Jan 3, 2024 05:35 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 3, 2024 06:19 PM by C C.)
https://aeon.co/essays/kurt-godel-his-mo...fter-death
EXCERPTS: As the foremost logician of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel is well known for his incompleteness theorems and contributions to set theory, the publications of which changed the course of mathematics, logic and computer science.
[...] Thanks to Marianne’s direct question about Gödel’s belief in an afterlife, we get his mature views on the matter. She asked him for this in 1961, a time when he was in top intellectual form and thinking extensively about philosophical topics at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had been a full professor since 1953 and a permanent member since 1946. The nature of the exchange compelled Gödel to detail his views in a thorough and accessible manner.
[...] Before moving on, it is good to pause and capture Gödel’s argument in a nutshell. Assuming that the world is rationally organised, human life – as embedded in the world – ought to possess the same rational structure. We have grounds for assuming that the world is rationally organised. Yet human life is irrationally structured. It is constituted by a great potential but it never fully expresses this potential in a lifetime. Hence, each of us must realise our full potential in a future world. Reason demands it.
[...] Gödel thinks that rationality is evident in the world through the deep structure of reality. Science as a method demonstrates this through its validated assumption that intelligible order is discoverable in the world, facts are verifiable through repeatable experiments, and theories obtain in their respective domains regardless of where and when one tests them.
In the letter from 6 October 1961, Gödel expounds his position: ‘The idea that everything in the world has meaning is, by the way, the exact analogue of the principle that everything has a cause on which the whole of science is based.’ Gödel – just like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whom he idolised – believed that everything in the world has a reason for its being so and not otherwise (in philosophical jargon: it accords with the principle of sufficient reason).
As Leibniz puts it poetically in his Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason (1714): ‘[T]he present is pregnant with the future; the future can be read in the past; the distant is expressed in the proximate.’ When seeking meaning, we find that the world is legible to us. And when paying attention, we find patterns of regularity that allow us to predict the future. For Gödel, reason was evident in the world because this order is discoverable.
Although unmentioned, his belief in an afterlife is also imbricated with the results from his incompleteness theorems and related thoughts on the foundation of mathematics. Gödel believed the world’s deep, rational structure and the soul’s postmortem existence depend on the falsity of materialism, the philosophical view that all truth is necessarily determined by physical facts.
In an unpublished paper from around 1961, Gödel asserts that ‘materialism is inclined to regard the world as an unordered and therefore meaningless heap of atoms.’ It follows too from materialism that anything without grounding in physical facts must be without meaning and reality. Hence, an immaterial soul could not count as possessing any real meaning. Gödel continues: ‘In addition, death appears to [materialism] to be final and complete annihilation.’
So materialism contradicts both that reality is constituted by an overarching system of meaning, as well as the existence of a soul irreducible to physical matter. Despite living in a materialist age, Gödel was convinced that materialism was false, and thought further that his incompleteness theorems showed it to be highly unlikely.
The incompleteness theorems proved (in broad strokes) that, for any consistent formal system (for example, mathematical and logical), there will be truths that cannot be demonstrated within the system by its own axioms and rules of inference. Hence any consistent system will inevitably be incomplete. There will always be certain truths in the system that require, as Gödel put it, ‘some methods of proof that transcend the system.’
Through his proof, he established by mathematically unquestionable standards that mathematics itself is infinite and new discoveries will always be possible. It is this result that shook the mathematical community to its core.
[...] So what essentially human property points towards a destiny beyond this world? Gödel’s answer: the human ability to learn, and specifically the ability to learn from our mistakes in a way that gives life more meaning. For Gödel, this property hangs necessarily together with the property of being rational. While he admits that animals and plants can learn through trial and error to discover better means for achieving an end, there is a qualitative difference between animals and human beings for whom learning can elevate one into a higher plane of meaning.
[...] To learn in Gödel’s sense is not about our ability to improve the technical means for achieving certain ends. Rather, this distinctive notion of learning is humanity’s capacity to become wiser. I might, for example, learn to be a better friend after losing one because of selfish behaviour, and I might learn techniques for thinking creatively about a theoretical approach after multiple experimental setbacks. An essential property of being human is, in other words, being prone to develop our reason through learning of the relevant sort. We are not just learning new ways of doing things, but rather acquiring more meaning in our lives at the same time through reflection on deeper lessons discovered through making mistakes.
All this might lead one to infer that Gödel believed in reincarnation. But that would be overhasty, at least according to certain standard conceptions of it. An intriguing feature of Gödel’s theological worldview is his belief that our growth into fully rational beings occurs not as new incarnations in this world, but rather in a distinct future world...
