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I 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

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Thanks 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 ago
    I 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.

not_kurt_godel 7y ago

I 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 ago
Thanks 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 ago
  I 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.