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Breakfast of Champions
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finally he was processed through customs, he came jauntily toward me; we
shook hands gingerly, picked up his string-tied bundle of luggage, and
went straight to the airport bar for a breakfast of double scotch and
soda. -J.M. Brinnin describing Dylan Thomas' arrival at Idlewild Airport at 7 a.m. |
A good friend of mine often brings up his three fundamental laws of human behavior:
You are too
The point being that it is provable that you can't know everything. For those who don't belong to the subspecies that finds mathematics, logic and philosophy fascinating, it might amuse you to investigate some of the ramifications of the findings of Kurt Gödel. Kurt found some fundamental limitations of what we can prove we know.
Basically, once you have recursion in a system, you can end up with situations which are undecidable in that system.
We can consider the human being such a system. Our internal structure (or soul, if you will) can be thought of as a system of rules and axioms. We have certain fundamental beliefs that compose our world view. We have operations that we use to filter and organize our thoughts and experiences into this system.
And what our good friend Kurt has shown is that in such systems that we are, there are some things that simply can't be known for sure.
Which simply sucks. It seems that this could well be the source of all our frustration and complete incompetence as a social species.
It would seem to be the incompleteness proofs discovered by Gödel are the reason we have gods, superstitions and magic in our lives.
And also the reason for the three laws above.
No matter how good of a person you are, you can't see everything. There are simply some things you're going to miss and simply can't decide if they are live or memorex.
And it doesn't help to have another person watch your back.
Because you and the person watching your back form another system. And this system is itself subject to the same Gödel curse.
Which means that not only can you not win, but you can't even leave the game.
No amount of huddled masses of neurons, nor other human beings, nor artificial or alien intelligences will ever get us out of this mess.
Brandy, after many
weeks of remodeling
Unfortunately
August 18, 2001
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