"too many people misuse Godel -- starting with GEB, and onward."

Assuming this is Hofstader's Godel Escher Bach, I'd like to see support for this claim. GEB is just a popular exposition of Godel and a paean to self-reference. It's not a rigorous work but I don't know of any terrible violations it involves.

GEB not just a popular exposition of mathematical logic, the book is quite explicitly about philosophy of mind. In particular, he develops the self-reference stuff so he can draw an analogy to brains and tell us his theory of consciousness. As for support for that claim, he clarified the point of the book in an elaborate preface to the 20th anniversary edition, and that still wasn't enough to get the point across, so he wrote an entire second book ('I am a Strange Loop') to explain his theory of mind again.

Exactly. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems have as much to do with philosophy of mind (consciousness/brains/AI) as the Pythagorean Theorem does.

I found I Am a Strange Loop good, but a little sad.

How is that a "misuse" of Godel's Theorem? He doesn't draw conclusions from it about consciousness. He only points to it as an example of a strange loop. Godel's Theorem is an analogy, not an explanation.

That's not at all an accurate description of the book. Goedel is not just used as an example of a strange loop, he bases his entire model of mind on it. This is developed in chapter 20. Particularly noteworthy are the sections of that chapter titled "Undecidability is inseparable from a high-level viewpoint", immediately followed by "consciousness as an intrinsically high-level phenomenon".

It's true that he uses it as an analogy, but not a loose or vague one. For example, "But it is important to realize that if we are being guided by Goedel's proof in making such bold hypotheses, we must carry the analogy through thoroughly [...] If our analogy is to hold, then, 'emergent' phenomena would become explicable in terms of a relationship between different levels in mental systems." p708

He's literally taking the logic of Goedel's proof, transferring it to brains step by step, to argue for a particular theory of consciousness.

+1

It is odd to think of someone "using" or "misusing" Godel - if the points are salient and clear, how is it misuse? (At least, in this case, where GEB is a philosophical text, not a scientific one.)

The salience is exactly what's disputed.

> Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem isn't particularly interesting, can be proved fairly easily (to an average high-schooler)[1]

I don't agree. The more modern result of incomputability has certainly decreased the importance of the first incompleteness theorem, but the idea of unprovability is still important.

And I don't think its a result that most high-schoolers can prove (with rigor). I would like to point out that your reference does not in fact even prove it (even informally). It only proves that there are incomputable functions. Such a function does allow you to make an unprovable statement, but that is an extra step at least as large as the given proof.

There are a bunch of important details to the formal proof (as Godel wrote) that are not easy. The method to find a fixed point of the unprovable statement is definitely not something I could repeat from memory. Understanding why the "certain amount of elementary arithmetic" is one of the details I feel is important to understanding the theorem.

The number of functions (or rather programs) is countable though, as we can think of them as Turing machine. A Turing machine is a set of the form (states, transitions). Given that a Turing machine has finite number states and transitions, there are countably many such machines.

So indeed, we reach a contradiction, but the hypothesis was :

> To make things even easier, we can just throw out programs that loop infinitely or don’t return a 1 or a 0

so the contradiction tells us that \bar f is not in this set. More specifically, \bar f may loop infinitely at some point, I guess it does loop when you feed \bar f to itself.

> Such a function does allow you to make an unprovable statement, but that is an extra step at least as large as the given proof.

Not at all. An unprovable statement is, in fact, exactly such a non-computable function. Supposing S is a non-computable function, all we need is a meta-logical jump from "computing S(x)" to "checking if the statement 'S(1) = 0' is correct" -- the latter of which is also trivially not possible (because S is not computable).

> An unprovable statement is, in fact, exactly such a non-computable function

In any rigorous logic it is not. An unprovable statement is a non-existent value whereas the non-computable function is a mapping to a non-existant value. Sure there are ways of turning one into another (however there is not an isomorphism), but that does not make them the same.

> all we need is a meta-logical jump from "computing S(x)" to "checking if the statement 'S(1) = 0' is correct" -- the latter of which is also trivially not possible (because S is not computable).

As the other comments point out, you can't check just one case. f bar's definition makes it computable at a bunch of functions.

The lecture you linked in the article actually has a follow up where it goes into showing that a formal language would be able to prove any computable function's value. It isn't hard, but it requires some thought.

> ... but that does not make them the same

I need to check my undergrad metalogic notes, but I think they are "almost" the same. You might be right though, it's a very nuanced point you're making. IIRC, Godel and Lob used the "|- Prov(...)" (or Bew(...)) predicate to essentially make them the same.

I'm confused by your statement, there's plenty of not computable functions for which we know whether S(1)=0 is true or not

We might know it†, but we can't prove it† (because proving it implies computing it).

† The knowing is external to the system at hand, and the proving is internal to the system at hand. I go into detail about this in my blog posts linked above.

Define (inside the system) the function S(1)=14 and S(n+1)=g(n) for all n\geq1 where g is any function which is not computable. I'm not convinced you can jump from "the function is uncomputable" to "the system cannot determine a single value of the function"

I see what you're saying, and yeah, I think you're right. You can construct a non-computable function S(n) that returns n when n is even, but does something non-computable when n is odd (kind of like f_bar). Of course, we're not really interested in these degenerate cases where n is even, but rather in the cases where we know that there's some kind of answer we can't prove in the system. I gave "S(1) = 0" as an example (you can replace '1' with whatever argument ends up being non-computable in your case, maybe S(2)).

To add to what the other commenter said: Isn't the Busy beaver function uncomputable and we still can obtain some values for small n and prove that they are correct [1]?

So I'm not sure it only applies to some special cases, I think several relevant incomputable problems might have this characteristic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver#Non-computability

A question about the article. Surely, for any function fn(x) we can just add gn(x) = 1-fn(x) to the table. And so then the argument that there are missing functions does not hold. Why is this reasoning wrong?

I think you forgot to notice the diagonalization in the article. That is, the newly defined function precisely disagrees with the i-th function when input is i. A similar diagonalization process is used by Cantor to prove the reals are not countable.