Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the incomplete dept.

I came across an interesting blog post by Rudy Rucker from 2012 that I found quite interesting and thought I would share with my fellow Soylentils. It is titled "Memories of Kurt Gödel" and it is quite an interesting read.

Kurt Gödel was unquestionably the greatest logician of the century. He may also have been one of our greatest philosophers. When he died in 1978, one of the speakers at his memorial service made a provocative comparison of Gödel with Einstein ... and with Kafka.

Like Einstein, Gödel was German-speaking and sought a haven from the events of the Second World War in Princeton. And like Einstein, Gödel developed a structure of exact thought that forces everyone, scientist and layman alike, to look at the world in a new way.

The Kafkaesque aspect of Gödel's work and character is expressed in his famous Incompleteness Theorem of 1930. Although this theorem can be stated and proved in a rigorously mathematical way, what it seems to say is that rational thought can never penetrate to the final, ultimate truth. A bit more precisely, the Incompleteness Theorem shows that human beings can never formulate a correct and complete description of the set of natural numbers, {0, 1, 2, 3, . . .}. But if mathematicians cannot ever fully understand something as simple as number theory, then it is certainly too much to expect that science will ever expose any ultimate secret of the universe.

Wikipedia's page on Gödel's incompleteness theorems summarizes:

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of the natural numbers. For any such formal system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.

Employing a diagonal argument, Gödel's incompleteness theorems were the first of several closely related theorems on the limitations of formal systems. They were followed by Tarski's undefinability theorem on the formal undefinability of truth, Church's proof that Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem is unsolvable, and Turing's theorem that there is no algorithm to solve the halting problem.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fishybell on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:32PM (12 children)

    by fishybell (3156) on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:32PM (#554365)

    Or, to state a different opinion...

    Math belongs on this site.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:39PM (11 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:39PM (#554368)

    Have you looked at SN lately? Gödel is sandwiched between North Koreans and Russians, and the next pending story in the queue is about Iranians. Even the word "queue" is too mathy for this political cesspit.

    • (Score: 2, Touché) by Tara Li on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:14PM (10 children)

      by Tara Li (6248) on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:14PM (#554378)

      Perhaps if people submitted more mathy & physicsy stories - like the supernova one a few articles back, P vs NP, neutrinos and the m/am imbalance, Falcon 9 launch...

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by chromas on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:42PM (9 children)

        by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:42PM (#554394) Journal

        Yeah but those barely get any comments. Kinda weird, huh. The posts we claim we want more of get less conversation than the ones we say don't belong here. Hmm.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:52PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:52PM (#554398)

          You hit the nail on the head. Rage sells because rage gets people to involve themselves, thus selling ads.

          The only answer is to not click on the crap article! If you can't help yourself, at least don't comment!

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:39PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:39PM (#554420)

            Oh...yeah. SoylentN is swimming in funding from subscriptions purchased by thickheaded assholes who want to kick up a shitstorm with their political buddies. Nothing like a good old fashioned polarized flamewar between the libertarian retards and the solcialist retards.

          • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:22AM (1 child)

            by bzipitidoo (4388) on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:22AM (#554571) Journal

            Rage sells, you say? How about restarting the old flame wars:

            vi vs emacs.
            command line vs GUI.
            IPv4 vs IPv6.
            sysv vs systemd.
            Xorg vs Wayland vs Mir.
            Redhat vs Ubuntu vs Slackware vs Arch vs Gentoo.
            FreeBSD vs Linux.
            SoylentNews vs ....

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @07:11AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @07:11AM (#554591)

              Posting AC to ensure I don't end up being the spark on a fire.

              sysv vs systemd.

              Apart from devuan, the only proper distro I could find that would run without systemd (apart from Slackware) were all Gentoo based. Which is sad, because as much as I love emerge, I just want something to as wholesome as apt-get. I had no option but to go for Devuan, but it is containing very old packages.

              It is just sad :(

              Posting to get some help. Please don't troll....

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:57PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:57PM (#554430)

          People like to see those articles, but as for discussion there isn't a whole lot to discuss for the average user. Unless they have specific knowledge, or relevant comment, then true science articles are more about the news and less about the discussion.

          I think most people enjoy the political articles, and like it or not politics is kind of center stage right now.

          • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:12PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:12PM (#554481)

            Go back to reddit.

        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:16AM

          by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:16AM (#554569) Journal

          Comments != interest. I know on the days that everyone on the internet likes to measure stuff by discussion metrics and "participation," but we all know here (or should know) the rules about how many people read or are interested in stuff vs. the much tinier fraction who participate actively. Those stats lean much more heavily toward viewers/readers and away from participants (I would assume) on stuff like hard-science articles.

          Political articles attract more discussion because most people feel like they can have an opinion. Moreover, politics is often divided into easy "sides," creating built-in confrontation, which promotes discussion.

          Commenting on a science article requires either WORK (RTFA) or pre-existing knowledge or both. Then it requires you to come up with something interesting to say -- "This doesn't quite make sense" or "I really liked this part of the finding." And most of those comments won't result in significant discussion -- the first just needs one knowledgeable explanation in reply, and the second doesn't really need any follow-up comments at all. Or you might have a comment of "this reminds me of some other related stuff" which again doesn't often require follow-up discussion.

          Meanwhile, to comment on a political article, you only need to subscribe to a pre-existing side that agrees or disagrees, and then other people can easily just jump in and start yelling the other direction. So, frankly, your observation that there's more discussion on articles that facilitate discussion is basically a tautology.

          I like the science and math and whatever articles a lot more than the political ones, and I'm more likely to actually bother to RTFA on science or math. The political ones are generally just prompts to get people yelling, so it's often not even worthwhile to RTFA since the discussion is going to rapidly head off the rails anyway.

          TL;DR -- more comments != more interest (necessarily), but I already said that.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:25AM

          by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:25AM (#554573) Journal

          Oh, and if you need an example, look at what I did below in this very thread. I RTFA (as I often do on science/mathy stuff), and this time I *tried* to manufacture controversy by nitpicking one claim in the summary and even included a small dig about a popular geek book for good measure. Then I offered a bunch of my own thoughts... but you'd have to know something about the history of mathematical logic or philosophy to reply to my comment. (Well, unless you just wanted to troll, which is the only comment reply so far.)

          If anyone bothered to read my comment, maybe they'll take away some info, but mostly, I expect a lot will just not know what to say. And that's okay -- I figured I'd throw it out in case anyone else who actually reads detailed books on formal logic happens to see it.

          Meanwhile, if you have a political article on ANY political topic, someone can easily shout "Trump blah, blah!" And suddenly 20 people will be able to easily retort. No need to go read up on who Tarski was or to think about the historical of logic to reply.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:35PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:35PM (#554702)

          That's one side of it, the other is that subjects such as this require some degree of understanding of the subject to comment, politics being the domain of diarrhea of the mouth is more inviting for commentary.