Same Difference

Sundeep Dougal (holden@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in)
Wed, 27 Oct 1999 04:23:35 +0530 

To Steve's suggestion of Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, I'd like to
add Hofstadter's more recent Le Ton beau de Marot - in praise of the
music of language -- and what's more as those with good memories would
recall, this book is more on charter too, as it stands with an
invocation to 'poor, poor Salinger" and is allegedly written in a
"poor, poor Salinger" style too. The sort of book Holden Caulfield
will write on the subjects currently hot under discussion.

Very, very relevant to the translation thread too -- and this language
thread in any case is an offshoot of that. Fundamental
interconnectedness, etc. Updates the rebuttal of Searle's Chinese Room
and intentionality and so on, and is overall playful and insightful. I
haven't had the chance to follow the debate on this thread fully yet
as to who said what etc. but Godel does seem very relevant here. In
true recursive fashion he keeps cropping up on various listservs I am
on, and most unexpectedly too. I have a post I made there around a
month or so handy, so for those of you interested, I gratuitously
append certain sections which might be of use to some:

<quote>
Godel's theorem appears as Proposition VI in his 1931 paper, "On
Formally Undecidable Propositions in _Principia Mathematica_ and
Related
Systems". So the Russell connection.

In short, showing that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no
matter what axiomatic system is involved. That no fixed system, no
matter how complicated, could represent the complexity of the whole
numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3,..In this particular case, the fixed system was
the
Principia. And his whole approach was based on the insight that a
statement of number theory _could_ be about a statement of number
theory
(possibly even itself), if only numbers could somehow stand for
statements, and this is what he proceeded to do by coming out with his
coding or what is known as Godel-numbering. If only he just had
thought
up Lisp.

<unquote>

This subject interests me a great deal too -- ah, here's another
message from Matt --and though I'm just about now beginning to read
through the messages of the last 7-10 days or so, if you guys move
this discussion out of here, I'd like to join in too. It would
probably mean re-reading parts of the Marot book, but Matt much as
Godel, Escher, Bach is fascianting, looking over at your last few days
messages, I can assure you that you'd find his Marot book even more
relevant.

Sonny