My Kingdom of Logic is not of this World

Is it ironic that the 20th century's greatest logician went insane? 

Or would it be ironic if he hadn't gone insane? 

Either way, the 21st century would surely have pushed him over the edge. At least the previous century was characterized by a lot of wrong ideas. Now they're not even wrong.  

Which is one of the left's patented tirade secrets: their ideas provide no sane person with a coherent or consistent toehold in reality. Arguing with a progressive is like trying to play basketball without gravity: there's nothing stable to push off of. More generally, follow any leftist argument to its conclusion, and it ends in either absurdity or self-contradiction.

Example: why do black lives matter? Because all men are created equal! Okay, so all lives matter. RACIST! Or, here's a progressive conundrum: if you place "trans-women" in a female prison, how did the females get raped and impregnated. Although it sounds impossible, keep pondering. There is a correct answer!  

Anyway, over the weekend I read this new biography of Gödel, Journey to the Edge of Reason. I enjoyed it, although there's really only so much one can say about his personal life. You could say he lived a dual existence, one side dwelling in the purest realm of abstract logic, the other in a messy haze of concrete delusions. He was only 25 when he made his most important discoveries. Then he lost his mind. End of story, more or less.

After the age of 27 the mind came and went, but when he died in 1978 it was definitely gone. As was his body; indeed, he weighed just 65 pounds. Why? Well, he had a lot on his mind. In addition to longstanding fears of his food being poisoned, the Nazis were doing their best to have him declared mentally incompetent, and had already recently sent his brother to a concentration camp. Moreover,

people hated him, he was a terrible person, the doctors were all imposters, evil spirits had removed from his desk a letter about his unfinished essay on Carnap [I hate when that happens!], and his friend Abraham Wald had actually not died in a plane crash nearly thirty years earlier but had survived and was secretly living in the Soviet Union (Budiansky).

So, he had a lot on his plate. No wonder he couldn't clean it.

Now, I saw my share of paranoiacs over the years, but then I decided to stop watching MSNBC.

The Paranoid Mind. That subject could easily hijack the rest of this post, but I think I'll leave it alone. Suffice it to say, it is fruitless to argue with paranoid types, especially when they are intelligent, which they often are. They exhibit a kind of watertight hyper-logic that can always cherrypick sufficient factual trees to support the delusional forest. It's how the media discovered Trump was a Russian spy, or how our intelligence community found out Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation.

I'm going to highlight a number of passages that arrested my attention for one reason or another. There's nothing complete or consistent about them. Or, perhaps there will be once we specify them; in other words, maybe we'll discern a pattern. 

Starting with the theorem(s), they represent "the most significant mathematical truth of the century," the "staggeringly brilliant and paradoxical proof" to the effect that -- wait for it -- "no formal mathematical system will ever capture every mathematical truth within its own bounds."

I'm no doubt missing something, because this strikes me as common sense, and I'm no logician, let alone brilliant, although I have been known to stagger.  But if you know what the soul is and the intellect does, obviously they transcend any mathematical or computational system. The mind is not a computer. Sure, a lot of experts talk about artificial intelligence, but this is only because they are genuinely stupid. Or at least ignorant of Gödel.

Speaking of which, although the theorems were published in the early 1930s, there was no popular book on the subject until the late 1950s. Then they were used by anyone and everyone to prove anything and everything (similar to how people take the Theory of Relativity to mean everything's relative, when it implies the opposite). Deepak no doubt uses Gödel to prove that our minds create reality. 

More generally, there are people who loved the implications and people who hated them, but both camps tended to misunderstand them.

Although Gödel was a member of the famous "Vienna Circle," he ended up placing intellectual dynamite under its absurdly pretentious and narrow-minded empiricism and positivism; although he mostly kept it to himself, he inclined to

the deeper conviction that there were truths to be found not just in the empirically perceivable, but perhaps more beautiful and enduring ones in the realm of abstract conceptions, where they awaited human discovery not through tangible perception, but by thought alone.

Okay, prove it!

The rest is history. Although his proofs still haven't managed to vanquish scientism, reductionism, materialism, Marxism, atheism, naturalism, humanism, evolutionism, et al. To be sure, they've been defeated, only they don't yet know it and don't want to know: matter over mind!

For Gödel, mathematics is not a human invention but a human discovery, a proposition that has literally infinite pansophical implications. "Mathematical objects and a priori truth were as real to him as anything the senses could perceive." Same. Well, maybe not the former, since I'm no math wiz. But a priori truths are as real to me as reality, since there is no reality without them.

Gödel regarded mathematics as "a search for truth, and more specifically a search for pre-existing truths that inhabited a reality separate from the human mind."

What?! A reality separate from the human mind? Yes, it's called reality for short. It's that thing that doesn't go away even when progressives refuse to acknowledge it.

Gödel once made a gag that "It's just as hard to be wrong about everything as it is to be right about everything."

St. Thomas would approve, for it is only possible for man to be right about anything because he cannot in principle be right about everything. The first follows from the second; ideologies that pretend to be right about everything (e.g., Marxism) are inevitably wrong about everything, or at least the most important things.

This post has gone on long enough. It's not complete, but I think it's pretty consistent.