Re: Godel

["John Gelles" <johng@xxxxxxxxxx>]

    Our choice is not just between no-rules intuition
    and causality evidenced under scientific rules for
    replicable empirical experiment (or fair simulation
    where experiment is not possible).

    There are other choices. There is the realm of
    values whose acceptance is a matter of meta-
    physical faith or rhetoric or both.

    And there is the combination we call logical posi-
    tivism--the realm of empirical evidence and formal
    ways to express absolute cause and effect, possible
    cause and effect, or probabilities associated with
    some causal patterns.

    Animal (non-human) economics that tells of ant
    colonies, bee hives, and monkeys in the wild, etc.,
    is well expressed under rules for logical positivism.

    Human economics relies heavily on values--and
    therefore on metaphysical faith, including politics,
    morality, psychology, all the social sciences, art,
    mathematics, literature and history.

    We live in the post-Keynesian age when the
    lessons of democratic wartime spending have
    been forgotten and will have to be learned all
    over again. That is, they will have to be re-
    learned if democracy is to survive in the new
    century.

    We can likely use fiat money effectively to
    produce global prosperity and freedom OR
    we can allow corporate plutocracy to usher in
    a new era of imperial wars (without cousins at
    the head of rival empires the way it was in 1914.)

    The choice is ours. Goedel's theorem will not
    enter the picture. The appropriate theories to
    ponder are three:

        1. Nations (and worlds) can financially afford
            (with managed fiat money) anything they can
            produce.  -- From the ILO in Montreal, 1944

        2. The logical rules for expressing causal patterns
            that work for a time, (until replaced by rules that
            work after older rules have failed), is science.
                -- Adapted from Rudolph Carnap's views on
                    logical positivism

        3. To come near being Just (or fair) you must do
            unto others as you would have others do unto
            you.  -- A Golden Rule common to many faiths


    John Gelles

----- Original Message -----
From: Gunnar Tomasson <gunnar.tomasson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; Paul Davidson <pdavidson@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2002 11:16 AM
Subject: Re: Godel


Here is my take on Goedel, as conveyed to a
correspondent yesterday:

I think Goedel punctured the Russell-Whitehead idea
that linear thinking is the way to go in coming to grips
with reality.

[...] I am persuaded that our reasoning faculty and
associated linear thinking plays, as it were, second fiddle
to our intuition.

Gunnar

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Davidson" <pdavidson@xxxxxxx>
To: <pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2002 1:43 PM
Subject: Godel

> I thought that Godel showed the unprovability of consistency for some
> axiomatic systems and the formal undefinability of the notion of truth.
> This indicated that  it was impossible to present all scientific knowledge
> in the form of axiomatics.
>
> Paul