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Sunday 3 March 2019

My views on Gödel Incompleteness Theorem



1:41:00  at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVruiZX5nEM Jordan Peterson says God is the miscellaneous file of everything we can't do or don't know, or something along those lines. It is an example of hypothetical reasoning eg "Let's assume for the sake of argument that God exists and His laws are good for us." Anyone who thinks God's laws are not good for us would have to demonstrate that they are not. Those who do would argue that they are.


Church of Entropy
Streamed live on 1 Mar 2019

I got an email about my Gödel proof. I will explore that today.

Email:

So that brings me to my interest in the proofs of Gödel with regards to what statements (and subsequent proofs of them) can be made in an axiomatic system. When I read Gödel, Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, along with the proofs that Gödel did with his Gödel numbering system, I started to (at least, believe I) understand the implications of the two proofs and began to think it might have a great deal of overlap with my interests in psychology, philosophy and the limits of language/abstraction itself. That is to say, that there are statements that are true that cannot be proven true (unless you can get outside the system to prove it - but let's shelve that latter part for now). 

So, to bed my understanding/supposition within an example in the real-world then, it would be a statement of many of the belief in something non-provable such as the existence of God. Now, because our limits on our axiomatic system (of language; codified symbols of meaning) we may ask the question 'does God exist?' but a proof using any of our tools - especially language - and I mean this in a sense of transferability, as in, that it is both able to be stated and once stated able to be fundamentally understood, means that for now at least we face a problem in that it cannot be done to all questions. So far, the only proof of this example question that has worked for anyone is one's own subjective sense of knowing that comes from consciousness - and in my mind at least, suggests that this knowing is bestowed from observance from outside of the system (given that we have an ability to take a 'view from nowhere', to give a reference to Thomas Nagel). That is to say, a proof cannot bridge the physical space between two people and that it must come from 'somewhere' outside of an individual to the individual only.

If my understanding of this, and the conclusions I've drawn are in any way correct, Gödel has shown (to me, for now) to keep with the same example there is a possibility that God exists, because (for now at least) it cannot be proven in a manner that we can share or express within this rule-set/system of expression/axiomatic system. I see a conjecture such as this being akin to the prime-number conjecture. With regards to primes, it's heavily suspected that the conjecture is a true statement, and logic would be on the side of that conjecture in terms of the patterns generated, but absolute proof is lacking due to the problem of an infinity of examples and that there exists no complete set of all primes - but also more specifically that we are unable to discover a formula that produces prime numbers (i.e. what is fed into the system from outside the system to create them with regards to distance between etc.)

To refer back to your comment that you replied to me with, you said "the issue with the proof is the definition of 'truth', specifically that an arbitrary number of true statements exist", I believe I need to define what I understand by the term true here, and I will draw a distinction to split 'true' up. There are true (lower-case t) statements that have proofs and there are True (upper-case t) statements that cannot have proofs. The former true statements and proofs are available to be expressed coherently and tested within the same system/rules that governed the construction of the conjecture itself. The latter True statements lack proofs and/or 'good questions', and what this means is that there is a space (i.e 'set of all T/truths') that will forever have absent patches. Let me illustrate this with a crappy mspaint-job:

The whole square can be through of as the 'set of all T/truths'.

So in summary, my understanding is that there is not an arbitrary/whimsical amount of T/truth - there are finite T/truths but we are not able to ask the correct questions and/or prove all Truths. In that regard, and if my terminology is correct, the amount of Truth is undefined (yet must be finite). That being said, perhaps 'the set' is fractal at the edges and therefore has an infinite edge but finite area? I'm just spitballing there, so shelf that.

Lastly, I'm willing to accept any part of/all of the above is the ramblings of a madman, and I come to you with gratitude for your openness (there are literally zero people I know personally that I could have such a conversation with in person, and don't even get me started on the state of 'masked discourse' that The Internet allows - or doesn't, as the case may be). So I figure, what the heck, you have my attention but if I'm honest I'm not quite in sync with your method of expression, topics and proofs (yet) but I feel compelled to ask and listen all the same in the sense that you're certainly projecting something I haven't quite elucidated myself yet and feel you're open to reciprocity... So please, go ahead and set me straight or point me to some place of further learning on my above presupposition!




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