
How Gödel Saved Mark Changizi from Physics - ColinWright
http://io9.com/5928674/how-godel-saved-mark-changizi-from-physics
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carsongross
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.

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

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bluekeybox
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?

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eapriv
"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.

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rprospero
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.

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lobo_tuerto
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.

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nova
This sounds like Robert Rosen's work.

