Wednesday 27 July 2011

Animism in Mathematics and Logic

Logic and mathematics provide Science with its higher foundations, but there is nothing esoteric about the animism that backs them up.

By employing Cantor's diagonal slash Godel animated the syntax in his incompleteness theorems. These theorems were an animistic variation on the idea that symbols and propositions can, under their own steam as it were, refer to their own position in the text in which they appear. Elsewhere, old favourites such as an object is identical to itself, A=A, and "this sentence is false (or true)" become strangely animated when we look at them, as if endowed with the power to show us the position on the page they are printed on.

A casually-accepted animism baptises all mathematical objects with a hidden identity, an identity that can, like the genie in the bottle, be summoned for some (mathematical) task. And no greater summons is made than by Goedel's (animistic) incompleteness theorems which, for Goedel, show us how the natural kingdom is independent of mathematical machinations or calculi. This is ironic, as it is really only in the natural kingdom that identity can be found.

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