[...] The next world, therefore, must be one that liberates us from our current, earthly limitations. Rather than recycling back into another earthly body, we must become beings with the capacity to learn from memories that are latently brought along into our future, higher state of being... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: As the foremost logician of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel is well known for his incompleteness theorems and contributions to set theory, the publications of which changed the course of mathematics, logic and computer science.
[...] Thanks to Marianne’s direct question about Gödel’s belief in an afterlife, we get his mature views on the matter. She asked him for this in 1961, a time when he was in top intellectual form and thinking extensively about philosophical topics at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had been a full professor since 1953 and a permanent member since 1946. The nature of the exchange compelled Gödel to detail his views in a thorough and accessible manner.
[...] Before moving on, it is good to pause and capture Gödel’s argument in a nutshell. Assuming that the world is rationally organised, human life – as embedded in the world – ought to possess the same rational structure. We have grounds for assuming that the world is rationally organised. Yet human life is irrationally structured. It is constituted by a great potential but it never fully expresses this potential in a lifetime. Hence, each of us must realise our full potential in a future world. Reason demands it.
[...] Gödel thinks that rationality is evident in the world through the deep structure of reality. Science as a method demonstrates this through its validated assumption that intelligible order is discoverable in the world, facts are verifiable through repeatable experiments, and theories obtain in their respective domains regardless of where and when one tests them.
In the letter from 6 October 1961, Gödel expounds his position: ‘The idea that everything in the world has meaning is, by the way, the exact analogue of the principle that everything has a cause on which the whole of science is based.’ Gödel – just like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whom he idolised – believed that everything in the world has a reason for its being so and not otherwise (in philosophical jargon: it accords with the principle of sufficient reason).
As Leibniz puts it poetically in his Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason (1714): ‘[T]he present is pregnant with the future; the future can be read in the past; the distant is expressed in the proximate.’ When seeking meaning, we find that the world is legible to us. And when paying attention, we find patterns of regularity that allow us to predict the future. For Gödel, reason was evident in the world because this order is discoverable.
Although unmentioned, his belief in an afterlife is also imbricated with the results from his incompleteness theorems and related thoughts on the foundation of mathematics. Gödel believed the world’s deep, rational structure and the soul’s postmortem existence depend on the falsity of materialism, the philosophical view that all truth is necessarily determined by physical facts.
In an unpublished paper from around 1961, Gödel asserts that ‘materialism is inclined to regard the world as an unordered and therefore meaningless heap of atoms.’ It follows too from materialism that anything without grounding in physical facts must be without meaning and reality. Hence, an immaterial soul could not count as possessing any real meaning. Gödel continues: ‘In addition, death appears to [materialism] to be final and complete annihilation.’
So materialism contradicts both that reality is constituted by an overarching system of meaning, as well as the existence of a soul irreducible to physical matter. Despite living in a materialist age, Gödel was convinced that materialism was false, and thought further that his incompleteness theorems showed it to be highly unlikely.
The incompleteness theorems proved (in broad strokes) that, for any consistent formal system (for example, mathematical and logical), there will be truths that cannot be demonstrated within the system by its own axioms and rules of inference. Hence any consistent system will inevitably be incomplete. There will always be certain truths in the system that require, as Gödel put it, ‘some methods of proof that transcend the system.’
Through his proof, he established by mathematically unquestionable standards that mathematics itself is infinite and new discoveries will always be possible. It is this result that shook the mathematical community to its core.
[...] So what essentially human property points towards a destiny beyond this world? Gödel’s answer: the human ability to learn, and specifically the ability to learn from our mistakes in a way that gives life more meaning. For Gödel, this property hangs necessarily together with the property of being rational. While he admits that animals and plants can learn through trial and error to discover better means for achieving an end, there is a qualitative difference between animals and human beings for whom learning can elevate one into a higher plane of meaning.
[...] To learn in Gödel’s sense is not about our ability to improve the technical means for achieving certain ends. Rather, this distinctive notion of learning is humanity’s capacity to become wiser. I might, for example, learn to be a better friend after losing one because of selfish behaviour, and I might learn techniques for thinking creatively about a theoretical approach after multiple experimental setbacks. An essential property of being human is, in other words, being prone to develop our reason through learning of the relevant sort. We are not just learning new ways of doing things, but rather acquiring more meaning in our lives at the same time through reflection on deeper lessons discovered through making mistakes.
All this might lead one to infer that Gödel believed in reincarnation. But that would be overhasty, at least according to certain standard conceptions of it. An intriguing feature of Gödel’s theological worldview is his belief that our growth into fully rational beings occurs not as new incarnations in this world, but rather in a distinct future world...
[...] The next world, therefore, must be one that liberates us from our current, earthly limitations. Rather than recycling back into another earthly body, we must become beings with the capacity to learn from memories that are latently brought along into our future, higher state of being... (MORE - missing details)
