fgtbell@kcl-cs.UUCP (ZNAC450) (02/11/86)
You may remember that I posted an aricle to the net a few months ago asking for information on any courses running on the book `Godel,Escher, Bach.' Here is a brief synopsis of the topics covered in the course we had here,followed by the mail I received from others.Many thanks to all who responded ; I hope you find the following information useful. "PROGRAMMABILITY" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The course is mainly based on Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach". To be more precise, its first 450 pages, plus a few short later sections. We have decided to forego Typogenetics. Also the AI section overlaps another course run by our Department. Examinability is an interesting problem. One wonders what feelings Hofstadter himself would have on this issue. At present our examination paper tends to be avoiding essay questions, and seems to have no effective place for a candidate's acquaintance with the worlds of Bach and Escher. Special emphasis is placed on course work and on personal or small group discussion. Course topics by theme : Logic/Philosophy/Psychology/Sociology/Computer Science : Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett: The Mind's Eye Douglas Hofstadter: Metamagical Themas figure/ground, Gestalt holism/reductionism David Bohm: Wholeness and the Implicate Order growing relevance of Paradox in logic/philosophy/psychology,etc William Quine: The Ways of Paradox Watslawick, Beavin, Johnson: Pragmatics of Human Communication the growing Computer Culture, "child philosophers", the Hackers Sherry Turkle: The Second Self Seymour Papert: Mindstorms are there basic social priorities among the programmables? Joe Weizenbaum: Computer Power and Human Reason Lewis Mumford: Technics and Civilisation Jacques Vallee: The Network Revolution Martin Gardner: The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener Godel and his Theorem : Propositional Calculus in Gentzen style Predicate Calculus in Hofstadter style (TNT) the Hilbert Program, antagonists being not only Godel but constructivist Brouwer the logic of Godel's theorem as developed from "quining", aided by Hofstadter's parallels Ernst Nagel, James Newman: Godel's Proof what can the theorem tell us in a wider sense today? ed. Alan Anderson: Minds and Machines The Programmmables : Marvin Minsky: Computation - Finite and Infinite Machines the pioneer originators of (hypothetical) Universal Systems: Post, Church, Turing Andrew Hodges: Alan Turing - The Enigma fundamentals of Recursive Function Theory, generability contrasted with testability for membership Predictably Terminating program systems, Hofstadter's BlooP, also the Kleene approach to primitive recursiveness Escher : his own views on his work, in particular and in general his relationship with maths, with Bach etc. his unique place in art history as creator of nonabstract forms (creatures) in the Regular Division of the Plane J.L.Locher: Escher Magritte : "this is not a pipe", words and reality, Wittgenstein's "language games" Suzi Gablik: Magritte Michel Foucault: This is not a pipe Georges Roque: Ceci n'est pas un Magritte Music in general : a simple pitch/rhythm notational program for the musically illiterate Hans Keller's analysis of musical meaning as Broken Expectations is there a universal grammar of music? Leonard Bernstein: Harvard Lectures Jeremy Campbell: Grammatical Man composed music as contrasted with folk/traditional noncomposed music how does/should a composer's individual style relate to more general musical evolutions? is a composer aided by forming or being given some system of rules or restrictions with which to operate? tonality? 12-tone? in what sense ought performance to reflect the composer's supposed intentions? Deryck Cooke: The Language of Music Leonard Meyer: Music, the Arts, and Ideas Sebastian Bach : Albert Schweitzer: Bach Wilfred Mellers: Bach and the Dance of God Malcolm Boyd: Bach Hans David: J.S.Bach's Musical Offering how far is Bach's music universal? globally? (Hofstadter) galactically? his place in European musical history characteristics of the Baroque period in music in Germany at the time of Bach the relations of musical experience to maths and to magic and mysticism is Bach primarily a composer of religious music whatever that phrase quite means? counterpoint (listening as multiprocessing), canons, fugues characteristics of Bach's last period, music as "sounding arithmetic"? relation of composer to society in the time of Bach as contrasted with, shall we say, 50 years later (Amadeus!) ====================================================================== HERE FOLLOW THE TEXTS OF INFOMATIVE RESPONSES TO MY LAST ARTICLE ====================================================================== Dear Francis, We had an undergraduate seminar on GEB at the computer-science department of the University of Bonn (West Germany) in winter 1981/82. The 12-week course was very successful and we had a lot of fun. Every week a chapter of the book (together with the dialogues) was presented by a student. The students were very engaged, we were listening to the music and had interesting discussions. The final dialogue of the book was even presented as a theater performance by some students. Although the book was then not very popular in Germany (the German translation appeared this year and became a bestseller (I thought, it would be impossible to translate the book ! )), the number of students who wanted to attend the course exceeded the number of available places by a factor of 2. I can highly recommend such a course to everyone and would be very interested in getting more details about you course. Friedemann Mattern ================================================================== The University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) had a philosophy course in which one or two chapters of the book were discussed each week. Your mark in the course was based 100% on an essay handed in at the end of the term on any topic related to the book and approved by the prof. It was a VERY interesting course. Approximately 2/3 of the students were computer/math oriented. since the whole point of the course was discussion, the prof did not prevent the discussion from going in any reasonable direction. Mark (utzoo/dciem/nrcaero/xios/mark) ======================================================================= In answer to your query, I have heard that the University of Waterloo has been offering a course in Hofstadter's book, probably in the philosophy department. If I can get hold of a calendar, I'll mail you the details. -- Steve J. Rapaport ...watmath!watrose!sjrapaport ===================================================================== As a recall, there was a course taught at Dartmouth that had that as its major text. It was a seminar taught in the computer science dept. I don't know much about it, but I had a friend in it about 2 years ago. I think it was taught only once. DB Kay Dartmouth College ================================================================ I know that J.F. Baldwin, Department of Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol, has used GEB in his courses but not for a complete course - just as a discussion or essay topic, I think. Fred Long, Dept. Computer Science, U.C.W. Aberystwyth ================================================================= Any comments or suggestions please,by email. Thanks, -- ---francis King's College London Department of Computing. ( !kcl-cs!neon!fgtbell ) Long live Westfield ! [aaaargh!...stabbed in the back by a merger]