[Fis] Limits of Formal Systems

[eric werner]

Dear Carlos,

Notice you contradicted yourself:

On 2/5/2024 4:43 PM, Carlos Gershenson wrote:
> It is clear that models/descriptions will never be as rich as the 
> modeled/phenomena, and that is the way it should be. As Arbib wrote, 
> “a model that simply duplicates the brain is no more illuminating than 
> the brain itself”. [1]

On the one hand, you state that a model/description will never be as 
rich as the model/phenomena it describes. And, then in the next sentence 
you quote Arbib who presupposes that there could be a model that 
duplicates the brain.  Duplicating the brain presupposes that that model 
is as rich in structure and information as the thing it models, namely 
the brain.

Of course, Arbib is wrong. If we did have model that duplicates the 
brain, then given the model is something like an LLM residing on my 
laptop, that model would not only be as rich but richer in many ways 
than the brain it modeled.  It would give us unprecedented insight into 
the organization and function of its architecture.

My point is that models are often richer than the object that is 
modeled.  They often have further dimensions that go beyond the object 
modeled. This extra-dimensionality and richness enable us to understand 
that object and utilize it.

To be fair, you do state that computers can go beyond axiomatic systems, 
implying perhaps that they can model phenomena that axiomatic systems 
cannot.  But I am skeptical of what appears to be your wish to throw all 
axiomatic systems together and then get meaning out of such a hodgepodge.

I must admit I long for the beauty of mathematics and logic, the 
crystalline world of truth, even if Goedel and other's seem to have made 
a mess of it.

And yet if you actually read Goedel's proof, reading as I did while a 
student of Kleene (who was a student of Goedel's at Princeton) and later 
teaching it as I did to undergrads, that proof is itself a thing of 
beauty even if a bit messy.

But Goedel did steal the core idea from Cantor's diagonal method. And, 
someday we may find that Cantor's method is flawed, in yet another 
higher dimensional mathematical space.  Which will bring us back to the 
Greeks!

Thank you for your contribution, Carlos, and remember this is all in 
good fun,

-Eric

****
Dr. Eric Werner, FLS


On 2/5/2024 4:43 PM, Carlos Gershenson wrote:
> In the 1920s, David Hilbert's program attempted to get rid once and 
> for all from the paradoxes in mathematics that had arisen from the 
> work of Cantor, Russell, and others. Even when Hilbert’s PhD student — 
> John von Neumann — was working avidly on demonstrating that 
> mathematics were complete, consistent, and decidable, Kurt Gödel 
> proved in the early 1930s that formal systems are incomplete and 
> inconsistent, while Alan Turing proved in 1936 their undecidability 
> (for which he proposed the "Turing Machine", laying the theoretical 
> basis for computer science).
>
> Digital computers have enabled us to study concepts and phenomena for 
> which we did not have the proper tools beforehand, as they process 
> much more information than the one our limited brains can manipulate. 
> These include intelligence, life, and complexity.
>
> Even when computers have served us greatly as "telescopes for 
> complexity", the limits of formal systems are becoming even more 
> evident, as we attempt to model and simulate complex phenomena in all 
> their richness, which implies emergence, self-organization, downward 
> causality, adaptation, multiple scales, semantics, and more.
>
> Can we go beyond the limits of formal systems? Well, we actually do it 
> somehow. It is natural to adapt to changing circumstances, so we can 
> say that our "axioms" are flexible. Moreover, we are able to simulate 
> this process in computers. Similar to an interpreter or a compiler, we 
> can define a formal system where some aspects of it can be 
> modified/adapted. And if we need more adaptation, we can generalize 
> the system so that a constant becomes a variable (similar to oracles 
> in Turing Machines). Certainly, this has its limits, but our 
> adaptation is also limited: we cannot change our physics or our 
> chemistry, although we have changed our biology with culture and 
> technology.
>
> Could it be that the problem lies not in the models we have, but in 
> the modeling itself? We tend to forget the difference between our 
> models and the modeled, between the map and the territory, between 
> epistemology and ontology; simply because our language does not make a 
> distinction between phenomena and our perceptions of them. When we say 
> "this system is complex/alive/intelligent", we assume that these are 
> inherent properties of the phenomenon we describe, forgetting that the 
> moment we name anything, we are already simplifying and limiting it. 
> It is clear that models/descriptions will never be as rich as the 
> modeled/phenomena, and that is the way it should be. As Arbib wrote, 
> “a model that simply duplicates the brain is no more illuminating than 
> the brain itself”. [1]
>
> Still, perhaps we're barking up the wrong tree. We also tend to forget 
> the difference between computability in theory (Church-Turing's) and 
> computability in practice (what digital computers do). There are 
> non-Turing-computable functions which we can compute in practice, 
> while there are Turing-computable functions for which there is not 
> enough time in the universe to compute. So maybe we are focussing on 
> theoretical limits, while we should be concerned more with practical 
> limits.
>
> As you can see, I have many more questions than answers, so I would be 
> very interested in what everyone thinks about these topics.
>
> I'll just share some idea I've been playing with recently, although it 
> might be that it won't lead anywhere. For lack of a better name, let's 
> call them "multi-axiom systems". For example in geometry, we know that 
> if we change the 5th axiom (about intersecting parallel lines), we can 
> go from Euclidean to other geometries. We can define a "multi-axiom 
> geometry", so that we can switch between different versions of the 5th 
> axiom for different purposes. In a similar way, we could define a 
> multi-axiom system that contains several different formal systems. We 
> know we cannot have all at once universal computation and completeness 
> and consistency. But then, in first-order logic, we can have 
> completeness and consistency. In second-order logic we have universal 
> computation but not completeness. In paraconsistent logics we 
> sacrifice consistency but gain other properties. Then, if we consider 
> a multi-axiom system that includes all of these and perhaps more, in 
> theory we could have in the same system all these nice properties, but 
> not at the same time. Would that be useful? Of course, we would need 
> to find rules that would determine when to change the axioms. Just to 
> relate this idea to last month's topic — as it was motivated by Stu's 
> and Andrea's paper [2] — if we want to model evolution, we can have 
> "normal" axioms at short timescales (and thus predictability), but at 
> longer (evolutionary) timescales, we can shift axioms set, and then 
> the "rules" of biological systems could change, towards a new 
> configuration where we can use again "normal" axioms.
>
>
>
> [1] Michael Arbib, The Metaphorical Brain 2. Neural Networks and 
> Beyond (1989)
> [2] Stuart Kauffman, Andrea Roli. Is the Emergence of Life an Expected 
> Phase Transition in the Evolving Universe? 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09514v1__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!S9usrOp9JhvW8UwJEq9dcFtq7FKcSNqNVPec2sX1BgZjKXwC0mnBUV_SDjdu1Sa_AS3w3prDwKITzaqBez3-j58$  
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>
>
> Carlos Gershenson
> SUNY Empire Innovation Professor
> Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering
> Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science
> State University of New York at Binghamton
> Binghamton, New York 13902 USA
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