File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-06-08.010, message 76


Date: Mon, 27 May 1996 11:35:18 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re:  waiting for Godel


     OK, Ralph, here goes.  
     My father proved the most generalized form of Godel's 
Theorem.  (see J.Barkley Rosser, "Extensions of some theorems 
of Godel and Church," _Journal of Symbolic Logic_, 1936, vol 1, 
pp. 87-91).  He gave me my copy of Hofstadter's book.  I know
that he considered it (he is dead now) to be mostly a pop
schlop book, but then you would be unable to read what he did
not consider to be such.  But I also know that he considered
Hofstadter's argument about the relationship between self-
referencing and artificial intelligence to be a very serious
hypothesis, although I think that he ultimately sided with Searle
on the matter of genuine human consciousness.
     Guess, you got caught with your wee-wee hanging out on this
one.  Better stick to looking for infinity in a grain of sand or
convincing the proletariat that "Jerusalem" is a comprehensible poem.
(We still love you, Ralph.  Hey, you are being invoked over on M1
against the tirades of malecki as proof that M2 is not a simpy-wimpy
duck pond!)  (BTW, I happen to like "Jerusalem" myself, but then I
am a hopelessly petit bourgeois intellectual, quack, quack, :-).)
     More seriously, Ralph, there is certainly a narcissistic, petit
bourgeois strand to "self-conscious pomo" where people get so caught
up in thinking about how they are thinking and looking at themselves
looking at themselves looking at... that, well....   So, the point is
well taken.  But I would also contend that some of this is both useful
and even necessary.  How does a class become conscious of itself if it
does not engage in at least some degree of self consciousness?
     A few further remarks on Hofstadter's book:
     1)  Bach's piece is "Musical Offering" ("Musikalisches Opfer")
     2)  There is some stuff on Zen in the book, but I agree with
Jukka that Zen paradoxes are relevant to paradoxes of mathematical
logic.  My father, who was very hard nosed, paid little attention to
them, but some of his closest friends, colleagues, and sometimes co-
authors did (or do), e.g. Stephen C. Kleene (dead) and Raymond Smullyan
(still alive and very wittily active).
     3)  There is only a small amount on quantum mechanics in the book
and it pretty much stays away from some of the woozier kinds of stuff
one finds in many books dealing with the "broader implications" of the
topic.  No Schrodinger's Cat, for example.  
     I do note that some serious
physicists have suggested more recently a quantum mechanical explanation
for consciousness, e.g. Roger Penrose, _The Emperor's New Mind_.  A Trot
physicist friend of mine wrote a very favorable review of that book.  He
was very happy that it provided a clear materialist foundation for 
consciousness (are you listening, Adam R.?).
     4)  My favorite tidbit in Hofstadter's _Godel, Escher, Bach: an 
Eternal Golden Braid_ is in the bibliography where the following entry 
appears:
"Gebstadter, Egbert B. _Copper, Silver, Gold: an Indestructible Metallic
Alloy_, Perth: Acidic Books, 1979.  A formidable hodge-podge, turgid and
confused---yet remarkably similar to the present work.  Professor 
Gebstadter's Shandean digressions include some excellent examples of
indirect self-reference.  Of particular interest is a reference in it
well-annotated bibliography to an isomorphic, but imaginary book".
     How so proto-pomo.
J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. (a.k.a. "Dr. Blood")


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