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Other names for Gödel encoding: Digital. Binary. Zorros and Unos. Today Gödel encoding is so pervasive, it’s easy to miss that everything is trivially Gödel en
by Nevermark 6mo ago
Other names for Gödel encoding: Digital. Binary. Zorros and Unos.
Today Gödel encoding is so pervasive, it’s easy to miss that everything is trivially Gödel encladed. Because like most everything invisible, it’s right in front of us.
We Gödel our memes and gift cards, and (pick your poison) pr0ns. Colors and AI’s, lax ASMR’s and our (sneaky don’t read me) terms of service. Even this very small humble .
Gödel isn’t eating the world. Gödel already pööped it.
- manofmanysmiles 6mo agoDo you recommend reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid"?
- jb1991 6mo agoYou are suggesting Godel created the punctuation mark known as a period? Obviously not. But I'm not sure what you are trying to say..
- Nevermark 6mo agoThat period was encoded in a symbol string, i.e. it is a bit string. Today we encode everything in bi-symbol strings. This was not common when Gödel crafted his incompleteness theorem. And at the time it was a novel approach for setting up a context for testing the limits of computing. Some people can still be struck by it as novel when reading the proof, because in context it was, and still feels that way. But today "symbol string" representation is ordinary and pervasive.
- bazoom42 6mo agoGödel did not invent encoding. Morse was widely used before Gödel.
- Nevermark 6mo agoMorse didn't conceptually extend encoding to self-referential symbolic systems. Morse's insight was pure communication of symbols devoid of meaning. Important but nowhere near the same. Today, general symbolic encoding is viewed as trivial. Every symbol we have is pervasively encoded as bits, so of course entire expressions are. So Morse's code might seem comparable. But what Gödel invented went well beyond Morse. We are just jaded with regard to his insight now.
- bazoom42 6mo agoOf course you can encode self-references in morse code, how could morse prevent that? Just use the same lisp syntax as in the article and then encode using morse code instead of Gödel numbering. The purpose of Gödel numbering is to represent an arbitrary-length string of symbols as a single integer which allows you to manipulate it using Peano arithmetic. But it is not like Gödel invented binary as you seem to suggest. Baudot code (a 5-bit character encoding) was in use in 1870’s. In any case, Gödel-numbering is the least interesting part of the the theorem. The groundbreaking idea is creating statements about theorems.