On 01-02-98 William Elliot wrote to David Martorana... 
 WE> Nihilism is a philosophic notion of a limit to knowledge.   
 WE> 'Cannot', again another negative implication.  You'd like  
 WE> Godel Incompleteness Theorem from mathematical logic.  He  
 WE> proved that there existed statements such that neither the  
 WE> statement itself nor its negation could ever be proved.   
 WE> That there are statements that can neither be proven nor  
 WE> disproved.  How's that for enforced ignorance. -)  Tho  
 WE> nihilism asserts that human knowledge is incomplete,  
 WE> mathematicians have proven that it is.   
Lemmee see if I got this: 
A: this statement does not exist. 
B: Statement A is wrong. 
 
 WE> Recent focus has been on problems which, tho theoretically  
 WE> solvable, cannot actually be done even with supercomputers.  
 WE>  They haven't actually proved the existence of such, but it  
 WE> has been proven that the whole bunch of such problems are  
 WE> equivalent in the sense that if one is actually solvable,  
 WE> they all are. 
And, if they all are? 
 
 WE> Yes, it's easy to recognize that we don't know everything.  It's a 
 WE> fantasy  
 WE> that we -can- know everything.  Science has this fantasy  
 WE> and philosophy even more so.  Religion has the most  
 WE> pronounced fantasy of omniscience ever, that my buddy god  
 WE> knows it all.  'Tis the minority of thinkers that recognize  
 WE> that human cognizance is limited.  This is why Godel's  
 WE> Incompleteness Theorem was such a shock.   
 WE> An earlier shock was Russell's Paradox.  It was a lot  
 WE> harder to resolve than Xeno's paradox.  You know of these?  
Izzat "Zeno"? who said that 'space' must exist for stuff to 
exist 'in' it, even though space itself is 'nothing'? 
 
I suspect that the answer lies in some more recent insights from 
quantum physics, where stuff like this is dealt with all the time 
in conceptions of reality that require more than three dimensions 
to make the math work out, which apparantly, it does if you have
six dimensions. 
 
The discovery that space itself has a quanta, or integer length, 
where you will either find, or not find, an atom or particle, but 
never find anything *inbetween* these pixels of reality.  Or the 
discovery of 'brother' photons which demonstrate behavior that is 
indicative of the state of the other brother, independent of the 
distance between them- the *information* about that state seems 
to pass from one to the other instantaneously, exceeding the so 
called constant speed of light. 
 
The Heinlein novel, where the hero had the capability to 'Grok', 
or understand the totality of a system beyond the limits of a 
mind that was tied to linear thought processes, where one was 
able to 'paralel' process a relationship set that made no sense 
if you had to do it one line of reasoning at a time.  IT was, it 
seems, related to the mystical notion of synchronicity, where a 
set of apparantly unrelated phenomena, except for the relation 
each member of the set had in a given time frame, was in fact, 
related because *of* the concurrent time factor. 
 
There is the assumption in Astrolgy, for instance, that every 
single thing that happens 'now' is related to the 'now' in which 
they happen, and that that relationship, as for example, where 
all these cosmic bodies are when you are born, is indicative of 
something, even though, *demonstrating* that relationship is not
possible.  Is it true that Scorpios make fine friends, but very 
dangerous lovers? 
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