Theme: Decidability

“ONCE YOU GET ERRORS ON CANTOR’S LEVEL YOU NEED TO INVENT COMPUTABILITY TO RID YOURSELF OF THEM”

( by frank sock leibowitz)

—“Humans have this deep-rooted tendency to imagine things have platonic essences, which stems from our imperative to use lossy compression efficiently manage our limited cognitive power. Once we invent a good compression algorithm (a heuristic) to encode information, we start mistaking the heuristic for reality, which convinces us that there are amazingly expressive elegant objects that describe reality to the fullest extent. We start believing π exists, circles are real, continuum exists, space-time is continuous. Thus we start believing reality is comprised of ideal objects that don’t require to be strictly constructible. Power of heuristics seduces us, if you will.

Elaborate and extremely clever conjurations of non-constructible objects like infinite cardinalities seal the deal. Once you get errors on Cantor’s level, you probably need to invent computability theory to rid yourself of the lies.

I suspect, mistaking pithy heuristics for reality, has to afflict every computer that’s not aware of being one—and that concordantly doesn’t understand the implications of computability. It probably really takes a programmer that’s also proficient in history, philosophy of law, philosophy of math, and philosophy of science to invent Testimonialism.

Thanks for your amazing work Curt.”— Frank (Sock) Leibowitz