Kurt Godel: Philosophy Forums

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Kurt Godel

Gassendi1
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Posted 03/09/05 - 01:43 PM: Subject: Kurt Godel	#1
I have been reading Rebecca Goldstein's book on Godel. It is very good. (Goldstein also wrote a very fine philosophical novel, "The Mind-Body Problem". Here is an interview some should find interesting. http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=116

180 Proof
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Posted 03/09/05 - 04:24 PM:	#2
Gassendi1 wrote: I have been reading Rebecca Goldstein's book on Godel. It is very good. (Goldstein also wrote a very fine philosophical novel, "The Mind-Body Problem". Here is an interview some should find interesting. http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=116 thanks for the recommendation!
The question isn't "Which explanations do I believe?" but rather "Which explanations do I least disbelieve?" Absence of evidence THAT MUST BE THERE (i.e. implied by any claim, concept, or (its) predicates, that affects changes in/to the world) entails evidence of absence. [What cannot be done?[What cannot be hoped?[What cannot be known?]]]

muxol
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Posted 03/09/05 - 04:34 PM:	#3
I'll read the interview, but in all honesty, I'm becoming increasingly tired of Gödel -- actually, all the confused nonsense about him. Interesting -- never knew Goldstein was (and still is!) female!

muxol
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Posted 03/09/05 - 07:49 PM:	#4
It was interesting but it is what I would hardly call an "interview", rather than a written or typed correspondence between the two parties. This is becoming all too common nowadays with email. So-called interviews are simply email exchanges, which takes something away -- spontaneity, wit, etc. Oh well, I suppose it is the "future".

Gassendi1
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Posted 03/10/05 - 07:44 AM:	#5
180 Proof wrote: thanks for the recommendation! Welcome.

TecnoTut
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Posted 03/10/05 - 11:10 AM:	#6
More on Godel, Goldstein, Einstein, and time: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?050228crat_atlarge
I won't utter falsehoods, but I've no objection to uttering meaningless statements - A.J. Ayer, when saying grace. The apparent negation of a pseudo [meaningless] statement must also be a pseudo-statement - from Carnap's Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology Those who deny [Aristotle's] first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped. - Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

muxol
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Posted 03/10/05 - 05:20 PM:	#7
TecnoTut wrote: More on Godel, Goldstein, Einstein, and time: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/a...050228crat_atlarge[/quote] I enjoyed this one more than the other.

Zukix
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Posted 03/11/05 - 05:32 AM:	#8
Rebecca Goldstein wrote: There’s a sense in which Gödel’s proof, especially as it was filtered through the work of Turing, helped to invent the computer. In what sense?

muxol
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Posted 03/11/05 - 06:38 PM:	#9
Zukix wrote: In what sense? His subsequent work on general recursive functions did, and maybe that work was the result of his earlier incompleteness proofs -- I don't know. Maybe she's blowing out a bunch of hot air.

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Posted 03/12/05 - 06:55 AM:	#10
muxol wrote: His subsequent work on general recursive functions did, and maybe that work was the result of his earlier incompleteness proofs -- I don't know. Maybe she's blowing out a bunch of hot air. I was suspicious it was the flannel but having thought about it, I can see that Godel's encoding of mathematical theorems as numbers might have inspired Turing's step in 'On computable Numbers' to encode instruction tables as numbers. This in turn had some relation to stored program computers like the Manchester baby which store instructions as numbers. I have heard it said that general recursive theory was implicit in the incompleteness proofs but aside from being equivalent with Turing machines I don't know of their involvement with early computers.

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