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> is godels incompleteness theorem disprovable Do you actually understand its proof? On what basis would it be disproven? It's really difficult for me to even
by not_kurt_godel 7y ago
> is godels incompleteness theorem disprovable
Do you actually understand its proof? On what basis would it be disproven? It's really difficult for me to even conceive of what disproving it would even "mean" - you seem to think that it's somehow tied to whether the universe is deterministic, but it's not. A "disproof" would essentially break the very logical tools used to construct itself (since it is the nature of these that Godel's theorem concerns); it's like trying to drive further north than the north pole - there simply isn't a conceptual direction to go unless you completely redefine the meaning of "north".
Edit: Also, Laplace's demon has likely been formally proven to be impossible: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-proof-reveals-fundamental-limits-scientific.html https://phys.org/news/2018-05-proof-reveals-fundamental-limi... Perhaps your apparent belief in Laplace's Demon combined with the comparison of this proof to Godel's Theorem is your motivation to suggest that it can be disproven?
- AndrewKemendo 7y agoI agree with you that any progress in these areas would include breaking pretty much everything we "know." That's kind of the point though, current epistemology and computability questions basically stop with these irreducable theories. So we live with this irreducable uncertainty currently. I'm not proposing solutions or saying that there are errors with these proofs. Rather, when I finally understood them years ago it induced an existential crisis that I don't see any pathways to resolve. My hypothesis is that humans aren't capable of conceptualizing experiments or building tools that could approach the three most intractable problems in epistemilogy. Maybe we don't have the math to do it, or it's fundamentally intractable and it will never be resolved, I dunno. But those are much more interesting questions than "is there an amoeba on europa?"
- not_kurt_godel 7y agoI think you'd probably be interested in Gerard 't Hooft's latest work: https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548 https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548 It's rather, shall we say, controversial (that is: widely rejected by his peers), but it's an attempt to construct a framework through which the laws of the universe can be interpreted as deterministic which leverages the sorts of epistemological concepts you seem to be interested in. (That being said: I personally find "is there an amoeba on Europa?" to be supremely interesting, but to each their own.)
- AndrewKemendo 7y agoThanks for this, I'll definitely take a look. My concern always, as you point out, is falling into crackpottery territory. Hopefully being acutely aware of that serves as an inoculation to some degree. I should also state, I certainly find the concept of life on other planets extremely fascinating. However as I said above its insufficient to give clarity to some of the more fundamentally existential questions around our existence.
- not_kurt_godel 7y agoI should also mention - there is quite a bit of discussion on 't Hooft's work on StackOverflow, including heavy participation by 't Hooft himself. I don't have any pointers handy, but they should be fairly easy to discover with a minimal amount of searching.
- erichocean 7y agoI don’t accept non-constructive proofs that require “constructions” as being valid. (Diagonalization is another invalid technique in my book.) So there’s at least one of us.