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    Gödel Versus Wittgenstein
    Gödel Versus Wittgenstein
    Gödel Versus Wittgenstein
    Ebook424 pages4 hours

    Gödel Versus Wittgenstein

    By Mike Hockney

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    “Without mathematics we cannot penetrate deeply into philosophy. Without philosophy we cannot penetrate deeply into mathematics. Without both we cannot penetrate deeply into anything.” – Leibniz

    In intellectual history, perhaps nothing has been more misinterpreted than Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Stephen Hawking, adopting the popular misconception, said, “Thus mathematics is either inconsistent, or incomplete. The smart money is on incomplete.”

    This book is about the titanic struggle for the soul of mathematics, and reflects two immense battles in which mathematics is immersed to this day.

    Firstly, if mathematics is tautology, as Wittgenstein said, mathematics cannot be inconsistent and/or incomplete, and so Gödel’s work cannot be about mathematics. If mathematics is not tautological, mathematics is necessarily mired in inconsistency and/or incompleteness, just as Stephen Hawking said, hence is wholly unreliable.

    Secondly, if mathematics is non-ontological, it cannot say anything about reality. If mathematics is ontological, it’s the only thing that can say anything true about reality.

    There can’t be a world where math is a bit true and a bit false. Either the world is wholly mathematical – in which case math and not science is how we must study the world – or the world isn’t mathematical at all, in which case it’s absurd for science to use math in its attempts to account for, or model, reality.

    Math presents a deadly challenge to science. If math is real, we don’t need science. If math isn’t real, then science, which is so heavily reliant on math, is nonsense! The greatest challenge facing science isn’t to define and understand the universe, but to define and understand math.

    Of course, it turns out that math and the universe are one and the same. Only if the universe is mathematical can it be rational and intelligible. It must be entirely mathematical since a universe that is partly mathematical and partly something else would be irrational and unintelligible given that mathematical things cannot interact with non-mathematical things (this would constitute a version of Cartesian dualism where two incompatible substances cannot interact since they have no common ground).

    To understand what math actually is, you must strip all non-mathematical considerations from it. Are you ready to ponder existence in itself - bare existence - shorn of all subjective experiences, feelings, desires, sensations, perceptions, mystical intuitions, beliefs, opinions, and interpretations?

    What is naked existence? What is existence in its rawest, oldest, most primitive and primordial state? Until you understand that, you will have no idea what it is when you impose an appearance on it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMike Hockney
    Release dateMay 1, 2016
    ISBN9781311873774
    Gödel Versus Wittgenstein
    Author

    Mike Hockney

    Mike Hockney invites you to play the God Game. Are you ready to transform yourself? Are you ready to be one of the Special Ones, the Illuminated Ones? Are you ready to play the Ultimate Game? Only the strongest, the smartest, the boldest, can play. This is not a drill. This is your life. Stop being what you have been. Become what you were meant to be. See the Light. Join the Hyperboreans. Become a HyperHuman, an UltraHuman. Only the highest, only the noblest, only the most courageous are called. A new dawn is coming... the birth of Hyperreason. It's time for HyperHumanity to enter HyperReality.

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      Gödel Versus Wittgenstein - Mike Hockney

      Introduction

      Without mathematics we cannot penetrate deeply into philosophy. Without philosophy we cannot penetrate deeply into mathematics. Without both we cannot penetrate deeply into anything. – Leibniz

      In intellectual history, perhaps nothing has been more misinterpreted than Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Stephen Hawking, adopting the popular misconception, said, Thus mathematics is either inconsistent, or incomplete. The smart money is on incomplete.

      Gödel’s incompleteness theorems actually have nothing to do with what math is. No one in the academic world has any idea what math is. Gödel himself certainly didn’t know, and adopted a rather mystical stance.

      Gödel’s work indicates what math can’t be, not what it must be. He tells us how not to define math, not how to define it. His result is emphatically negative, not positive. What his work does is rule out all approaches to defining math other than the correct one. He does nothing to reveal what the correct one actually is, i.e. the authentic truth of math. He failed to show what the ontology of math is.

      Wittgenstein was much closer to the mark than Gödel. His assertion that All mathematics is tautology is right. It’s impossible for anything tautological to be either inconsistent or incomplete. Given the correctness of Wittgenstein’s view, whatever Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are about, it’s certainly not real math.

