[Arlo previously] Why would you want to overlook it? Incompleteness is an aspect of any symbolic system.
[Platt] Including I presume the "incompleteness" of the "fact" that incompleteness is an aspect of any symbolic system. (I prefer self-contradictory to incomplete because it more dramatically reveals the weakness of logic on which we place so much faith to ascertain "truth.") [Arlo] What you're teetering around here is Epimenides Paradox, "This sentence is false." I think Case or Ron recently mentioned how this was used in Star Trek "Everything Arlo says is a lie." Then Arlo says, "I lied." Hofstadter talks about this "self-referentialness", and how it leads to symbolic paradox and recursion. Its just a part of the game. [Platt] Be that as it may, it seems to me your view amounts to: "In the end we know that we can know nothing, even though for practical purposes we fool ourselves into thinking we can." Am I wrong? [Arlo] Depends on your definition of "know". By all pragmatic counts, we certainly can "know" things. And this isn't "fooling ourselves", its just a recognition that this is as good as it gets. Its like saying, we can get to 99.9999999999999.... % certainty, but we can never, by virtue of the game, reach 100%. Is that last .00000000000000001% a big deal? No, it is neither something we should deliberately ignore, or something we should dwell on incessantly. It just _is_. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
