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I can see why this guy is popular. I wonder whether he'd be so quick to dismiss Gödel and Quine if presented with an utterance like, "This sentence is tru
by myWindoonn 8y ago
I can see why this guy is popular.
I wonder whether he'd be so quick to dismiss Gödel and Quine if presented with an utterance like,
"This sentence is true, but cannot be proven true by any human nor any human-crafted device."
I'm quite confident that this sentence is true, but cannot put forth a proof which would convince anybody; at the same time, just like any other mathematical object, its proof is generated by the observer, who convinces themselves of its truth while simultaneously acknowledging the paradox.
Gödel's entire point was that this formulation was rigorous and could not be escaped by a mere change of (syntactic or semantic) venue. Turing's point was that this formulation extends to computation and effective methods of producing results. Quine's point was that it is the quotation mark, and not the self-reference, that leads to the incompleteness/inconsistency.
I probably wouldn't mind so much, but he seems like the kind of guy who believes in physical cause and effect.
- foldr 8y agoAre Gödel and Quine mentioned in the article?
- igravious 8y agoQuotation marks enable self-reference. To quote myself, "Quotation marks enable self-reference". To quote myself again, “To quote myself, "Quotation marks enable self-reference".”. A formulation is that which is formal (Gödel) and the act of forming (Turing). A computation is the act of computing (Turing) and that which is computable (Gödel). The less said about Quine the better.
- naasking 8y ago> Gödel's entire point was that this formulation was rigorous and could not be escaped by a mere change of (syntactic or semantic) venue. Well that's not true, because there exist logics that are both consistent and complete, they simply don't have the expressive power of full arithmetic. This is a syntactic or semantic change, depending on how you frame it.
- jan888 8y agoCan you give an example of a consistent and complete logic?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- brownbat 8y agoIt sounded like he agrees he just doesn't think it is that interesting or meaningful. He's probably primed by the frequent misappropriation of Gödel to support radical skepticism in pop sci contexts, something I'm not sure Gödel or Quine would have thought very highly of either. (I've seen videos of Quine railing against skeptics... I do not think he had much patience for it.)
- vedantroy 8y agoI have very little experience with philosophy, but the stated sentence does not seem to be true or false, it just... exists.
- njharman 8y agoPython 3.7.0 (default, Jul 23 2018, 20:22:55) >>> bool("This sentence is true, but cannot be proven true by any human nor any human-crafted device.") True