RE: virus: MEME UPDATE: To Censor Or Not?
Dave Pape (davepape@dial.pipex.com)
Tue, 17 Dec 1996 01:07:27 GMT
At 14:47 16/12/96 -0600, you wrote:
>On Mon, 16 Dec 1996, Schneider John wrote:
>
>> David pape wrote:
>> > >Obvious sources of nondetermination:
>> > > Quantum mechanics. [Granted, magnifying it to macroscopic
>> > >level is difficult. But not impossible--cf. Schrodinger's Cat.]
>> >
>> > Excellent point sir! I'm a real beginner in QM... almost totally
>> > hammered by even the simplest parts of the maths. I'd very much
>> > like to know what you think about the "universe cannot have per-
>> > fect knowledge about how it works" proposal in my last posting.
>> > Because... well, QM is very very accurate, but not totally so...
>> > are there any physicists around who think that the reason you get
>> > such bizarre effects as measurement collapsing the Schroedinger
>> > equation is because... erm... we're at a level of detail where...
>> > erm... maths can't take us any further? Where, due to the limited
>> > ability of teh universe to compute its own nature, we're starting
>> > to get odd results? I know this sounds like a shitty cop-out, but
>> > I'm interested in the idea of humanity's search for truth reaching
>> > an asymptotic gap from the Truth...
>
>[CLIP]
>
>> Your suggestion sounds like it would relate well with Godel's
>> incompleteness theorems, which I regret that I've never studied
>> from a technical viewpoint before, so can't do anything more than
>> mention it.
>
>Among other places where Godel's incompleteness theorems work, any formal
>system in predicate calculus with at least one predicate with two
>arguments will do. This includes *ALL* of mathematics.
>
>[Godel's Theorem can send Raving Religious Rightists into emotional
>overload, when applied to the Word. There's enough of a formal core
>there to apply Godel's Theorem.]
>
>One of two things hold:
> 1) A true statement exists that cannot be proven.
> 2) A false statement exists that *can* be proven.
>
>[or possibly both???]
>
>That is, a reasoning system of sufficient complexity must be either
>incomplete or inconsistent.
Well jings. So either language and maths are fundamentally flawed for the
purposes of understanding how things work (because they produce results like
Godel's theorem, and mad things like the turbulence between Relativity and
Quantum Mechanics), or language and maths are valid, but the universe is, by
its very nature, trippy and impossible for us to understand. Cool! (Sorry,
one of my top hobbies is Being Baffled.)
There is no such thing as anything.
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