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Is this the Shortest disproof in history

 
 
Reply Sat 15 Sep, 2007 05:07 am
Godel's incompleteness proof runs to over 60 pages. Colin leslie has proved him wrong in less that 150 words.
Is this the shortest disproof in history


Godel specifies that he uses Zermelo axiom system- so deans critique stands

quote
http://www.mrob.com/pub/math/goedel.html


"In the proof of Proposition VI the only properties of the system P employed were the following:


1. The class of axioms and the rules of inference (i.e. the relation "immediate consequence of") are recursively definable (as soon as the basic signs are replaced in any fashion by natural numbers).

2. Every recursive relation is definable in the system P (in the sense of Proposition V).

Hence in every formal system that satisfies assumptions 1 and 2 and is ω-consistent, undecidable propositions exist of the form (x) F(x), where F is a recursively defined property of natural numbers, and so too in every extension of such

[191]a system made by adding a recursively definable ω-consistent class of axioms. As can be easily confirmed, the systems which satisfy assumptions 1 and 2 include the Zermelo-Fraenkel and the v. Neumann axiom systems of set theory,47"


Godel used Peanos axioms but these axioms are impredicative and thus acording to Russel Poincaré and others must be avoided as they lead to paradox. Godel himself accepts impredicative definition and notes that if we accept the criticism of them then most classical mathematics must be false-

quote


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preintuitionism

This sense of definition allowed Poincaré to argue with Bertrand Russell over Giuseppe Peano's axiomatic theory of natural numbers.

Peano's fifth axiom states:

* Allow that; zero has a property P;
* And; if every natural number less than a number x has the property P then x also has the property P.
* Therefore; every natural number has the property P.

This is the principle of complete induction, it establishes the property of induction as necessary to the system. Since Peano's axiom is as infinite as the natural numbers, it is difficult to prove that the property of P does belong to any x and also x+1. What one can do is say that, if after some number n of trails that show a property P conserved in x and x+1, then we may infer that it will still hold to be true after n+1 trails. But this is itself induction. And hence the argument is a vicious circle.

From this Poincaré argues that if we fail to establish the consistency of Peano's axioms for natural numbers without falling into circularity, then the principle of complete induction is improvable by general logic.


quote

http://www.friesian.com/goedel/chap-1.htm

recent research [9] has shown that more can be squeezed out of these restrictions than had been expected:

all mathematically interesting statements about the natural numbers, as well as many analytic statements, which have been obtained by impredicative methods can already be obtained by predicative ones.[10]

We do not wish to quibble over the meaning of "mathematically interesting." However, "it is shown that the arithmetical statement expressing the consistency of predicative analysis is provable by impredicative means." Thus it can be proved conclusively that restricting mathematics to predicative methods does in fact eliminate a substantial portion of classical mathematics.[11]

Gödel has offered a rather complex analysis of the vicious circle principle and its devastating effects on classical mathematics culminating in the conclusion that because it "destroys the derivation of mathematics from logic, effected by Dedekind and Frege, and a good deal of modern mathematics itself" he would "consider this rather as a proof that the vicious circle principle is false than that classical mathematics is false."[12]
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Type: Discussion • Score: 1 • Views: 870 • Replies: 19
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tinygiraffe
 
  1  
Reply Sat 15 Sep, 2007 04:04 pm
i thought you couldn't prove a negative...

hmm, maybe just with ontology. why can't i find any info on dean online? no wikipedia article, dead links in the top search pages, etc.
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nightrider
 
  1  
Reply Sat 15 Sep, 2007 07:55 pm
Quote:

hmm, maybe just with ontology. why can't i find any info on dean online? no wikipedia article, dead links in the top search pages, etc.


the links work
wiki seems to only allow articles on dead philosophers-prove me wrong and try and put an article on dean on wiki
0 Replies
 
parados
 
  1  
Reply Sat 15 Sep, 2007 08:31 pm
Dean's proof is meaningless.
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tinygiraffe
 
