X-Message-Number: 23914
References: <>
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Godel Challenge
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 19:51:44 +1000

Michael Price writes,

>> We know that QM and GR aren't mutually consistent; this and the plague
>> of infinities are obvious symptoms. God doesn't renormalize.
>
> Obvious?  Let's wait for the theory of everything before
> we jump to conclusions. [...] There is no escape from Goedel's result.

There can be no theory of everything if you're right about Godel being 
inescapable. I've suggested a frame that escapes Godel, but let me be 
constructive about it:

Ignore true and false; we're predicting empirical signal. That's all a 
useful theory can ever do. Forget your axiomata and metamath. We have a 
sensory/analytic apparatus, or several, and we have an experimental 
variable we can twiddle, or several.

Set up a labelling sufficiently describing the degrees of freedom of 
sensors and twiddlers. There are limits of resolution on our labels; 
the key is that we have sufficient labels, sufficient sensors, and 
sufficient analytics to quantifiably distinguish one experimental 
behavior from another.

Gather data. Each datum is a combination of labels we'll encode as bits 
according to their significance. Balanced Ternary will do for most 
simple variables here; see Knuth. If you want to get fancy see Lucas & 
Gibson.

Now we either obtain a binary polynomial that accounts for all our 
empirical data, or we have an ambiguity. If the latter then we either 
need more resolution or some extra sensory or analytic ontologies.

Add ontologies to the labelling scheme until there are no ambiguities 
in the polynomial. There, you're done, the polynomial is the theory. If 
you want it to be beautiful, reduce to the minimum necessary number of 
terms.

Godelize that!

Peter Merel.

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