{"id":7358,"date":"2017-03-17T01:00:05","date_gmt":"2017-03-17T08:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=7358"},"modified":"2017-03-18T10:06:06","modified_gmt":"2017-03-18T17:06:06","slug":"godel-phenomonology-and-monads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/17\/godel-phenomonology-and-monads\/","title":{"rendered":"“Simply G\u00f6del,” Phenomonology, and Monads"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently read an advance copy of a great book by my friend Richard Tieszen. It\u2019s called Simply G\u00f6del<\/em><\/a>. It\u2019ll go on sale in mid-April, but you can pre-order now if you like. The book is a remarkable achievement\u2014a handy guide with the impact of a philosophical tome. It\u2019s all here: elegantly lucid discussions of Kurt G\u00f6del\u2019s epochal discoveries, a sympathetic account of the eccentric genius\u2019s life, focused discussions of his encounters with his astonished peers, and a visionary peek into the future of mathematics, philosophy, and the on-rushing specter of robots with minds. A compact masterpiece, brimming with fresh revelations. <\/p>\n

I’ll discuss some of my thoughts sparked by Simply G\u00f6del<\/em> today, adding some of my paintings to the illos, including two new ones.<\/p>\n

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As I\u2019ve mentioned in my blog posts \u201cMemories of Kurt G\u00f6del<\/a>\u201d\u009d and \u201cConversations with Kurt G\u00f6del<\/a>,\u201d\u009d in 1972 I had a couple of long talks with G\u00f6del in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study. He made a huge impression on me. It goes almost without saying that he was the most intelligent person I will ever meet. Even though he was, at some lower levels\u2026eccentric.<\/p>\n

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\n“The Wanderer,” acrylic on canvas, 24 ” x 18 “, September, 2008<\/em><\/p>\n

How so? G\u00f6del had very unusual views on the nature of reality. He firmly believed that there are indeed higher levels and higher beings\u2014things like ghosts or demons. Indeed, he felt that a person is in some sense an extradimensional being that might be called a monad<\/em>, after Leibniz\u2019s use of the word. A monad affects the physical world, but it\u2019s not embedded in the spacetime framework. A bit like a soul.<\/p>\n

At less philosophical levels, G\u00f6del could be paranoid. He worried that poison gases emanated from his refrigerator or from his furnace. He worried that strangers might be assassins who planned to kill him. He worried that his food was poisoned\u2014and he preferred not to eat anything unless his long-suffering wife Adele had tasted it first.<\/p>\n

But these aspects of the man weren\u2019t apparent when he was talking about mathematics, science, philosophy, and mysticism. To me, he seemed like a man of knowledge and wisdom, profoundly so.<\/p>\n

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\n \u201cOrigin of Life\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, March, 2017, 30\u201d\u009d x 20\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Shown above is a painting of me talking to G\u00f6del in 1972. Well, actually it\u2019s a painting of an abstract image based on a cellular-automaton screen I recently captured, characterized by having double scrolls known as Zhabotinsky patterns. See my previous post, \u201cStill Seeking the Gnarl<\/a>,\u201d\u009d for more about these CAs. These patterns occur naturally in certain chemical mixtures, and they could have played a role in the origin of life within the primordial soup. So I called it \u201cOrigin of Life.\u201d\u009d But, who knows, maybe it is <\/em>me and G\u00f6del. Monads in an extradimensional space of phenomenological impressions. But which one is me?<\/p>\n

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G\u00f6del was Einstein\u2019s best friend during the physicist\u2019s later years in Princeton. Why? Probably Because G\u00f6del was the one person who could readily understand what Einstein was talking about. And perhaps because both of them had made a priori intellectual discoveries that changed humanity\u2019s way of seeing the world. But Einstein wasn\u2019t above teasing his younger friend. Here\u2019s a quote from Ernst Gabor Strauss, taken from Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt G\u00f6del<\/em>. <\/p>\n

