Letter to Pip 17 May 2022

Hi Pip,

It is cold and dark and probably wet. Hard to tell on account of it being dark. There was a full moon last night.

That’s great about your daughter’s graduation. Congrats!

Sorry you are so busy. I hope it is not getting you down. My gf is stupid busy too, nearly all the time. I may have already told you that. She is a deputy principal at a Catholic secondary school. She used to not mind the insane workload so much but now it is combined with a leadership team who have lost her respect. The additional requirements of the pandemic have not helped either. If not down exactly she is plain exhausted.

On the incompleteness theorem, we have stumbled onto a subject that I think we are both captivated by. It was probably my father who introduced me to Gödel. I read about Alan Turing and his machines which are analogous to the theorem. I have had a book called Gödel, Esher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter since the 80s. I am yet to read all the pages, which is a fine state for a book about incompleteness. My father was dismissive of Hofstadter for intellectual reasons that I don’t remember exactly but I think had to do with elegant popularist writing being non-rigorous or maybe just bullshit. Anyway I enjoy the book. It loves self reference and humour. It is structured around chapters with an illustrative story that demonstrates what the text body of each chapter will discuss. For instance there are stories about Zeno’s paradoxes, dialogues, and record players. The record player is one of the simplest. Imagine a record A that has sounds that vibrate in the exact pattern that will cause a player A to tear itself apart if reproduced. If you want to hear record A you will need to invest in player B that is made differently. Player B though will have a corresponding record B that will cause it to be destroyed. In order to play record B you will need a super record player C that can play record A and B safely. You can see where this is going. Record C and so on ad infinitum.

If I recall correctly I read all the stories and only some of the body text. In my defence a friend who was writing philosophy at the time borrowed my copy for about ten years! I am now not in contact with her which is a shame as although she was as mad as she was very interesting to talk to. She did give back my copy eventually, I don’t think she ever finished what she was writing.

So there are all these corollaries for Gödel’s theorem from Turing machines to record players. The lesson I gathered from it is that while there are statements that cannot be proved to be true in a given logic system, most of those untestable propositions are esoteric. We can get by in life being logical without being trapped by it. I do admit that the more rigorously logical we are, the more we live by self imposed rules, the less choice we appear to have if we want to be consistent.

When you mention expanding formalism, I surmise you are taking a leap beyond the kind of statement that can be captured by symbolic logic, otherwise it would fall foul of the theorem once again.

Having been married for as long as you have you probably only have knowledge of dating apps from popular culture and friends. Anyway one of the standard suggestions for your profile is to state what lessons your parents taught you. Most people say something emotional and mushy like ‘love powers our lives’ or ‘family is number one’. Mine said ‘my father taught me the universe is logically consistent’. I was kind of joking, hoping to distinguish myself from the crowd, but it was also characteristic of our relationship and what I really have grown up to think. He never said “the universe is logically consistent” explicitly as we didn’t discuss his work thoroughly but numerous conversations were an introduction to logic. It should be obvious that the universe does not stand for P and not P to be true at the same time as we can’t talk about anything in that scenario.

I agree that there is much that can arise from understanding that nothing has inherent meaning. I thought a lot about it at the time. Many of my conclusions were lost in the process of recovery from psychosis. I was convinced that to test if a thing is true the quickest way is to hold the idea in your heart and see if it causes comfort or discomfort. The power of human intuition, as opaque as an AI black box. Apparently when making decisions we create the logical justification for our conclusion after the fact. In other words we unconsciously snap decide then work back through how we got there. I am probably echoing what you said about defying rules. I know nothing about probabilistic models so I can’t be sure.

I have spent long enough writing this for dawn to break. There are pink clouds in the pale sky now.