Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Fathoming Gödel
    Fathoming Gödel
    Fathoming Gödel
    Ebook79 pages1 hour

    Fathoming Gödel

    By Jim Spinosa

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The conclusion reached in "Fathoming Gödel" is that Gödel's 1931 paper is a shell game. It is based on several errors that are well camouflaged. Some shortcomings in the paper are openly admitted although they are downplayed, and errors are also produced in an effort to force a particular conclusion. This critique is limited to Gödel's first incompleteness theorem as translated by Martin Hirzel. "Fathoming Gödel" is an examination of Kurt Gödel's 1931 paper: "On formally undecidable propositions of 'Principia Mathematica' and related systems 1."
    In a somewhat interesting note, it seems that my sarcastically humorous book description for "Fathoming Gödel," which formerly began with this very paragraph, possibly dissuaded up to 85% of the people who viewed this page from downloading my free e-book, which I believe is one of a select group of free offers available on the internet that is actually free with no strings attached. The data regarding my book description is inconclusive for several reasons. For instance, it is difficult to take into account the effect of the one review this book received. The review was decidedly negative, but it seems that even a cursory reading of the review would be enough to delineate the ambiguity of some of its assertions. Another reason is that it is impossible to tell how many viewers of this page simply decided they weren’t interested in the book.
    My intuition though is that the sarcastic tone of my book description dissuaded many potential readers. I will publish the sarcastic book description in my self-interview so the interested reader can view the purportedly damaging material. Perhaps, because the internet seems to have a superabundance of mean spirited commentary any sarcastic writing is viewed in a negative light. For instance, recently, I was viewing some photographs of the actress Jessica, and some poster seemed determined to make the point that in his view the actress looked like a man. Perhaps, because I believe I have significant points to make, I have no interest in mean spirited commentary, but I do have an interest in the kind of sarcasm present in say Monty Python’s “The Cheese Shop” sketch because I feel it presents the frustrations of our modern world in a comically heighten way.
    But, I feel that even those readers that were able to distinguish my sarcastic humor from the mean spirited palaver that infests the internet were dissuaded from downloading my e-book because my book description wasn’t presented in the tone they had come to expect. In a way, we are all prisoners of tone. This is so for several reasons: the kind of educations we receive, the way we are bombarded with a staggering amount of information and the fact that so much information seems to be complex propaganda. There is an upside to making judgments based on tone; it relieves us of the burden of making judgments based on substance. As the substance of much mathematical and scientific writing became impossibly difficult to understand, it seems natural that the tone of this writing would become the deciding factor, and thus, the tone of this variety of mathematical and scientific writing became uniformly sober, somber and obtuse. It seems odd that people would judge a mathematical or scientific document to be correct merely because of its tone, but if we look at our society at large that is exactly the kind of world we live in. It is always and endlessly style over substance. It is a problem that is not generally acknowledged, and when it is acknowledged it is almost always portrayed as a problem that has just now come into existence.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJim Spinosa
    Release dateOct 22, 2015
    ISBN9781310309953
    Fathoming Gödel
    Author

    Jim Spinosa

    Born in 1955,Jim Spinosa remembers,as a youngster,being entranced by the science fiction novels heperused in a small,corner bookstore in Denville,NJ. The cramped confines of that store had claimedto contain the largest selection of books in Northern New Jersey. His penchant for science fiction engendered an interest in physics. Often daunted by the difficulty of physics textbooks,hequestioned whether physics could be presented as clearly and concisely as science fiction,without sustaining any loss in depth Nuts and Bolts:TakingApart Special Relativity is an attempt to answer that question.

    Read more from Jim Spinosa

    Related to Fathoming Gödel

    Related ebooks

    Mathematics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How Information Got Re-Invented

      Aug 10, 2017

      With his marriage to Norma Levor over, Claude Shannon was a bachelor again, with no attachments, a small Greenwich Village apartment, and a demanding job. His evenings were mostly his own, and if there’s a moment in Shannon’s life when he was at his

      31 min read

    • Article

      The Impossible Mathematics of the Real World

      Jun 8, 2017

      Using stiff paper and transparent tape, Craig Kaplan assembles a beautiful roundish shape that looks like a Buckminster Fuller creation or a fancy new kind of soccer ball. It consists of four regular dodecagons (12-sided polygons with all angles and

      6 min read

    • Article

      Don’t Worry, Smart Machines Will Take Us With Them: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve.

      Sep 3, 2015

      When it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence is much easier than it is, because we see examples all around us. In a recent poll, machine intelligence experts p

      7 min read

    • Article

      It’s Like Hammering Into Nothing When I Speak It

      Mar 5, 2018

      k.g. Guttman was a student when she first met her friend Nancy Ring. Years later, in 2009, she asked the professor, art historian and writer the same seven questions every day for seven days. From their conversation emanates a complex, constellationa

      4 min read

    • Article

      English In The Real World

      Jan 3, 2023

      Bryan A. Garner is here to update us on changes in how people speak and write in real life The post English in the Real World appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Schizophrenic Sentence

      Dec 14, 2017

      The Schizophrenic Sentence
      4 min read

    • Article

      Books

      May 29, 2023

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Complete Sentence

      Oct 26, 2017

      The Complete Sentence
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Climate For Growth

