I had to look carefully in order to see that it doesn't necessarily contradict itself even though I should have known this from Gödel, Escher, Bach.

On reflection this ordinal probably represents something real -- a set of Gödel statements, which we'd regard as 'true' if we knew about them. Or rather, the fact that it seems meaningful to deny the existence of a general formula for producing these Gödel statements that will generate any given example if the process runs long enough. (To get an uncountable set of the right kind I might have to qualify this by saying something like "G-statements you could generate starting from a given system and a given method of Gödel numbering," but I can't tell how much of that we actually need.)