How Gödel Saved Mark Changizi from Physics | Hacker News Reader

How Gödel Saved Mark Changizi from Physics

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27 pointsColinWright8 comments

When I finally understood Gödel, in as much as I do (which is probably not very), I found it tremendously relieving: God has laced the world with just enough paradox and unprovability to keep it interesting, and maybe there is something to that gut feeling that we don't live in a grinding, meaninglessly mechanistic pin-ball game.

I'm afraid that I found this interview very unenlightening. What in particular did he find from Godel that made him change his view?

I share your feeling, but I also have a question. Does anyone choose neuroscience as a career path without dreaming one day to write a successfully-selling (not that there is anything inherently wrong with that) pop-science book?

Physicists have a knack for treating living, function-filled animals as complicated, dynamic – but dead and functionless – goop.

When one enters into mathematical logic and the theory of computation, one enters into the world of computer science, and in that world function and purpose is central.

So the insight is not just to describe what a system physically does or could do, but also to rigorously analyze what it means or could mean.

"Some of the most awe-inspiring discoveries in the 20th century are about the limits of thought, and about rigorous ways to think about thinking. Gödel was central to these results [...]"

I am not aware of any "awe-inspiring discoveries" about "the limits of thought" made by Gödel. Personally, I (and maybe other mathematicians) find his incompleteness theorems awe-inspiring, but they are in no way about the limits of "thought". Those theorems are precise statements concerning some formal axiomatic systems. They have great significance in mathematical logic, a little bit less so for other branches of mathematics, and virtually no philosophical meaning at all.

This is probably just my own bias as a physicist coming in, but I found the opposite conclusion from what he saw. He spoke of how Godel took him to computation and computer science, where function and purpose are essential. However, I'd say that the uselessness of purpose is most evident in computer science. To take a trivial example:

    double square(double x) {
        return x * x * x;
    }

If you look at the purpose of that function, it's to return the square of a number. However, if you treat it as just a big pile of code, you'll see that it's going to return the cube.

Looking at purpose focuses your mind on a model of how the world should be and distracts you from what it really is. The purpose of the eye is to collect as much light as possible, but the layout of the retina isn't setup for that. The purpose of a business is to make money, but the actual accounts can still be in the red. Looking at the purpose can be a useful crutch when the system matches its purpose, but looking at the big pile of goop is best in the real world where things don't always go as planned.

I think we shouldn't automatically conflate labeling with purpose. If you labeled it "slepx" instead of "square" would you say that its purpose is "slepx"?

We can imbue labeling with purpose, and use it to point to the purpose of the thing we are labeling. Which is not the case with your example.

The purpose of the function you posted above is definitely to return the cube of a number.

This sounds like Robert Rosen's work.

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