Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Incompleteness

I began reading Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel by Rebecca Goldstein months ago but I never finished it. It’s not that the book wasn’t good. It was. I was just … preoccupied with something. (I have no idea what.) I just ran across the review of it that I’d begun putting together, though, and I think it still makes relatively interesting reading, so… here it is.

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I’m a Platonist.

I believe there is an essential unchanging reality and that the purpose of science (and mathematics) is to discover the nature of that reality. Like Gödel, I believe that numbers exist independent of us and that concepts such as evenness and oddness, square roots, and such are hard realities of the universe that exist entirely outside our own minds.

I believe that when reality seems slippery — as at the subatomic and cosmic levels — it’s only because of limitations in the human mind and not because reality itself is slippery.

This is all very obvious to me — and it’s not because I’m uneducated about “potentiality” and “uncertainty” or am entirely reliant upon experiential reality. I simply reject the notion that our human inability to accurately predict some kinds of phenomena is a reflection of some quality of reality itself.

You can’t see the entire system as long as you are a part of the system. Einstein knew it (relativity) and Gödel knew it (incompleteness).
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Truth is abstract — and mathematics is the language in which it is written.