      Nov 3, 2022

      A Climate For Growth
      6 min read

    • Article

      This Isn’t the Essay’s Title

      Sep 13, 2021

      Whether or not paradoxes are glitches in how we arrange our words or due to something more intrinsic, they signify a null-space where the regular ways of thinking, of understanding, of writing, no longer hold. The post This Isn’t the Essay’s Title a

      18 min read

    • Article

      Notes on the Art of Rhetoric

      Oct 23, 2017

      Rhetoric is persuasion, and persuasion is seduction. And seduction, in human language, is syntactical. The post Notes on the Art of Rhetoric appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      DeLillo, Lethem, and the Seductive Sentence

      Apr 11, 2018

      DeLillo is so famously and distinctively a writer who appeals to sentence-lovers, with all their blindnesses, hubristic ideals, and narrow-minded cerebrations. The post DeLillo, Lethem, and the Seductive Sentence appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Fathoming Gödel

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Fathoming Gödel - Jim Spinosa

      Fathoming Gödel

      By Jim Spinosa

      Published by Jim Spinosa at Smashwords

      Copyright 2015

      Dedicated to Steven G. Spinosa: The Spinner Cares and

      Anthony Adventure Bille

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes: This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Fathoming Gödel is a free book.

      Contents

      Introduction

      Part I- Ignis Fatuus

      Part II- Nostalgie de la boue

      Part III- Stick to one’s last

      Part IV- Caramel perihelion of nihilism

      Section A- No more winklepickers

      Section B- Etymology or entomology

      Conclusion

      References- Friends of Paraclete

      Endnotes- Parthian Shot

      Introduction

      Fathoming Gödel is an examination of Kurt Gödel’s 1931paper: On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems I

      The translation being used for this critique of Gödel’s1931 paper is by Martin Hirzel. It is available at: http://www.research.ibm.com/people/h/hirzel/ papers/canon00-goedel.pdf. The translation is dated November 27, 2000. The paper is 22 pages in length, and Hirzel states, This document is a translation of a large part of Gödel’s proof . . . This translation omits all footnotes from the original, and only contains sections 1 and 2 (out of four).¹ The omitted sections are entitled Generalizations and Implications for the nature of consistency. The two translated sections are entitled: 1−Introduction, which is two pages in length and 2−Main Result, which is 15 pages in length. The Main Result is divided into seven subsections: Definitions, Gödel-numbers, Primitive recursion, Expressing metamathematical concepts, Denotability and provability, Undecidibility theorem and Discussion. In order to more easily understand this short e-book Fathoming Gödel, it is highly recommended that the reader download Martin Hirzel’s translation of a large part of Gödel’s proof. The reader should keep the translation handy as he will probably have many occasions to refer to it in order to clarify many of the notions put forth in Fathoming Gödel. One of the advantages of having the translation handy is that in moments of frustration the reader can always mutter to himself it’s not just gibberish; it’s gibberish squared. Actually, it is essential that the reader have a translation of Gödel’s 1931 paper handy in order for Fathoming Gödel to make any sense at all. Perhaps, no book has been as dependent as Fathoming Gödel is on an outside source for disclosing its meaning. The dependence of (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy on outside sources (plural) to disclose its meaning is similar, yet not quite the same.

      The reason the words Principia Mathematica are underlined in the title of Kurt Gödel’s 1931 paper is because the words refer to the title of a book by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead.

      The conclusion reached in Fathoming Gödel is that Gödel’s 1931 paper is a shell game. It is based on several errors that are well camouflaged. Some shortcomings in the paper are openly admitted although they are downplayed, and errors are also produced in an effort to force a particular conclusion. This critique is limited to Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem since that is the point at which Martin Hirzel’s translation ends.

      Torkel Franzén, in his book Gödel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse defines Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. On page 16 of his book, he writes, "Any consistent formal system S within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out is incomplete with regard to statements of elementary arithmetic: here are such statements which can neither be proved, nor disproved in S."²

      How should the reader prepare himself to examine Gödel’s proof? This author would often stand on his driveway in the quiet of the evening in the late spring and early summer and listen to a faint sound he heard emanating from the large trees bordering the side of his yard. He believed he could hear caterpillars munching on the leaves of the red oak trees. But as he thought about the biology and physics involved in hearing caterpillars munch on leaves from such a distance, he reached a conclusion that was 180 degrees from his original supposition. Instead, he concluded he was hearing a fecal rain.

      Part I- Ignis Fatuus

      Gödel’s paper is the description of a formal system he denotes with the letter P. Among other things it includes the natural numbers and the number zero. The first error occurs in subsection 2.1−Definitions. Gödel introduces the term sign of type n where n can stand for the individual natural numbers 1, 2, 3, etc. The category, sign of type n, includes both number-signs and variables. Specifically the sub-category of sign of type n denoted as sign of type 1 includes both number signs and variables. Number-signs are Gödel’s term for the natural numbers including zero, which are considered constants in standard mathematics. So the sub-category sign of type 1 includes both contants and variables. In Gödel’s system, constants have an almost entirely different definition.

      It will be helpful to re-familiarize ourselves with some standard mathematical terms. A constant is either an integer or a variable whose domain is strictly limited. The domain of a variable that is a constant must be a set with only one member. An example of a domain with only one member is the following: States of the United States whose name begins with the letter D. Integers include the positive and negative whole numbers and zero. The domain of a variable is different from its solution set. The solution set is all the values of the variable that make a particular formula true. The

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1