Date: Mon, 27 May 1996 08:20:23 -0500
Subject: Re:  waiting for Godel


Ralph:

>I read HOfsdater's shit years ago.  I suggest to Jukka that you read
>it before you deny it is fundamentally ideological.  I've known a lot
>of hi-tech hippies in my lifetime, and I am very familiar with the
>ideoligcal needs that such people have.  I suggest you read Hofstatder
>more carefully, then you will see how little subsatnce there is in it.
>And check with people in mathemtics to see how much they respect him for
>this book.  Perhpas a list of publishers who rejected it before it was
>finally accepted for publication might be instructive.  Of course
>the Godel book was befreo pomo.  It came in on the New Age bandwagon.
>BOugfeois ideology contanstantly mutates, but its fundamental features
>never change.
>Now, Rahul, it's your turn to come out swinging.  We can;t afford to
>let these dishonest little piss-ants to  get away with their perps.

Okay, Ralph, but first things first. I read GEB when I was about 15, and,
although I got bogged down in verbiage and rather annoyed a few times, I
certainly didn't think it was a case of charlatanism. When you made the
charge, I went back over the whole book, skimming over most of the padding
stuff. I have to say it's unfortunaye that he included any mention of Zen
in the book, although it's basically confined to about 20 pages, and he
never makes any claims in the same galaxy as the kind of nonsense Capra
spouts. In fact, whenever he lets his own philosophical perspective show,
it's basically that of a typical, sensible scientist. Why he's interested
in Zen koans, which seem to be just like postmodern academic writing but
more amusing, I can't imagine. The core of the book, however, is an
introduction to formal systems and mathematical logic for the casual
reader. There is certainly not a great deal of mathematical content to the
book, but that's hardly surprising; it's well-nigh impossible to write a
popular book that teaches anyone anything real about math. With that
understood, I think it gives a very readable and straightforward account of
the important concepts underlying Godel's theorem. As for his material
about AI, it's hard to argue with the idea that self-reference is at the
heart of intelligence, but for the rest it has the character of most such
stuff; people are talking about something that doesn't seem really even to
have come on the horizon in all the time it has been worked on, so whatever
is said is really neither here nor there.

Hofstadter mixes in a lot of things based solely on the idea of
self-reference, including Escher's art, Bach's music, and molecular
biology. Clearly the statements about art and music have no direct
relevance to the intellectual subject at hand, and one can make the case
that he should just leave them out. Whatever his own feelings, though (and
it seems he genuinely finds the connection fruitful in some way), I can't
blame him wholly for that. The philistines that the popular science writer
writes for can't keep their attention solely on the wonders of nature or of
mathematics, and must be beguiled by literary allusions and strained
analogies with artistic endeavor, and with clever wordplay, or they'll turn
straight to Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. To pander to that may
well be shameful, but the alternative is not to be read. Even scientists
like Steven Weinberg feel the need to quote Shakespeare profusely (which is
not harmful) and to make silly analogies with things more within the
reader's realm of experience (which often is, since the analogy is such a
dangerous beast).

Whatever the value of all his musing, though, and it makes little
impression on me, possibly because I've seen it all a million times by now,
he is certainly no charlatan. There is not much that's original in the
book, but viewed solely as a popularization I don't think it's bad. It
requires some (though little) effort to assimilate the mathematics, and I
imagine most readers did not, but that's their fault. Also, one thing that
distinguishes him from lots of high-tech hippies is that he has a Ph.D. in
physics. Many mathematicians, and I imagine computer scientists as well are
vulnerable to all kinds of anti-scientific crap because they may have no
contact with the world of hypothesis and experimental verification, and
also through some kind of ultrarationalism, which tries to hold science to
the standards of mathematics, a requirement that science cannot fulfill.
When the Unabomber was caught, I said to myself, "Of course. No one more
anti-scientific than a mathematician."

It must be the case, though, that the success of this book inspired all
kinds of less scientifically knowledgeable people to write all kinds of
crap, and furthermore people can always claim that the book shows some kind
of connection between Zen and AI, though the author makes no such explicit
claims. Since he is not partial to mysticism himself, I imagine that he
would have considered the political ramifications more carefully if he was
publishing now rather than in 1979.

Finally, I'd just say that ideas of interconnections like the ones he plays
with may well be there in the minds of scientists when they're doing their
thing, and that's fine. It doesn't matter what the provenance of an idea
is, once you work out its consequences and see if it's justified or not.
However, those background ideas might just as well stay in the mind of the
scientist because the irrational or suprarational connections one person
makes are probably completely different from the ones anyone else will.

Rahul

PS If you want to see some serious charlatanry by a mathematician, you
might check out the World of Mathematics 4-volume set, which has, inter
alia, a couple of pieces by G.D. Birkhoff (one of the best American
mathematicians of the early 20th century) on the mathematics of aesthetics
and the mathematics of morality.




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