« JC's Column | Main | Missing BBC Journalist »
March 07, 2007
Goedel's Theorem in the Wild
From Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:
''Yeah well," as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive 18-volume study of King Kong, ''you know folks, he did love her." Proceeding from this thesis, it appears that Prettyplace has left nothing out, every shot including out-takes raked through for every last bit of symolism, exhaustive biographies of everyone connected with the film, extras, grips, lab people... even interviews with King Kong Kultists, who to be eligible for membership must have seen the movies at least 100 times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam...And yet, and yet: there is Murphy's Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of Goedel's Theorem - when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us...something will. So the permutations 'n' combinations of Pudding's Things That Can Happen in European Politics for 1931, the year of Goedel's Theorem, don't give Hitler an outside chance. So, when the laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born... (it's page 275 in the Penguin edition)
My favourite part is the idea of Pudding writing a book called Things That Can Happen in European Politics.
Posted by logican at March 7, 2007 09:53 PM
Trackback Pings
The trackback address for this entry is:
http://www.logicandlanguage.net/trakbak.cgi/171
Comments
Have you read Garciadiego's BERTRAND RUSSELL AND THE ORIGINS OF THE SET-THEORETIC 'PARADOXES?' It sounds like you haven't, and you should. Then take a look at the "mathematics" designed to "solve" or "avoid" the "paradoxes." If you want a strong dose of this very bad mathematics, take a look at Maddy's dreadful polemic, NATURALISM IN MATHEMATICS.
Unfortunately, it seems a lot of thinkers--from Godel to Einstein--swallowed this mathematics whole, with bad consequences for their ideas.
Here is a link to a paper I am delivering in Beijing in August:
Ryskamp, John Henry, "Paradox, Natural Mathematics and Twentieth-Century Ideas" (April 14, 2006). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=979784
Posted by: JohnRyskamp at April 11, 2007 12:16 PM
Could Godel's incompleteness theorems apply to natural language?
Posted by: Robert at September 19, 2007 09:10 PM
Goedel's Theorem will apply to any language
(satisfying certain conditions).
You may (or you may not) wish to have a look
at this:
http://www.geocities.com/robert.milleker
Posted by: Robert-Jan Milleker at October 23, 2007 08:00 AM