RE: virus: MEME UPDATE: To Censor Or Not?
Dave Pape (davepape@dial.pipex.com)
Tue, 17 Dec 1996 20:17:38 GMT
At 00:45 17/12/96 -0500, John wrote:
>Dave Pape wrote:
>[clip]
>> Godel! That's the fella. And it's a THEOREM, is it? Excellent...
>> the problem is, now I need to UNDERSTAND it. See you all in a
>> couple of years...
>
>It's discussed through and through in Hofstadter's book "Godel,
>Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". I first dscovered it in
>Rudy Rucker's "Infinity and the Mind". Actually, the understand-
>ing of the theorem is the easy part. It says, basically: in any
>formal system determining truths, there will be truths which the
>system cannot determine. [Hence the similarity I see between
>this theorem and your observation that science gets all hazy and
>'I-dunno'ish at the quantum level: truths it cannot determine?]
You hit my nail on the head. I was actually talking to my dad this lunchtime
(he was in the area and dropped by), and he said pretty much the same thing.
BUT he also reckons that Incompleteness in computing systems implies...
FREEWILL! Oh God! I'm changing my surname, and I'll return to this when I've
read a bit more Hofstadter. If anyone else wants to dip in one way or the
other (Godel supporting/opposing existence of freewill)... please do.
There is no such thing as anything.
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