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Reading Tieszen\u2019s great Simply G\u00f6del<\/em> got me thinking about all these things again. If we have souls and telepathy, maybe G\u00f6del is still talking to me. Helping me understand Tieszen\u2019s book, as far as it goes. Something in the book that strikes me as particularly interesting is the notion that, in his later years, G\u00f6del was looking for a way to justify his belief that we have a direct perception or intuition about mathematical objects. He felt we could \u201csee\u201d\u009d even such objects as outr\u00c3\u00a9 as transfinite sets such as the cardinal alef-one, or the continuum of all real numbers between zero and one. You want to know if these two sets have the same size? Focus. Look harder\u2026<\/p>\n

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Immanuel Kant famously said that the \u201creal\u201d\u009d objects around us are so-called noumena<\/em>, and we know them only at second-hand, that is, via the phenomena <\/em>given by our senses\u2026sounds, images, touch sensations, smells, etc. And later the philosopher Husserl started talking about phenomenology, which might mean the practice of taking your sense impressions as in some sense external to you as well. Like, rather than blundering around banging our shins on noumena, we\u2019re spacing around in a cloud of phenomena. Husserl isn\u2019t super clear about any of this. He strikes me as something of a bullshitter, never writing one word when twenty will do. But I feel there\u2019s a fertile acorn sprouting beneath his great load of words. With an oak to emerge.<\/p>\n

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\n“Topology of the Afterworld,” acrylic on canvas, 40 ” x 30 “, August, 2009.<\/em><\/p>\n

Trying to imagine being a phenomenologist, I let go of my ordinary stance of being an object among objects. As Husserl would put it, I bracket <\/b>this mode of thought, that is, put it on hiatus. (There\u2019s even a short Wikipedia article about phenomenological bracketing<\/a>!) <\/p>\n

So I frikkin\u2019 bracket the whole issue of what is reality. I\u2019m a monadic focus point amid phenomena. I\u2019m not watching things, I\u2019m kicking it back a level, I\u2019m experiencing phenomena. It\u2019s like an exercise in mindfulness. Just focus on the flow of sights and sounds and touch and weight and don\u2019t try to interpret them or see them as objects, just take them for what they are…phenomena. <\/p>\n

It’s so hard to “keep up” with the onrushing flow sensations, one is continually tempted to dive down into associative chains. But when I can do it for a few minutes, it gets me high, and that is, after all, the end goal of philosophy (at least to this reprobate’s mind). And you can jack up your phenomenological awareness to a \u201ctranscendental\u201d\u009d level and treat your thoughts as phenomena as well.<\/p>\n

Looking at the odd 3\/4 moon on the horizon last night, rotten looking, moldy as an overripe cantaloupe that seeps smeely fluid, I advised to Sylvia that we bracket any thought about the Moon’s physical nature, and merely focus on the look of the moldy moon.<\/p>\n

I think for the rest of the week I\u2019ll make a habit, of saying I’m bracketing <\/em>whatever is going on around me at any given time. Kind of a Woody Allen thing to do. He loves joking about higher philosophy.<\/p>\n

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Speaking of phenomenology, Georg Hegel is my great-great-great-grandfather, and one of his best-known works is Ph\u00c3\u00a4nomenologie des Geistes<\/em>, which we call either The Phenomenology of Mind <\/em>or The Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em>. Not that, so far as I know, Hegel’s notion of phenomenology has much to do with Husserl’s. I\u2019ve been trying to read this book since I was in high-school, and so far I\u2019ve never gotten beyond the preface. But there is one passage in the preface that I\u2019ve grown to love. Especially the sentence I italicized.<\/p>\n

A building is not finished when its foundation is laid; and just as little, is the attainment of a general notion of a whole the whole itself. When we want to see an oak with all its vigour of trunk, its spreading branches, and mass of foliage, we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn instead. <\/em>In the same way science, the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not found complete in its initial stages. The beginning of the new spirit is the outcome of a widespread revolution in manifold forms of spiritual culture; it is the reward which comes after a chequered and devious course of development, and after much struggle and effort.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I take this passage to express an idea popularized by Stephen Wolfram in his A New Kind of Science<\/em>. And this is the notion that, in the realm of computation, we can have incredibly rich and complex patterns that are in fact based on extremely simple little rules. The Mandelbrot set is a classic example of this. And, if you think of biological growth as a type of computation, the tree is indeed the \u201coutput\u201d\u009d of the tiny acorn program. One of the most interesting places to see small rules making cool patterns is in the world of cellular automata.<\/p>\n

