A Pleasurable Journey to the Edge of Reason, and Beyond

What is beyond reason? Madness? Or Truth? Or both?

All other animals are confined to the fixed nature assigned by heredity. Only in human beings do we see the peculiar combination of a fixed "species nature" with an open-ended process of personal development -- as if the task of each man is to become his own species, so to speak. 

Which they say is true of angels, each being its own unique species. But aren't we a little like that -- as if freedom is individuality lived or actualized? 

In any event, human nature doesn't change on a collective basis, but we never stop changing on an individual one. What's going on here? How did we escape genetic necessity? And I wonder if Gödel has anything to say about it? (I'm reading a biography of him called Journey to the Edge of Reason.) 

If passing along one's genes is the Prime Directive, how to explain someone like Gödel, for whom "the highest aim" of his life was the "pleasure of cognition"? It seems he was a hedonist, but on an immaterial plane which isn't supposed to exist, certainly not in any real way (i.e., as real as the material/biological realm to which it may be reduced.) 

Nevertheless, in college Gödel was increasingly drawn "away from the more practical worlds of physical science to the ethereal realms of pure thought."  

How does pure thought get detached from pure biology, anyway? Or even pure physics, from which Gödel decided to turn away because the discipline was "logically so messy to him."  

I wish I had thought of that one back in 11th grade physics. "These equations are all very nice, Mr. Lamberth, but isn't this whole subject of physics a bit of a mess compared to pure thought?" 

For Gödel's "abiding interest" was "in getting to the very root of things," in both "science and in life." So he switched majors from physics to logic, and why not?

Gödel could never reconcile himself to the positivist standpoint that knowledge derives solely from empirical observations of natural phenomena. Mathematical objects and a priori truth were as real to him as anything the senses could directly perceive.

He 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. 

Then -- to the embarrassment of all and sundry -- he went and proved it, i.e., that "it is impossible ever to prove the consistency of a consistent system" from within the system, or in other words, that "it is impossible to define the concept of truth within a formal system itself." For him this meant that

the human mind can perceive evident axioms of mathematics that can never be reduced to a finite rule -- which means the human mind "infinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine."

Therefore "If the human mind is not a machine, then the human spirit cannot be reduced to the mechanistic operation of the brain, with its finite collection of working parts consisting of neurons and their interconnections."

But it's a catch 22, because supposing the mind "is nothing but a calculating machine," then it too "is subject to the limitations of the Incompleteness Theorem," so we once again escape its presumed completeness. Thus, "if I am not mistaken," there is

a whole world which is the set of mathematical truths, into which we gain access only through intelligence, just as there is a world of physical realities...

Gödel was "committed to accessing the immaterial world of higher philosophical truths through the power of sheer abstract logical reasoning." 

So, Plato wins again? For what is this "immaterial world of higher philosophical truths" but the light streaming in from outside the cave? 

Here are some of his bottom line truths:

--There are other worlds and rational beings, who are of the other and higher kind.

--The world in which we now live is not the only one in which we live or have lived.

--Materialism is false.

--There is a scientific (exact) philosophy (and theology)... which deals with the concepts of the highest abstractness.

He also concluded that "Religions are for the most part bad, but not religion." (His early religious exposure was pretty inadequate, as is true for most people.)

Perhaps such-and-such a religion is the attempt to symbolize Religion as such? And religion as such "deals with concepts of the highest abstractness?"

Exact philosophy and theology. I don't know about you, but this is something I'm always thinking about. As things stand, it seems that both philosophy and theology are a bit messy. Is it possible to clean them up via pure thought? 

I don't know, but it would be a pleasure to try.