languages" at Barnard/Columbia back in the 80s.

Thank you professor Curry😊

Both. It is part of the search query and I did not understand the PQ system based solely on the usage in this video.

please turn on community-contributions for a subtitle to let people add subtitles...

I need to do a lot of homework to be able to follow this.

this guy is good

I haven’t finished the video but does he finish the MIU theorem proof using the axioms?

Hooray! Canadian Brass!

His assertion at ~17:30 about "finding someone else with your birthday in a room of 40 people" was misstated. He should have said "finding two people with the same birthday". The probability of the two statements are very different. The first one is not surprising, but the second one is.

Enjoying this. Are the class notes lecturer refers to somewhere online? ( I have the book )

Yes. I figured that if I forgot your reward, I should at least conjure up an expression similar to regret.

"Self-determinacy is a deep but subtle concept, owing largely to the fact that unlike either determinacy or randomness, it is a source of bona fide meaning. Where a system determines its own composition, properties and evolution independently of external laws or structures, it can determine its own meaning, and ensure by its self-configuration that its inhabitants are crucially implicated therein. " C.M.Langan, CTMU.

Solved the MU puzzle in

So did the lecture end or did they cut out some of the end?Why did it fade out while the teacher was still talking?

This is amazing when you know music theory

This is super interesting

I purchased this book 3 years ago. Still haven't read a page😂. I am attempting to now.

Logic as allegory...Thomas Mann ...Venice adventures....

"Dialogue C cannot be spoken in this lecture series"

I mean no disrespect but to those of you who are exploring GEB for the 1st time, please buy the book. This guy isn't great at communicating or connecting the ideas, though I appreciate his effort. The book is multi-faceted and there are parts that will leave you amazed, truly enlightening. This lecture proves why Douglas H. took his 'sweet time' laying out the fundamentals.

I have been at it (on and off) for 30 years now and still have not got through it!

Ever notice how many major unsolved problems in physics and AI lie at infinity. I would argue that we still don't really understand what infinity even is....

what would happen if pinocchio said my nose will grow now?

I believe you misspoke when you were explaining the "Birthday Paradox". You said that most people assume that you would need a large group of people in order to ensure that someone in the room has the same birthday as you, and you said that you would really only need about 40 people in the room for this result. There is no way that that could be true. Did you mean to say that, in a group of about 40 people, there will very likely be two people with the same birthday as each other?

With the way he describes zeno's paradox.... Would a base 0-9 real number axiom be necessary for "infinitely infinite"recursion and imaginary numbers of half steps?

Oh no! Adore this guy, but he misstated The Birthday Paradox! But that's really a good thing, and a lesson to us all. The very best minds have a lapsus; of course he knows, he's a tiny bit nervous.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey - OCW-MIT, presented by Justin Curry and Curran Kelleher (2007). Very interesting view of Douglas Hofstadter's excellent book...

When you have a high school education in math but still find this absolutely fascinating.. I wish I could go back in time. lol

Thanks for the upload sir

I don't really know if the comments are legit (or maybe just trolls), or whether they were posted before youtube introduced the reply feature (so they were meant for other users commenting), however I really enjoyed this lecture. Concepts were well presented except for a few slight errors. I have not read the book and am excited for the next lectures