      Gödel didn’t disprove Wittgenstein, and nor did Wittgenstein refute Gödel. They were talking about radically different things. Wittgenstein was stating a definitive property of actual math, while Gödel was responding to manmade interpretations of what math is. This problem – whether Gödel was referring to math itself, or merely to fallacious, manmade interpretations of math – goes to the heart of the difficulty of understanding the implications of Gödel’s work.

      There are versions of mathematics in circulation that should be called quasi or pseudo mathematical systems (and scientific materialism is one such system), i.e. mathematics with a whole bunch of philosophical assumptions applied to it that destroys its integrity. All of the mainstream approaches to defining the foundations of mathematics are imbued with philosophical and ideological paraphernalia. Bertrand Russell, one of the main contributors in this field, was an out-and-out empiricist. This meant that he brought to bear on mathematics a philosophy that fundamentally rejected mathematical rationalism, and thus served to make mathematics in many ways a non-rational subject. It’s no wonder Russell’s version of math produced paradoxes, inconsistencies and incompleteness.

      The trouble with math is not math in itself, but the ideological baggage with which it is saddled. People don’t come to math innocently, neutrally and rationally. The moment they open their mouths regarding math, they impose their philosophical, psychological and even religious point of view on it. None of those things has anything to do with math.

      To understand what math actually is, you must strip all non-mathematical considerations from it. This has proved staggeringly difficult for the mathematical community, which has consistently chosen fallacious ways of thinking about mathematics. Above all, it has rejected the ontological approach of the first true mathematician – Pythagoras.

      Mathematics will never become what it ought to be until it reverts to its Pythagorean roots. When Pythagoras said, All things are numbers; number rules all, he was doing what the mathematics establishment has resolutely refused to do ever since ... making mathematics the foundation of reality, and refusing to make other things – especially axioms, logic or sets – the basis of mathematics.

      It’s time to return to Pythagoras and the ontology of mathematics, and to reject all approaches to mathematics that fail to make it the arche, the ground of all.

      This book is about the titanic struggle for the soul of mathematics, and reflects two immense battles in which mathematics is immersed to this day.

      Firstly, if mathematics is tautology, as Wittgenstein said, mathematics cannot be inconsistent and/or incomplete, and so Gödel’s work cannot be about mathematics. If mathematics is not tautological, mathematics is necessarily mired in inconsistency and/or incompleteness, just as Stephen Hawking said, hence is wholly unreliable.

      Secondly, if mathematics is non-ontological, it cannot say anything about reality. If mathematics is ontological, it’s the only thing that can say anything true about reality. There can’t be a world where math is a bit true and a bit false. Either the world is wholly mathematical – in which case math and not science is how we must study the world – or the world isn’t mathematical at all, in which case it’s absurd for science to use math in its attempts to account for, or model, reality.

      Math presents a deadly challenge to science. If math is real, we don’t need science. If math isn’t real, then science, which is so heavily reliant on math, is nonsense! The greatest challenge facing science isn’t to define and understand the universe, but to define and understand math.

      Of course, it turns out that math and the universe are one and the same. Only if the universe is mathematical can it be rational and intelligible. It must be entirely mathematical since a universe that is partly mathematical and partly something else would be irrational and unintelligible given that mathematical things cannot interact with non-mathematical things (this would constitute a version of Cartesian dualism where two incompatible substances cannot interact since they have no common ground).

      It’s math or nothing, although, ironically, math is nothing. Mathematics is simply the science of nothing, and of its flip side, infinity. All the secrets of existence lie in nothing and infinity. Traditionally nothing/infinity has been called God or the Oneness, but it is in fact ontological mathematics, the mathematics of existence itself.

      Mathematics = Energy

      You will never understand mathematics until you understand that mathematics is ontological. It’s none other than energy in itself. Mathematics furnishes the energetic fibre and fabric of existence, and is the universal, infallible language of existence.

      Strange though it may seem, the language of existence must in fact be what existence is made of. If this were not the case, there would be no means of understanding existence. To know existence, we must speak existence, i.e. use the language existence uses of itself.

      It would be absurd to say that existence is made of English, a manmade language with no ontological properties. It would be absurd to say that existence has no language because then it would be unintelligible (language being the basis of intelligibility). The rules and laws that existence obeys constitute its language, and define its ontological grammar, syntax, vocabulary, correct spelling, and so on. In fact, they define ontology itself.

      In order for the components of the universe to interact, they must necessarily all obey the same language. An identical language must be inbuilt in every one of them. Each is a full expression of the language (just as all speakers of English, in order to understand all possible conversations and communications in English, must have the entire English language at their disposal, and not be missing a single element).

