Re: [Marxism] Re: godel etc (was ...)

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Les Schaffer" <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>



> "... Godel, in this paper which established his two great theorems by
> methods which are constructive in a precise sense, on the one hand
> showed the essential limitations imposed upon constructivist formal
> systems (which include all systems basing a calculus for arithmetic upon
> "mathematical induction"), and on the other hand displayed the power of
> constructivist methods for establishing metamathematical truths."

Behind the jargon, isn't this Thesis II?

> In some fundamental sense human (mathematical) activity
> cannot be reduced to formalism alone, such  formal systems are incomplete.

So we can say that Godel et al, do for Enlighment mathematics and logic what
Marx et al did to philosophy?

> The military-industrial complex aside, far from undermining the
> foundations of mathematics, Godel succeeding in opening a whole new
> avenue of investigation. via the work of Tarski, Barkeley Rosser (father
> of marxmail alumni J Barkeley Rosser), Church/Turing, and Gregory
> Chaitin, we now have deep connections between mathematics, computational
> systems, and, more recently, physics.

My main criticism of Academic marxism, in particular in the USA and the
Americas, but even in Europe, is that they have let the pomos claim all of
those developments as their own, as a matter of fact going ahead and
violently trying to question every little word of every brilliant scientist
and mathematician simply because wither the pomos captured them as their
own, or because they themselves went to the side of the pomos.

While I am not an academic, nor have more than pedestrian knowledge of many
things, I do feel we need to connect with a lot of the 20th century
scientific developments, something that was apparently lost outside of the
States that were marxist experiments.

Cybernetics and digital fault protection as the mathematical realization of
Leninism, if you will.

Interestingly, pomos do such no errors, and try to turn even a solid
socialist Einstein into a support of Liberalism, the eternal.

I am very interested in learning about current and old debates around all
those questions. Pomos love to connect, say, thermodynamics and linguistics,
and I see nothing anti-marxist in that process, and moreso, I see it as a
political capitulation on the part of the academic marxists that they have
preffered to differenciate rather than co-opt the pomo discourse, which is
in very Godelian terms actuall very much more "mo" than "po".

Did this rant make sense?

sks

ps

BTW my organization has several scientists, including a spokesperson who is
an MIT alumni in astro-physics (besides a siesmologist, several chemists, a
pure math guy, and quite a few science teachers, including the Union
president), so this is post-meeting beer conversation topic that is
frequently touched. I just haven't seen it addressed from a
progressive/marxist stand point in anyway that is not defeatists or
negative, but doubt this is the case... so share please!


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