You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

ike comments on Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Gondolinian 11 May 2015 12:16AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (247)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: ike 11 May 2015 02:54:31PM 1 point [-]

Gödel did prove that it's impossible to find all truths.

That's misleading. With a finite amount of processing power/storage/etc, you can't find all proofs in any infinite system. We need to show that short truths can't be found, which is a bit harder.

Comment author: Houshalter 14 May 2015 06:15:41AM 0 points [-]

I don't think that's correct. My best understanding of Godel's theorem is that if your system of logic is powerful enough to express itself, then you can create a statement like "this sentence is unprovable". That's pretty short and doesn't rely on infiniteness.

Comment author: ike 14 May 2015 01:32:23PM 0 points [-]

The statement "this sentence is unprovable" necessarily includes all information on how to prove things, so it's always larger than your logical system. It's usually much larger, because "this sentence" requires some tricks to encode.

To see this another way, the halting problem can be seen as equivalent to Godel's theorem. But it's trivially possible to have a program of length X+C that solves the halting problem for all programs of length X, where C is a rather low constant; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin'sconstant#Relationshiptothehalting_problem for how.

Comment author: Houshalter 15 May 2015 09:25:38AM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure how much space it would take to write down formally, and I'm not sure it matters. At worst it's a few pages, but not entire books, let alone some exponentially huge thing you'd never encounter in reality.

It's also not totally arbitrary axioms that would never be encountered in reality. There are reasons why someone might want to define the rules of logic within logic, and then 99% of the hard work is done.

But regardless, the interesting thing is that such an unprovable sentence exists at all. That its not possible to prove all true statements with any system of logic. It's possible that the problem is limited to this single edge case, but for all I know these unprovable sentences could be everywhere. Or worse, that it is possible to prove them, and therefore possible to prove false statements.

I think the halting problem is related, but I don't see how it's exactly equivalent. In any case the halting problem work around is totally impractical, since it would take multiple ages of the universe to prove the haltingness of a simple loop. If you are referring to the limited memory version, otherwise I'm extremely skeptical.

Comment author: ike 15 May 2015 04:53:50PM 0 points [-]

At worst it's a few pages, but not entire books, let alone some exponentially huge thing you'd never encounter in reality.

That's only if your logical system is simple. If you're a human, then the system you're using is probably not a real logical system, and is anyway going to be rather large.

I think the halting problem is related, but I don't see how it's exactly equivalent.

See http://www.solipsistslog.com/halting-consequences-godel/

Comment author: ChristianKl 11 May 2015 04:11:36PM 0 points [-]

We need to show that short truths can't be found, which is a bit harder.

DeVliegendeHollander post didn't speak about short truths but about all truths.

Comment author: ike 11 May 2015 06:13:24PM *  1 point [-]

If we're talking about all truths, then a finiteness argument shows we can never get all truths, no need for Godel. Godel shows that given infinite computing power, we still can't generate all truths, which seems irrelevant to the question.

If we can prove all truths smaller than the size of the universe, that would be pretty good, and it isn't ruled out by Godel.