      Only a monadic system of existence – where each monad (ontological unit) is a complete and consistent expression of the language of existence – can provide the means for infallible interaction (communication) between all the different elements in a single system (universe). The only alternative is for there to be no individual units, but, rather, just one monolithic system with many different aspects, like Spinoza’s God.

      Existence isn’t made of manmade words or any other kinds of words. It’s not made of Mythos, of stories, of the Word of God.

      There’s only one language that isn’t based on words, namely mathematics, the language of numbers (the Number of God rather than the Word of God, so to speak).

      This is a Logos universe ... a numerical universe. It’s not a Mythos universe ... a verbal universe. Why is science inherently absurd? – because it uses words. It refers to atoms, forces, and so on. There are no such things. These are heuristic fictions. There are only numerical units (monads) and their numerical relations and interactions. Atoms differ from monads insofar as the latter are entirely numerical, whereas the former lay claim to an undefined, non-numerical property or quality called physicality.

      Languages can comprise words, symbols, or numbers, and nothing else. They cannot comprise things with properties. When scientists say that an atom is physical, they are applying a descriptive word to it, but, merely by using that word, they don’t thereby confer that ontological reality on the word, just as referring to God doesn’t make God ontologically real.

      To state that something non-mathematical has such and such a property is to state an opinion, belief or interpretation, not a fact. So, scientific materialists refer to atoms as material entities, but the philosopher Bishop Berkeley denied there was any such thing as matter (as science conceived it). For him, matter was an idea in minds. Remove the minds, and you ipso facto remove the so-called matter.

      Every word is in fact an idea. When you use a collection of words, you are linking ideas, but how do you know whether the ideas correspond to anything objectively real? We can refer to God, angels, unicorns, and so on. Does that make them real? We can refer to trees, atoms, matter. Does that make these real? All ideas are real – as ideas – but that doesn’t make them real in any other sense. How do we link ideas – words or symbols – to objective reality (rather than to our subjective opinions, beliefs and interpretations)?

      The fundamental assertion of ontological mathematics is that numbers are the ground of reality, and numbers exist as analytic sinusoidal energy waves, which are carriers of information. These information carriers are exclusively mathematical, and strictly obey the rational laws of mathematics. However, the information they carry is empirical, not rational, and this empirical information does not obey the laws of mathematics.

      Where the information carriers obey the rational laws of numbers, the information carried obeys the empirical laws of words, symbols, sensations, perceptions, feelings, desires, ideas, and experiences. We have a mathematical, noumenal order of numbers (information carriers) underlying a non-mathematical, phenomenal order of non-numbers (information carried).

      These two orders – apparently so different – are two sides of a single ontological coin. They form a dual-aspect monism. One side of the coin (that of the numerical information carriers) is inherently noumenal and hidden from us. The other side (that of the information carried) is the phenomenal reality we actually experience.

      Yet many of our experiences are wholly subjective – as in dreams – and have nothing to do with objective reality. By sharing a certain word – such as God – people thereby convince themselves that this word has objective reality, but there’s no ontological link between shared words and things that exist in their own right. Just as religious people can talk about God all they like without God thereby being objectively real (beyond the use of the word), so scientists can talk about matter all they like, without matter thereby being objectively real (beyond the use of the word).

      Scientists believe that applying their senses to matter somehow elevates it to objective reality, yet, as Descartes pointed out, the human senses hardly constitute a reliable tribunal. Our dreams appear objectively real to us, but aren’t. What we imagine our senses are revealing to us, and what they actually are revealing to us, are two wholly different things, as any basic familiarity with the great debates of philosophy demonstrates.

      Science labels sensory things (and even non-sensory things such as dark matter, dark energy and singularities) with words, but nature in itself contains no words as ontological, objective realities. This, foundationally, is a purely numerical universe. Absolutely everything that presents itself to your senses is a mathematical wavefunction, which is, of course, a numerical function.

      When we say that reality is 100% mathematical, we are referring to reality in itself, stripped of all appearances. We mean reality as noumenon.

      When we consider appearances only – the phenomenal, empirical universe – we could equally well say that the universe is 100% non-mathematical, and this is exactly why ordinary people find it absurd to consider mathematics as the ground of reality. That’s why they often believe reality is somehow irrational, or only partly rational. That’s why there’s such scope for humans to be beguiled by mystery, mysticism and faith.

      Humans reify mathematics, which in practical terms involves converting numerical wavefunctions into things. Reify means make into a thing; make real or material; consider as a thing and comes from the Latin res (thing, object, matter, affair, event, circumstance, condition).

