Re: virus: Godel vs. Axiom of Choice Re. Freewill

Dave Pape (davepape@dial.pipex.com)
Wed, 18 Dec 1996 01:19:40 GMT


At 16:39 17/12/96 -0600, Ken B wrote:
>David Pape,
> Since truth-values are [hopefully] deterministic, I wouldn't
>consider Godel's incompleteness theorems a major loophole for freewill,
>or absence thereof. Also, randomness doesn't generate freewill, although
>it may be effective at emulation.

Yeh, when my dad came up with this, I had my standard "I don't see why that
argument implies what I'm being told" reaction. I think that a lot of the
time, "freewill" AND "random" are words used in place of "unpredictable".
Except, obviously "freewill" is a NOUN and everything, but... c'mon, your
brain's a neural net-style processor, you understand what I'm trying to say,
don't you? [Sorry]

> The highly controversial Axiom of Choice [from Set/class theory] is
>much more interesting as a loophole--or possibly outright assertion.
>Several schools of mathematics outright forbid its use, not including the
>more common ones.

Woah.

> A "proof" using the Axiom of Choice explicitly (and critically, no
>rewriting to avoid it possible) is the ultimate in nonconstructive
>proofs: not only does it fail to explicitly construct the
>example, the proof *cannot* be patched to allow explicit construction.

I really wish I understood this technical vocab. What field is this? Formal
logic? Where do I look to learn this language?

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