the math/philosophy overlap in set theory/logic makes me uneasy. the closer you get to it, the more the idea that “math is objective” starts to fade away. also pretty surreal to be learning philosophy/taking things as given in a math class. especially because you spend a lot of time proving that certain things are true, but you don’t ever say what it means for something to be true.
Math and science all have a philosophical core, it’s just that most of the time you don’t need to question it, so it’s easy to forget about it. Which is fine
before gödel’s theorems can be formally stated, you have to make a lot of assumptions about axioms, and you have to pick which kinds of logical rules are “valid”, etc. and that all feels way more dicey to me than the actual content of gödels theorems.
i definitely agree that gödels theorems can help to undercut the idea that math is this all knowing, objective thing and there’s one right way to do everything. but to me personally, i feel like the stuff that’s very close to the foundations is super sketchy. there are no theorems at that level, it’s just “we’re going to say these things are true because we think they are probably true”.
the math/philosophy overlap in set theory/logic makes me uneasy. the closer you get to it, the more the idea that “math is objective” starts to fade away. also pretty surreal to be learning philosophy/taking things as given in a math class. especially because you spend a lot of time proving that certain things are true, but you don’t ever say what it means for something to be true.
Math and science all have a philosophical core, it’s just that most of the time you don’t need to question it, so it’s easy to forget about it. Which is fine
All roads lead to Rome.
We already know that math isn’t objective due to Godel’s incompleteness theorem
how does that follow from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems?
Godel’s second theory of incompleteness states that a formal system cannot prove its own consistency
I think that’s as close as you can get to “math is not objective”
before gödel’s theorems can be formally stated, you have to make a lot of assumptions about axioms, and you have to pick which kinds of logical rules are “valid”, etc. and that all feels way more dicey to me than the actual content of gödels theorems.
i definitely agree that gödels theorems can help to undercut the idea that math is this all knowing, objective thing and there’s one right way to do everything. but to me personally, i feel like the stuff that’s very close to the foundations is super sketchy. there are no theorems at that level, it’s just “we’re going to say these things are true because we think they are probably true”.