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.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @05:38PM (13 children)
Math does not belong on this site.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fishybell on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:32PM (12 children)
Or, to state a different opinion...
Math belongs on this site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:39PM (11 children)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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
Posting AC to ensure I don't end up being the spark on a fire.
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)
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
Go back to reddit.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:16AM
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
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
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.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by ben_white on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:20PM (7 children)
I recommend this little jewel: A World Without Time [amazon.com]. This short book is a great introduction to one of Gödel's most important contributions to math and philosophy. This contribution, which is an extension of the Incompleteness Theorem, states that in any universe described by the Theory of Relativity, time cannot exist. The book is also an account of portions of both Einstein's and Gödel's lives to put the math and physics into context. I can't recommend this book enough. Worth re-reading.
--
cheers, ben
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @09:33PM (6 children)
It must be interesting to be able to think so clearly that one can develop such profound understandings of the world around us.
It's also strange that such a clear thinker believed in a god, and then starved himself to death.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:13AM (5 children)
INT != WIS. And what's so insane about not-atheism? I grant organized religions are nuts, but why would simple Deism or pan[en]theism be insane?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:30AM (4 children)
Not only is "There is a god" a worthless axiom, but there's no proof that any particular god (and and thus his dictates) are possibly based on anything other than insanity.
That's what makes it insane.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 16 2017, @11:54AM (2 children)
That's an argument for agnosticism, not for atheism. For atheism to be reasonable, the axiom "there is no god" would have to be a useful axiom. I fail to see the use of this axiom.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @04:31PM (1 child)
How is your response in any way relevant to my comment?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 17 2017, @04:47PM
Agnosticism is non-atheism.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday August 16 2017, @07:31PM
Oh, it's not an axiom. I'm one of the aforementioned panentheists, but I came to that inductively, not even deductively, let alone postulating this God as an axiom. And I am also aware that the "God" I have in mind may be merely a massive Boltzmann Brain; thinking about stuff like that is admittedly mind-bending. On the upside, I will never murder someone else for not being a panentheist, and in most regards I'm basically "atheist who believes in God" with reference to scientific, moral, political, etc views.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:01PM (2 children)
[does exactly that before even ending the sentence]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:05PM
You jest, but does not Quantum Physics validate the claim that what is not observed is in an yet undetermined "superposition"? This is denoted here by the ellipsis.
I could go on, but how's that for a universal truth?
Godel is a fool. "You can't count to infinity so you can't know anything for certain!" More mindrot infected by the brain worm of relativism.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:54PM
That is, of course, not a complete description. It could describe any of the following sets:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:48PM (6 children)
Hmm... I suppose it depends on what you're into and what you mean by "greatest." I was always a Tarski fan myself, but Gödel's definitely in the top three or four. Gödel gets more attention these days because of the legacy of the incompleteness Theorem in popular memory, though he obviously did more than that.. (This is just my opinion, of course.) And depending on how you draw the boundaries of "century," I think Peirce often doesn't get his due. (Peirce has been one of my favorite philosophers for a couple decades now... the guy was unquestionably -- there's that word again -- an original thinker.)
As for "greatest philosophers," I'd have to put the ranking quite a bit lower. Gödel is definitely near the top in terms of logicians, but beyond mathematical logic, his contributions to philosophy as a whole aren't very significant. Lots of other philosophers (Tarski and Peirce among them) had a broader scope to their inquiries and broader significance to contributions as a whole.
None of this should at all detract from Gödel, of course. Just noting a bit of hyperbole.
But thanks to the submitter for the link. It's always fascinating to hear personal anecdotes of people like this. I still remember back in my early 20s when I think I first really understood the Incompleteness Theorems and their full proof, after spending several days thinking about them. For some wacko reason that I can't recall, I happened upon references to Russell and Whitehead's Principia mathematica before I had ever really spent much time with the incompleteness Theorems and had even checked a copy out of a university library... not that anyone would ever actually read the damn thing, but it was amazing to go find stuff like the point where they finally prove that 1+1=2 some hundreds of pages in. This was back before it was so easy to find such stuff on the internet; nowadays I doubt I would have even bothered to check the thing out, or even download a PDF.
Sorry, now I'm off into personal reflection land. But yeah, Gödel's stuff can really blow your mind when you take time with it. (This may be heresy, but I never really was a huge fan of Gödel, Escher, Bach. Also being a huge fan of Bach, that book seemed to fall apart at some point to me, obsessed with its own cleverness... kind of like Bach's Art of the Fugue, which is more of an intellectual exercise than enjoyable music all the way through.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:38AM
Tarski was a bit Jewy.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:20AM (1 child)
Well, it was meant as an intellectual exercise. From Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
"The governing idea of the work", as put by Bach specialist Christoph Wolff, "was an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject."
Also from the same Wikipedia article:
Sylvestre and Costa[13] reported a mathematical architecture of The Art of Fugue, based on bar counts, which shows that the whole work was conceived on the basis of the Fibonacci series and the golden ratio. The significance of the mathematical architecture can probably be explained by considering the role of the work as a membership contribution to the Correspondierende Societät der musicalischen Wissenschaften (de), and to the "scientific" meaning that Bach attributed to counterpoint.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday August 17 2017, @10:30PM
To be clear, I didn't say an intellectual exercise is a BAD thing, but it doesn't necessarily make for the best reading... or listening. That's all I was saying. The Art of the Fugue is AWESOME, but I wouldn't generally pay to go to a concert of it.
By the way, all the stuff about golden section, Fibonacci, etc. is very likely BS. I know a lot of the scholarship on music about this stuff. Bach was a genius, no doubt, but it's very easy to find patterns that aren't there when you start trying to fit just about any possible numerological concept to something. (That's not to say there aren't really fascinating patterns in Bach that WERE clearly intentional... which there also are.)
(Score: 1) by DavePolaschek on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:27PM
Got links to more reading about Tarski or Peirce?
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:27PM
Socrates was one of the least-great logicians and philosophers in history - he would have told you so himself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @12:25AM
> Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce?