[harshreality]

Does that "separate enterprise" amount to knowledge? I don't think so. It's an artifact of neurology. It's an important artifact, and one that can't be ignored (when studying psychology or sociology, or managing humans, or planning events involving humans), but nevertheless that emotional artifact is not useful knowledge. Only the [scientifically and rationally understandable] mechanisms behind the emotional and sentimental connections are useful knowledge. The connections themselves may serve sociological purposes, enabling cultural knowledge generation and accumulation, not to mention improving societal stability, but in themselves emotional artifacts are not knowledge.

[littletimmy]

Sure, knowledge is true justified belief (we can add that it must be able to be transmitted). This separate enterprise is certainly true, insofar as it is a qualitative experience of somebody, it is justified and it is also a belief. He transmits it through his writing.

Your argument is presupposes your conclusion that this kind of thinking is not knowledge. That said, even if it is isn't knowledge, so what? Does not mean it is not valuable. With questioning the primacy of reason we can also question the primacy of conventional modes of knowledge.

[pron]

> knowledge is true justified belief

Or is it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem

[JackFr]

> Only the [scientifically and rationally understandable] mechanisms behind the emotional and sentimental connections are useful knowledge.

You understand that that is a pure value judgement.

At their heart, love of freedom over slavery, compassion over apathy and wisdom over ignorance are value judgements. I know them to be true, but I cannot prove them rationally.

[pron]

> It's an artifact of neurology

The fact that something is an artifact of something else doesn't mean that it can be meaningfully reduced to it (or even tractably reduced to it at all). Suppose we discovered the most basic of physical laws, and suppose that somehow computational power made a simulation of them tractable. Is our ability to simulate the universe the same as understanding every aspect of it?

On a more basic level, running software is an artifact of hardware (yet the software can simulate a computer with different semantics than the computer it's running on). So is the study of hardware the only relevant knowledge of the running software? And if you say that the software exists independently of the hardware, you'll find yourself with an idealist philosophy that, according to you, is at odds with your materialistic view.

[TelmoMenezes]

You fly through words like "knowledge" and "useful" without giving them proper thought. What do these words mean? We lived in a philosophy-starved culture. Too much social media, not enough deep thought.

And how can you know that what you call rationality is also not an artifact of neurology? In fact, Gödel proved that if you don't doubt your own rationality, you are in fact being irrational.

I think science is cheapened by this sort of blind faith. The defining characteristic of the scientific attitude is doubt, not certainty.

[eli_gottlieb]

>And how can you know that what you call rationality is also not an artifact of neurology? In fact, Gödel proved that if you don't doubt your own rationality, you are in fact being irrational.

That is not at all what Goedel's theorems actually say.

>We lived in a philosophy-starved culture. Too much social media, not enough deep thought.

No, we live in a culture that loves to engage in cheap, shoddy philosophizing by generalizing incorrectly from facts.

[TelmoMenezes]

> That is not at all what Goedel's theorems actually say.

An informal description of his second incompleteness theorem (from the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"):

"For any consistent system F within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out, the consistency of F cannot be proved in F itself."

One example of a sufficient "certain amount of arithmetic" for this to apply to a system is the use of the integer numbers, addition and multiplication. Such a system can no longer prove its own consistency.

If you think that this does not apply to human efforts at rationality, I would like you to explain why.

Debate becomes cheap and shoddy not when someone is wrong (I could be), but when you resort to name-calling instead of pointing out where you think the mistakes are.

[eli_gottlieb]

>If you think that this does not apply to human efforts at rationality, I would like you to explain why.

Human beings aren't proof systems. We don't operate under conditions of certainty via deductive reasoning. We're inductive (or rather, abductive) reasoners from the get-go.

[TelmoMenezes]

Sure, and abductive reasoning can be formalized in certain modal logics with Kripke semantics.

What Gödel tells us is that, as long as you have a sufficiently powerful formal system, you cannot prove the consistency of the system itself. Modal logics are no exception.

If you are a computationalist (that is to say, you believe that the human mind can be emulated by a Turing machine), then you might want to take a look at Gödel, Escher, Bach, where Hofstadter discusses how the second incompleteness theorem applies to Turing machines.

You might also enjoy "Forever Undecided" by Smullyan. It uses puzzles to guide you to an intuition about what the incompleteness theorems means to human knowledge and its limitations. In the worst case it's a fun read.

Peace!

[eli_gottlieb]

> Sure, and abductive reasoning can be formalized in certain modal logics with Kripke semantics.

No, it can't. Abductive reasoning is probabilistic modelling, and notably, there's a line of research by Cristian Calude showing that you can soundly, non-paradoxically place probabilities on Halting questions.

(Computational tractability is still an obstacle with his current approach, but it has been shown not to generate paradoxes, which is already a major step forward.)

>you might want to take a look at Gödel, Escher, Bach, where Hofstadter discusses how the second incompleteness theorem applies to Turing machines.

This is backwards: halting problems and Kolmogorov complexity for Turing machines give us the two Incompleteness Theorems for proof systems, via Chaitin's Incompleteness Theorem.

Which also neatly gives a way around the Second Incompleteness Theorem: a hierarchical-probabilistic reasoner can create an abstract, compressed model of themselves which consists of small-enough amounts of information that they can reason about its behavior without becoming subject to Chaitin Incompleteness.