Re: Meyer's Argument against Gödel's Theorem

On Aug 16, 6:35 pm, Peter_Smith <ps...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Aug 16, 4:30 pm, LauLuna <laureanol...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

I've argued with him that Gödel doesn't refer to expressions of an
object-language in which recursive relations would be expressed, that
Gödel is actually referring to recursive relations themselves; that
there is no meta- and object-language in the theorem but only ordinary
English (German) extended with mathematical notation

Exactly.

The essential claim here that (primitive) recursive functions can be
represented in (weak) formal arithmetics is elementarily provable (as
any modern textbook will teach Meyer).

Meyer is marketing a novel about Gödel's theorem in which a lot of
misunderstandings and awkward claims are conveyed. In the preface the
author claims with all seriousness to be the first who has really
understood Gödel's theorem.

And there is the other guy, Jeff Kegler, and his novel about Gödel's
ontologocal argument. Unfortunately, Kegler does not restrict himself
to the 'God Proof', he also says quite a deal about Gödel's
incompleteness results. Actually he condenses these two results into a
statement like:

if the world is consistent (sic), then there is a Liar sentence (sic;
Gödel's) that is true but that we cannot prove so, and we cannot prove
the world consistent either.

This, Kegler writes, is not that bad, for if the world cannot be
proven consistent, well, that's a proof that it is indeed consistent.

Does anyone knows of any decent fiction work about Gödel, Cantor,
etc. ? I enjoy that stuff whenever no gross inaccuracies make me
angry.

Regards
.

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