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\n \u201cAntarctica\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, March, 2017, 24\u201d\u009d x 20\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This is another recent painting of mine based on cellular automata. The image also dovetails with my ongoing obsession with \u201cAt the Mountains of Madness,\u201d\u009d which is H. P. Lovecraft\u2019s story about the lost ancient city in Antarctica. You can see the image in that same recent “Still Seeking the Gnarl” post<\/a>. I think of this painting as an aerial view of the ruined city. Synchronistically, the Capow pattern happened to have a shape like the head of a penguin. Working the phenomena. But maybe that\u2019s possible. Maybe if you get phenomenological enough you can be dancing with the universe, in synch with reality’s higher cosmic patterns.<\/p>\n

But if I\u2019m living in some sense to the side of the so-called physical world, then what am I? As I was hinting at above, G\u00f6del seems to want to say that he\u2019s a monad, in Leibniz\u2019s sense of the word. Gabriella Crocco of the university of Aix\/Marseille wrote a great 2013 paper about G\u00f6del, Leibniz, and monads, entitled, G\u00f6del, Leibniz and “Russell’s mathematical logic”<\/a><\/em>. The phrase \u201cRussell\u2019s Mathematical Logic,\u201d\u009d refers to one of G\u00f6del\u2019s papers.
\nAs another good philosophical resource see my Paris philosopher friend Mark van Atten’s excellent, “Monads and Sets. On G\u00f6del, Leibniz, and the Reflection Principle<\/a>” from 2009. Mark was my nearly constant companion when I was a visiting scholar in Brussels.<\/p>\n

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Tieszen’s Simply G\u00f6del<\/em> further discusses G\u00f6del’s rationalistic Platonism, and gets into the issue of having direct phenomenological perceptions of transfinite sets, which is something which G\u00f6del hinted at in his essay, “What is Cantor’s Continuum Problem,” and which G also discussed with the philosopher Hao Wang, and mentioned when talking to me. One the appealing things about Tieszen’s book (as well as Crocco and van Atten’s papers) is that, as a computer programmer might say about efficient low-level code, they “stay close to the metal.” Meaning that, rather than launching into overly wispy imaginings of what G\u00f6del might have meant to say, these philosophers stick to actual quotes from the man’s published and unpublished papers, the more fragmentary remarks in his archives, and of others’ records of conversations with him. There’s more than enough here to launch the wildest fantasies.<\/p>\n

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\n“Thirteen Worlds,” acrylic on canvas. 24″ by 18″. January, 2009. <\/em><\/p>\n

Getting back to monads, back in 2004, I read the whole of Leibniz\u2019s short book, The Monadology<\/em>. It\u2019s pretty close to being incomprehensible. It\u2019s way out there. Leibniz seems to say that our universe is an assemblage of \u201cmonads\u201d\u009d which reflect each other, and each monad has the whole world inside it. Naturally, it struck me that an idea this crazy ought to be used in an SF story. And\u2014here\u2019s the literary surrealist-in-action part\u2014as soon as I thought of that, I immediately thought that each monad should resemble a knobby giraffe. With brindle patches on it. And in 2016, I wrote an SF tale called “The Knobby Giraffe<\/a>” for Lightspeed <\/em>magazine.<\/p>\n

But I still feel like I’m missing the mark in my conception of monads.<\/p>\n

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Something more to think about. Anyway, thanks again to Richard Tieszen and Simply G\u00f6del <\/em>for getting all these wild thoughts churning in my head!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently read an advance copy of a great book by my friend Richard Tieszen. It\u2019s called Simply G\u00f6del. It\u2019ll go on sale in mid-April, but you can pre-order now if you like. The book is a remarkable achievement\u2014a handy guide with the impact of a philosophical tome. It\u2019s all here: elegantly lucid discussions of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7358"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7381,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7358\/revisions\/7381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}