What do you think?
Rate this book
602 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
“Epimenides the Cretan says, ‘that all the Cretans are liars,’ but Epimenides is himself a Cretan; therefore, he is himself a liar. But if he is a liar, what he says is untrue, and consequently, the Cretans are veracious; but Epimenides is a Cretan, and therefore what he says is true; saying the Cretans are liars, Epimenides is himself a liar, and what he says is untrue. Thus, we may go on alternately proving that Epimenides and the Cretans are truthful and untruthful.” (Thomas Fowler, 1869, The Elements of Deductive Logic).
“Any consistent formal system F within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out is incomplete; i.e., there are statements of the language of F which can neither be proved nor disproved in F.” (Raatikainen, Panu, “Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.))
“I have never been driven by any such passion, although I do enjoy finding unexpected connections from time to time. But I was indeed driven by a passion when I wrote GEB – namely, my intense desire to reveal what I believed consciousness (or an 'I') is, which in the book I called 'strange loop.' I was on fire to explain the 'strange loop' notion, and I did my best to show how this elusive notion was concretely epitomized by the unexpected self-referential structure lying at the heart of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.”