The conclusion reached in "Fathoming Gödel" is that Gödel's 1931 paper is a shell game. It is based on several errors that are well camouflaged. Some shortcomings in the paper are openly admitted although they are downplayed, and errors are also produced in an effort to force a particular conclusion. This critique is limited to Gödel's first incompleteness theorem as translated by Martin Hirzel. "Fathoming Gödel" is an examination of Kurt Gödel's 1931 paper: "On formally undecidable propositions of 'Principia Mathematica' and related systems 1."
In a somewhat interesting note, it seems that my sarcastically humorous book description for "Fathoming Gödel," which formerly began with this very paragraph, possibly dissuaded up to 85% of the people who viewed this page from downloading my free e-book, which I believe is one of a select group of free offers available on the internet that is actually free with no strings attached. The data regarding my book description is inconclusive for several reasons. For instance, it is difficult to take into account the effect of the one review this book received. The review was decidedly negative, but it seems that even a cursory reading of the review would be enough to delineate the ambiguity of some of its assertions. Another reason is that it is impossible to tell how many viewers of this page simply decided they weren’t interested in the book.
My intuition though is that the sarcastic tone of my book description dissuaded many potential readers. I will publish the sarcastic book description in my self-interview so the interested reader can view the purportedly damaging material. Perhaps, because the internet seems to have a superabundance of mean spirited commentary any sarcastic writing is viewed in a negative light. For instance, recently, I was viewing some photographs of the actress Jessica, and some poster seemed determined to make the point that in his view the actress looked like a man. Perhaps, because I believe I have significant points to make, I have no interest in mean spirited commentary, but I do have an interest in the kind of sarcasm present in say Monty Python’s “The Cheese Shop” sketch because I feel it presents the frustrations of our modern world in a comically heighten way.
But, I feel that even those readers that were able to distinguish my sarcastic humor from the mean spirited palaver that infests the internet were dissuaded from downloading my e-book because my book description wasn’t presented in the tone they had come to expect. In a way, we are all prisoners of tone. This is so for several reasons: the kind of educations we receive, the way we are bombarded with a staggering amount of information and the fact that so much information seems to be complex propaganda. There is an upside to making judgments based on tone; it relieves us of the burden of making judgments based on substance. As the substance of much mathematical and scientific writing became impossibly difficult to understand, it seems natural that the tone of this writing would become the deciding factor, and thus, the tone of this variety of mathematical and scientific writing became uniformly sober, somber and obtuse. It seems odd that people would judge a mathematical or scientific document to be correct merely because of its tone, but if we look at our society at large that is exactly the kind of world we live in. It is always and endlessly style over substance. It is a problem that is not generally acknowledged, and when it is acknowledged it is almost always portrayed as a problem that has just now come into existence.
Tags in Nature : Fathoming Gödel Jim Spinosa ebook , Fathoming Gödel Jim Spinosa epub , Fathoming Gödel Jim Spinosa AUDIOBOOK , Fathoming Gödel by Jim Spinosa ePub (.epub) , Fathoming Gödel book review , Nature
