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Models Do Not and Cannot Reveal All Truth Brownstone Institute
Models Do Not and Cannot Reveal All Truth Brownstone Institute
Models Do Not and Cannot Reveal All Truth Brownstone Institute
Most people who haven’t studied mathematics believe that math is a static
edifice of truth. The common perception is that mathematical symbols
represent ideas, and there are logical rules that can be used to create new
ideas: called proofs of theorems. People view the theorems and the ideas they
represent as a picture of the world that is predictable and known. What seems
to stop most people from pursuing this deeper knowledge is that it is really
hard. And really boring, right?
Over the past few years, this static view of mathematics has manifested as a
dependence on models. These were actual mathematical models, as in
predicting numbers of infections and how the virus might spread, and also
more general mental models, as in depending wholly on science to dictate
how we all should behave – Should we quarantine? Should we mask up?
Should we stay six feet apart?
This viewpoint holds firmly the idea that the truth we seek is fundamentally
dictated by a natural world that is rational, mechanistic, and predictable.
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Models Do Not and Cannot Reveal All Truth ⋆ Brownstone Institute 4/14/23, 2:19 AM
in the world, and only allows a narrow, focused view that is partly driven by
our desires. This is as true for scientists and policy makers as it is for people
in other pursuits.
The promise of science, of course, is to get around this problem. There is this
method, a way to carefully define experiments, so that this objective truth can
be shared with others and we can come to a common understanding of the
world around us. The pinnacle of science is this belief in the rational, that
models form all the basis of objective reality. But even science has its
limitations in the truth it can provide.
Digging deep into science, you arrive at mathematics. Surely, this forms the
basis of logical thought, and mathematical truths are complete.
What most people don’t know, unless you get to study math at a graduate
level, is that the very foundation of mathematics is not as stable as you might
think, and that the idea of what can or can’t be proven isn’t so cut and dry.
Mathematical revelations almost a century ago upset the mechanistic view of
the world.
Before the turn of the 20th century, many of the brightest mathematicians
were focused on understanding its foundations. To a mathematician the
foundations are those very basic elements of understanding that serve as
building blocks for everything else. From the foundations, everything else
follows.
Bertrand Russell, a logician and philosopher from this time period, worked
alongside mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead to construct
mathematics from first principles. Together they produced a gigantic work
describing how all of mathematics could be generated from a few basic ideas
and rules. The three volume tome, published between 1910 and 1913 was
called Principia Mathematica.
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So it begins: the first set is that of nothingness. (Really!) But the idea of
nothing is something. If we identify the set containing one thing, that
nothingness, we now have a set that is bigger than nothing, and that is how
we can define the number 1. So it goes, with rules defined for how to get from
one mathematical thing to another, the rules of logic, building up the entire
known universe of math.
The dreams of the fundamental basis for math lived for a decade and a half
until they were dashed forever by a young Czech mathematician named Kurt
Gödel. In 1930 Gödel produced a proof explicitly showing that Principia
Mathematica was incomplete. The essence of what he said is that within any
formal system:
There are things which are true that cannot be proven true.
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It was this recursive mechanism, where numbers were both statements and
instruction steps that inspired this revelation. So he found that there was a
number corresponding to a statement which was true within the framework
of Principia, but which could not be proven with the rules to generate truth
numbers.
With a single blow, Gödel destroyed the years of work of Russell and
Whitehead, and scores of other logicians seeking this Nirvana of fundamental
truth that would build up all of mathematics, and by extension, our
understanding of the physical universe.
This is important.
Gödel’s work exists only in the realm of mathematics. It does not prove
anything in the scientific or human realm except where these intersect with
the math. But it can inform real decisions in our lives.
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living and believing. They are all models, presumably based on rationality
and logic. These ideas are presented as an end-all. They are presented as if
there is no other truth. Gödel showed us that this mechanistic view of nature
doesn’t hold up against the most basic scrutiny of logic.
There are deeper truths in the cosmos that we are not allowed to understand.
Author
Alan Lash is a software developer from Northern California, with a
Masters degree Physics and a PhD in Mathematics.
READ MORE
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