TIP: Click on subject to list as thread! ANSI
echo: philos
to: MARK BLOSS
from: DAY BROWN
date: 1998-01-12 18:19:00
subject: `nothing`

 On 01-09-98 Mark Bloss wrote to Day Brown... 
 MB>  ...Or, put another way, there must be some contextual 
 MB>  designator external to the equation to complete any function. 
 MB> Therefore, 
 MB>  for _any_ function (F), (F) cannot prove itself.  That is the first 
 MB> of the three premises of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. 
 MB> 
 MB>  WE> Recent focus has been on problems which, tho theoretically 
 MB>  WE> solvable, cannot actually be done even with supercomputers. 
 MB>  WE>  They haven't actually proved the existence of such, but it 
 MB>  WE> has been proven that the whole bunch of such problems are 
 MB>  WE> equivalent in the sense that if one is actually solvable, 
 MB>  WE> they all are. 
 MB> 
 MB>  DB> And, if they all are? 
 MB> 
 MB>  They all _are_.  But who is the evaluator?  Who will be the 
 MB> contextual 
 MB>  designator external to every equation possible?  Not us puny humans, 
 MB>  I bet. 
I will take your bet Mark.  There is a mental tool in the 
computer that will do for the mind what the jet plane does 
for the body.  No longer do I have to fill my head with the 
trivia of phone numbers of all my correspondents. no longer 
do I have to think much about my tax forms, checkbook, any 
number of other routine tasks. 
 
Now, some of the mental energy once wasted on such trivia is 
available for deeper considerations.  At what point will the 
limit of those considerations be put? We have never had the 
like before, so the depth remains unplumbed. I am not asking 
some super computer; I am trying to make one in my own head. 
I have tried meditation and chemical compounds that some see 
as a risk to my sanity, which may well be, but which have in 
the long retrospective of my life proved to be useful to get 
to realizations not attainable in any other way. 
 
Like my desktop computer, I tinker with my mind, trying to 
get it run more smoothly- I have risked some serious crashes 
in this endeavor, but the results of stressing the system to 
limits teaches me more about it. Obviously not something to 
recommend to anyone else; if you have another tool use it. 
___ 
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