Sometimes I really don't understand how some people, in the literature, did not see what I have seen, and I begin to harbor doubt on my work. The most famous case was the case of Einstein and Godel, who met at Princeton, but seems not having try to really understand each other on some of the most fundamental question. Eventually I discovered that Einstein was a quasi-"conventionalist" in math, and this could explain his lack of interest in logic and in Godel's work.
A more vexing case was the case of Smullyan. Indeed all his technical, recreative or not, books on logic turn around Godel's theorems. But Smullyan wrote also books on religious/theological (in a wide sense). Still he never tried to connect them. I am thinking about his books "The Tao is Silent", "5000 BC", and "Who knows". I have recently discovered that Smullyan never talk on Church's thesis. He does not seem aware of the "simple" proof of Godel's incompleteness which follows almost directly from Church's thesis, nor does he use it to motivate some link between computer science and mathematical logic. In particular his book "Forever Undecided", although mentioning two times the "artificial intelligence" motivation is rather striking in that respect: indeed his chapter "the heart of the matter" is almost presented without motivation. He presents his "Godelized Universe" like if it was just a new kind of game or puzzle, not really more motivated than the *fairy* Knight-Knave Island. So, there is a sort of missing paragraph or section before the "heart of the matter", and I am working on it, so that "Forever Undecided" could be use more easily by those interested in the comp reversal. But then, what I got makes a bridge between his work on Godel's incompleteness and his philo/theo-logical writings, and I feel now sufficiently confident in that link to recommend those books. They does not present a metaphysical system, unlike Plotinus, but present rather many interesting short reasonings in the religious field, arguably converging toward Plotinus, notably through his comment on "cosmic consciousness" in the second part of "Who knows". I will, soon or later, expand a little bit on all this, especially on the importance, not just for comp, but for theoretical computer science, of Church's thesis. Meanwhile you could still study the 24 first sections of the FU book, i.e. until page 206. Particularly interesting for the "consciousness thread" is the succession of more and more self-aware sort of reasoners (type 1, type 1*, type 2, type 3, type 4) in his chapter "logicians who reason about themselves" (page 89) all that driven toward the "well known" type G). My approach to consciousness adds "inductive inference ability", with the automated (unconscious) bets on personal self-consistency, or of any proposition belonging to the corona G* \minus G. We can come back on this later. To be sure, all this is not necessary for the understanding of the UDA reversal argument, but it is necessary for the translation of that argument in the language of an introspective universal machine, and this is necessary for the actual derivation of the comp "propositional physics" (and then for its comparison with quantum logic). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