      Reification is the most human of all activities, and is the primary source of human delusion. Reification is how we fall under the spell of Maya. Wikipedia says, Maya literally means ‘illusion’ and ‘magic’. However, the term has multiple meanings depending on the context. In earlier older language, it implies extraordinary power and wisdom, in later Vedic texts and modern literature dedicated to Indian traditions, Maya connotes a ‘magic show, an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem’. In Indian philosophies, Maya is also a spiritual concept connoting ‘that which exists, but is constantly changing and thus is spiritually unreal’, and the ‘power or the principle that conceals the true character of spiritual reality’.

      It’s not spiritual reality that’s being concealed, it’s mathematical reality. Mathematical reality in itself is noumenal and non-sensory. It has no appearance whatsoever. However, rational mathematics also conveys empirical information, and it’s this empirical information that human minds reify, i.e. turn into phenomenal, sensory objects, which we then label with words, such as tree, water, sky, mountain, and so on. We also reify words themselves, most especially the word God. Although no one can point to God" as they can point to a tree, they nevertheless conceive of God as some existent entity that they could theoretically point to, and might actually be able to do so once they have died and gone to heaven.

      Thanks to having minds that experience empirical information (conveyed by mathematics; by sinusoidal waves, to be exact), and turn those mental experiences into physical things, we must conclude that we ourselves constitute Maya. We are the ones who create the magic show. No one, no force outside us, is deluding us. We are doing it to ourselves. We are the Illusionists, the Projectionists, the builders of the Cosmic Hologram. It’s all in our minds, individually and collectively.

      There’s no physical reality. There’s no matter. What exists is mathematics, and how we reify it. By reifying it – by making immaterial wavefunctions into material objects of the senses – we ourselves mentally construct matter, and thus conceal the fact that mental mathematics is the foundation of everything.

      Matter, as Bishop Berkeley pointed out, is simply an idea in minds. It’s via the process of reification that we turn objective wavefunctions – cosmic ideas – into solid objects.

      In discussions of quantum mechanics, it’s often said that we ourselves create reality by how we observe the world, and how we trigger wavefunction collapse. But that’s not it at all. We create reality by how we reify wavefunctions. In particular, we turn complex-numbered wavefunctions into spatial objects existing in time. The real part of the wavefunction is interpreted in spatial terms, and the imaginary part in temporal terms.

      The wavefunction is the reality. How we reify it is Maya. Maya is empiricism, while reality in itself is rationalism. To overcome Maya, we must overcome our experiences, our sensations, perceptions and feelings. To understand reality in itself, we have to de-reify everything, and that means using our reason to detect what lies beneath the world of appearances. Scientists – in thrall to their senses – are incapable of this. That’s why they’re empiricists and not rationalists.

      Scientists are exactly those who are wholly convinced by Maya, and believe in it without question. Why, then, does science work? – because it uses math. Remove math from science and there’s nothing left. Without math, science is just another religion. It’s Maya Unbound.

      *****

      Noumenal reality: eternal, necessary; uses the rational language of numbers; the information carrier; the signifier; Form; concerns Aristotelian logic based on non-contradiction.

      Phenomenal reality: temporal, contingent; uses the non-rational or irrational language of words, symbols, feelings, sensations, perceptions, intuitions, subjective experiences, desires, ideas, will; the information carried; the signified; Content; concerns Hegelian dialectical logic based on contradiction.

      Science tries to combine empirical phenomena with rational mathematics. It’s successful as far as force-fitting mathematical formulae to observed natural patterns goes. It has zero success regarding anything else. It can say nothing meaningful about anything unobservable (hence outside the scientific method), such as life, mind, free will, consciousness, the unconscious, the afterlife, soul, meaning, purpose, and the basis of existence, i.e. all of the most important things to the average human being.

      Science fails because it privileges the senses over reason. There’s a rational, non-sensory world of pure ontological mathematics, but science can say nothing about it because it ideologically trades only in sensory things. Science is fundamentally irrational and anti-rationalist since it takes the side of empiricism and the senses against reason and intellect.

      Move Out of the Way

      It’s revolutionary to equate mathematics to energy. It’s exactly because mathematics is energy that the presence of math in science makes perfect sense, and it’s exactly because of this that ontological mathematics can simply replace science.

      Science considers itself the study of energy, with mathematics being an abstraction. In fact, mathematics is the study of energy, and science is the abstraction. Ontological mathematics concerns energy in itself (noumenal energy), and how that energy can be expressed phenomenally, whereas science concerns phenomenal energy only, and has no idea what energy actually is, and nor does it care.