  1  
Reply Sat 15 Sep, 2007 11:20 pm
nightrider wrote:
Quote:

why can't i find any info on dean online? no wikipedia article, dead links in the top search pages, etc.


the links work
wiki seems to only allow articles on dead philosophers-prove me wrong and try and put an article on dean on wiki


the links work, but not one mentions dean. wikipedia has articles on living philosophers, but they might not consider dean noteworthy.

there are plenty of noteworthy things that they don't consider noteworthy of course. but i'm surprised that a philosopher with such a contribution isn't there.

besides i couldn't write an article on him, because as i said, i can't find any info on him to do the research.
0 Replies
 
fresco
 
  1  
Reply Sat 15 Sep, 2007 11:39 pm
Dean,

Your submission to Wikipedia was thrown out for being self published drivel.

Genuine living philosophers such as Derrida, Dennett, etc are all cited.

BTW, you've got a rival with the same personal problems involving forum spamming and publishing his own word salad. He has the single pseudonym "rebtevye 25". Perhaps you two should get together and talk past each other. :wink:
0 Replies
 
tinygiraffe
 
  1  
Reply Sun 16 Sep, 2007 12:20 am
i just got here, i'm not up to speed on this, but let me see how close i can get:

night is a big fan of this "colin leslie dean" or he IS colin leslie dean. colin leslie dean is a philosopher that isn't published anywhere online. (i'd bet most aren't.)

but dean is sort of an anti-philosopher out to prove that philosophy is pointless. the best way to do this IMO would be to avoid philosophy and live without it. of course... it would be a sort of philosophy itself to say that philosophy is pointless, right? it would be difficult to live intentionally without philosophy, once you had a reason to do so...

i can imagine it's going to be an idea that no one will have an easy task presenting to other people. regardless of that, let's say that we accept the thesis- that philosophy means nothing. okay, but then what? go back to surfing for pron? politics? religion? or do we just say "everything is meaningless" and become all-black-wearing nihilists drinking bad coffee in worse cafes and beating handdrums. nothing against that, but i wanna know where this is going, if possible.

lastly, if there is some kind of trickery going on here, i'd say... just admit it, get over it, and present your thoughts here as you do anyway. don't pretend to be published if you're not, but keep working on whatever is important (or meaningless) to you and good luck with it. i hope it makes you happy or, y'know, whatever.
0 Replies
 
fresco
 
  1  
Reply Sun 16 Sep, 2007 01:02 am
tinygiraffe,

Dean/nightrider/nightrover/nightdreamer/byron/pam69ur.....etc's agenda is NOT debate. It is "attention seeking". He has equally resorted to second rate "philosophical" controversy and poor erotic "poetry" in his endeavours. If you click on his posts on this or the other bunch of forums he is currently using, you will find that he rarely, if ever responds to the threads of others. The attention seeking "syndrome" is fed by any form of response whether it is positive or negative.
0 Replies
 
tinygiraffe
 
  1  
Reply Sun 16 Sep, 2007 02:56 am
i appreciate you attempting to set me straight on this, i really am trying to understand it. i probably won't get anything out of asking, but no matter what i get, i'll feel better having asked.

temporarily, this might be giving "undue" attention, but it's a small crime.

i'm asking for something of substance, but i'm also asking really specific questions. i promise, if i get nothing of substance, i'll give up before you know it.

and it's a sincere question. i mean, i'd like to give the guy a chance to say something, whatever the motives are.
0 Replies
 
fresco
 
  1  
Reply Sun 16 Sep, 2007 03:49 am
tinygiraffe,

Check out the posts. Dean has declined to "say anything" on challenges to his words, whether by me or anybody else. Instead he responds with catch all phrases like "self contradiction" or "meaningless". He doesn't seem to have the intellectual ability to handle "logic" as merely one mode of discourse, or "meaning" as an embodiment of "social consensus".

