Re:Gödel, Escher, Bach: an in-depth explainer
by gerdesj on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @07:34PM
(#32844953)
There are several levels that you can analyse this. Firstly: Is it English and is it grammatically correct? Seems OK but we can allow English to be a bit slack.
Now, how do we attach meaning to the actual statement. Do the English words actually mean the same thing to me as they do to you? Probably.
Should any statement be applicable to anything - world or otherwise? It is just a statement and not my best man's speech at my brother's wedding 25 odd years ago, which I'm sure you can appreciate that I consider that being rather more important.
So here we have a statement that is unable to be consistent and as you say, it sounds like it should have meaning but doesn't.
So we have a way of saying things with spoken language that are logically inconsistent that are also grammatically correct and that is a sort of flavour of what Goedel proved with his incompleteness theorem.
Now, how do we attach meaning to the actual statement. Do the English words actually mean the same thing to me as they do to you? Probably.
Should any statement be applicable to anything - world or otherwise? It is just a statement and not my best man's speech at my brother's wedding 25 odd years ago, which I'm sure you can appreciate that I consider that being rather more important.
So here we have a statement that is unable to be consistent and as you say, it sounds like it should have meaning but doesn't.
So we have a way of saying things with spoken language that are logically inconsistent that are also grammatically correct and that is a sort of flavour of what Goedel proved with his incompleteness theorem.