[postingposts]

The simulation stuff is just “Plato’s Cave”:Reloaded for people who never understood the concept of the cave in the first place. At a basic level you can interpret it from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which state that systems of logic need some form of observer to function. That observer concept reaches way back across different philosophical domains and authors as well.

[hither_shores]

That is not at all what the incompleteness theorems say.

The first incompleteness theorem says that for any consistent formal system T (with a recursively enumerable set of axioms) capable expressing of elementary arithmetic, T can express a statement which it can neither prove nor disprove.

The second incompleteness theorem says that T can't prove the statement "T is consistent". (I've still glossed over a number of technical details here; pick up a book on model theory if you want all the messy internals.)

First order logic is notably not capable of expressing elementary arithmetic. And observers aren't involved in any way.

[postingposts]

Yes, it is.

Sorry if you can’t read deeply into it or something. I’m not posting for grad students. I can sense you just like to correct people. Ahhhh I’m so wrong, you’re right?

[dang]

We've banned this account for continuing to break the site guidelines after we asked you to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[Agingcoder]

Godel's theorems mean something quite specific, and rely on an equally specific set of hypothesis.

It's tempting to try to apply them (or rather the same kind of conclusions) in other (non math) contexts, but it's very not obvious that you'll get something sensible. While you can play with the ideas, invoking Godel's theorem outside of its specific context doesn't make much sense.

[MichaelBurge]

I usually think of logics as search algorithms, since that's how the semantics for the meta-language describing them are defined.

I guess you could call a Turing Machine implementing the search algorithm for proofs implied by a logic an "observer", since it produces "reachability observations" i.e. proofs.