In the wake of Einstein's later comment that he "....only went to work these days so that he had the privilege of walking home with Godel..."we can reasonably conclude, that anybody who thinks they can "challenge" Godel is either a fellow genius or a fool. Our particular fool has "challenged" every philosopher from Aristotle to Wittgenstein.
0 Replies
 
tinygiraffe
 
  1  
Reply Sun 16 Sep, 2007 02:42 pm
well, let's begin with the given of a philosophy student / former student obsessed with the meaninglessness of philosophy.

he might be out for attention, which you could argue is an invitation for derision, that's what we do with trolls.

on the other hand, his obsession with this particular question seems to me like it might be sincere enough.

is there anything that can be done with that obsession? is there any advice he could be given to help him move from a philosophical rut, and channel his interest into something more useful? is there any response that could be given, or questions that could be asked, that would encourage him to progress?

maybe not. but to me, this is the interesting question. i've given up on getting an answer so it's fairly moot, but i thought i'd pose it anyway. i expect a string of "not a chance"'s and "no way's" and maybe you're right. it was just an experiment on my part is all. i'll probably move on to other thoughts now, and forget this one eventually.
0 Replies
 
Shapeless
 
  1  
Reply Sun 16 Sep, 2007 03:17 pm
fresco wrote:
Genuine living philosophers such as Derrida, Dennett, etc are all cited.


(Quick note: Derrida died three years ago.)
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fresco
 
  1  
Reply Sun 16 Sep, 2007 03:23 pm
tinygiraffe,

Sorry, but not just in my opinion, anyone who calls his own publishing company "Gamahucher" (= "Oral Sex") is beyond the pale for serious consideration. His obsession is with his self pretensions, not philosophy.
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fresco
 
  1  
Reply Sun 16 Sep, 2007 03:25 pm
Shapeless,

Thanks for that Derrida update.
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tinygiraffe
 
  1  
Reply Sun 16 Sep, 2007 03:42 pm
Quote:
Sorry, but not just in my opinion, anyone who calls his own publishing company "Gamahucher" (= "Oral Sex") is beyond the pale for serious consideration.


LOL! that's a point i was unaware of, that might have affected the amount of effort i put into the discussion. thanks for mentioning it.
0 Replies
 
g day
 
  1  
Reply Mon 17 Sep, 2007 12:21 am
Well as a mathematican I know that Godel was actually saying any system that gets too powerful contains axioms you can neither prove or disprove - the system can hide proofs or falsehoods from itself. With sufficient power comes abstraction - to the point you can say things one can never prove. Turing showed this was true with Halt-tester by constructing a contradtiction. Halt-tester was a program that could look at another program and say whether it would always terminate or never finish. Turing logically constructed inverse halt-tester (it reverse this outcome) and feed it itself. So if it saw it would finish it went into an infinite loop and if it saw it would loop infinitely it wouldn't - contradiction complete.

It showed for this sub-class of mathematics - Logic - there were statements you could make that you could never validate - versus statement that you could make that where only exceptionally hard to determine (e.g. the seven current millennium maths questions).

So you've mis-understood what Godel was saying and how to come up with that dis-proof.
0 Replies
 
fresco
 
  1  
Reply Mon 17 Sep, 2007 01:10 am
g-day,

Nice to have a mathematician's perspective.
0 Replies
 
tinygiraffe
 
  1  
Reply Mon 17 Sep, 2007 02:01 pm
Quote:
Well as a mathematican I know that Godel was actually saying any system that gets too powerful contains axioms you can neither prove or disprove - the system can hide proofs or falsehoods from itself. With sufficient power comes abstraction - to the point you can say things one can never prove.


wow, sounds like some kind of proto-chaos-theory (or at least, chaos theory as expressed in "jurassic park.")
0 Replies
 
averner
 
  1  
Reply Mon 17 Sep, 2007 11:20 pm
I read potato-chaos-theory instead of proto-chaos-theory, but it isnt too far off!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism
0 Replies
 
tinygiraffe
 
  1  
Reply Mon 17 Sep, 2007 11:33 pm
i don't remember eris saying anything about potatoes.

must be one of the esoteric texts.
0 Replies
 
 

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