Re: Godel's Incompleteness Theorems

[Judith Rosen <***>]

James,

I think you have "gotten" a great deal of what my father was saying, but
there are certain aspects of it that you may have missed. For example, he
said that atoms are complex, and life is entailed by complexity. So right
there, your question about whether there are aspects of life in "physics"
(which he was pretty careful to qualify as "contemporary physics") would be
answered "Yes." And "Pre-animate" would be exactly the right word to
describe "complex, but not alive". Simple systems would be more likely to
deserve the term "inanimate" because what he said about simple systems is
that there is no way to get to complexity from simplicity. Simplicity is not
the natural state of our universe. As to how atoms themselves "formed" or
"happened", and whether my father wrote anything on that subject, I haven't
found any evidence that he officially went there. I'm still looking though.

Judith
PS: My father did discuss Elasser quite a bit in his books, and I will post
some of that, I just haven't had a chance. But I didn't want you to think I
had ignored the question!

> What I don't carry well at the moment is the realization that RR
> never looked to find an access route past Godel and thusly to
> solidify and identify an accessibility between the world of
> limited models and the extended world of the natural.
>
> I think this is why conventional science is having such a difficult
> time rising to the panoramic thinking RR was at and expressing. He
> was 'there' but couldn't show others how to get there .. in terms
> they'd understand.  He had had an insight and revelation, could
> assert so many aspects of the differences between the limited and
> the unbounded, could talk about the differential qualiae at length
> and in all sorts of ways, but he had quantum leaped .. like Ramanujan
> .. and couldn't identify an alternative - mundane - path for conventional
> thinkers to take to join him.
>
> Waiting for 'companions in epiphany' had to have been a very lonely wait.
>
> What's gratifying for me though is to know that he had at least
> identified the incompleteness theorems as hobbled regional
> mathematics.  But, he never mounted an attack, in equations or
> discourse. Strange.
>
> Since 1995, I've seen such a counter work to be the keystone for
> getting to the natural, from the priori.
>
> The General Systems movement is the coda group which should
> be championing such an effort.  It couldn't have had a better
> President than it found in RR, when he served in that capacity,
> but something must have a choke hold on that community and
> any attempt to say, "Look, if we are going to have a universal
> theorem of systems performances/behaviors, if we feel we can
> reasonably identify -completely universal and pandemic- qualities
> of being and performance .. in spite of all the the alternative
> and new qualia arising in emergent ways .. then we are going
> to have to clearly and unequivocably show that Godel restrictions
> are surpassable in real, natural, provable ways .. because the
> scope of 'the natural' is nothing less than the scope of the
> already competently functional co-involved co-interacting
> universe."
>
> This goes to my question to Howard here last week, did he
> see any 'life qualities' in the realm of physics.  He answered
> 'no'.  Well, that was his answer to me in 1972 also, when I was
> running around talking with Walter Elsasser and I. Prigogine
> also.  (I could only kick myself now for not having identified
> and contacted RR back then.) 'No' is not an acceptable answer
> in my book (sorry Howard).
>
> Several things are going on here, and they all resolve around
> transpositioning across Godel limitations.  In the meme sense
> of things, I comfortably note that electrons filling and
> emptying the valence shells of atoms are tantamount to
> respiration in the higher tiers of metabolic organization.
> Going so far as to say that unless atoms 'respire' in this
> way on a consistant and constant basis, no living creatures
> 'breathes' either, because atomic respiration is the floor
> phenomenon of the developed one.
>
> That doesn't make atoms 'alive', but it semiotically and
> memetically makes them PREanimate instead of INanimate.
> A significant shift in paradigm.
>
> What it also -does- is makes us re-look at a Godel
> mapping of the related tiers.  Even if a system bounded
> by Godel axioms exists, it does so as a -natural member-
> of the extended sapce of information and relations and
> proofs. It -has a relation and relevance- to the rest
> of nature and information.  That pre-relevance is already
> a bridge between the information domains which 'incompleteness'
> rejects as accessible among one another [if it were
> directly accessible then the information of the exterior would
> be incorporable/incorporated and therefore make 'self-proof'
> possible; however even without direct presence, just the
> fact alone that there is sufficient compatibility _to_
> -eventually- access such 'potential/other' information
> and establish meme correlates and subsequent 'proofs'
> even under alternative (expanded) conditions, is strong
> enough grounds to show that some models and the natural
> are compatible and relatable].
>
> There do exist reductionist type principles I rely
> upon.  I point specifically to an identifiable property
> that is relevant to all tiers, systems and qualia
> of existence.
>
> One of the principles is that systems require incompleted
> degrees of freedom - option spaces - to enact in.
>
> In a sense, they require the unknown, as long as it
> is knowABLE.
>
> Conventional thought holds that anything less than completely
> known, is 'incomplete' and a deficient state of being (per Godel).
>
> In point of fact, there are knowable _characteristics_ between
> the interior and exterior of Godel spaces even if specifics
> aren't identified or instantiated. And that aspect is complete
> and pandemically universal, which breaks the back of the
> Godel paradigm.  Any system which is sufficient to have
> models or subpartitionable spaces must a priorally be universally
> whole in generic properties and extendedly consistent in
> all regions/domains/aspects.
>
> "Local" is insufficient to generate "global". "Global',
> even if only as potential, must exist prior to any
> "local".
>
> The 'natural' has preminent requisite qualities which can
> be identified, whether exhaustively accounted for or not.
>
> Jamie