      Science has no formal definition of energy. It can’t tell you what energy is in itself. J. R. Brown and P. C. W. Davies revealingly wrote, in The Ghost in the Atom, "Energy is a purely abstract quantity, introduced into physics as a useful model with which we can short-cut complex calculations. You cannot see or touch energy, yet the word is now so much part of daily conversation that people think of energy as a tangible entity with an existence of its own. In reality, energy is merely part of a set of mathematical relationships that connect together observations of mechanical processes in a simple way. What Bohr’s philosophy suggests is that words like electron, photon or atom should be regarded in the same way – as useful models that consolidate in our imagination what is actually only a set of mathematical relations connecting observations."

      Ontological mathematics, unlike science, can deal with mental and material energy – i.e. dimensionless and dimensional energy – and thus solve Cartesian dualism by making mind and matter expressions of the same thing (math = energy).

      If math isn’t about energy then it must be a manmade abstraction, and, in that case, it’s incomprehensible how it can be used in science, assuming science purports to be about reality. Either math is about energy or math is a ridiculous fantasy that’s no more relevant to the structure and operations of the universe than the Chinese language is.

      The prevailing mathematical, scientific and philosophical establishment has failed to understand the true nature of math, and this has had catastrophic consequences for the advancement of human knowledge. Pythagoras was more right 2,500 years ago than almost 100% of intellectuals today. Those 2,500 years have therefore been wasted. It’s not just religion that has held us back in that time, it’s also scientific, philosophical and mathematical empiricism.

      Empiricism (based on the worship of the human senses) is as much an enemy of reason as faith (based on the worship of human feelings).

      Ontological mathematics delivers the final victory of metaphysics, rationalism and idealism. It unifies religion, science, mathematics and psychology rationally rather than empirically. It’s the answer to everything.

      Once humanity has accepted ontological mathematics as the explanation of reality, it can embark on its divine trajectory. It won’t take us long to become the Gods themselves. Mathematics will allow us to answer everything, and the Gods are exactly those who know all the answers.

      Abstraction versus Ontology

      Gödel’s revolutionary work involved an encoding scheme called Gödel numbering, involving assigning a unique number to every proposition of a formal system. Such a coding scheme allows you to move back and forth between the original propositions and the code. As a simplistic example of the scheme, a sign in the formal system with the meaning of not might be arbitrarily assigned the natural number 1.

      No matter how much ingenuity is subsequently demonstrated, no matter how wondrous the manipulations are, and how seemingly meaningful and significant they are, the whole scheme’s legitimacy is decided at the very first step.

      The question that must be posed is this ... is there any ontological validity to this exercise, or is it merely trading in abstractions? Is it a language game with its own intricate rules, but is no more related to reality than the English language or Russian language is related to the fundamental constitution of existence?

      When numbers are ontological – when they are unique energies – what can it possibly mean to assign an energy to a symbol meaning not? This is a category error. There can be only one ontological language – mathematics – and it cannot be related to non-ontological, manmade languages.

      If numbers are ontological, and thus relate to the fundamental order of existence, and comprise the natural language of existence, how can they possibly be mapped to manmade words and manmade formal systems that use manmade symbols and rules?

      How can you link nature’s language to any manmade language and expect anything real to flow from it? As we said, it’s a category error. The two languages are wholly different, obeying wholly different rules. The language of nature is eternal and necessary, complete and consistent, analytic and tautological. All manmade languages are temporal, contingent and arbitrary, and always incomplete, inconsistent, non-analytic and non-tautological. Thus they have nothing in common. As soon as you attempt to insert natural numbers into artificial, manmade systems then whatever emerges will either be invalid from the get-go, or its conclusions will reflect on the manmade system only, but not on ontological numbers and reality.

      Gödel’s work treats numbers as abstract ... but they’re not. They’re ontological. You can’t manipulate them in any old way, regardless of their ontology. It would be ontologically meaningless to code the letters of the alphabet in terms of the chemical elements (with the element hydrogen mapped to the letter a, and so on). What makes anyone believe it’s any more valid to perform the same or a similar exercise with regard to numbers (energies)?

      Every language has its own unique rules and modus operandi, and therefore no language cannot be validly and comprehensively mapped to any other language. Confusion, ambiguity and mismatches are inevitable.

      You cannot undertake an exercise such as Gödel’s unless you have first defined the ontology of what you are doing, something that Gödel signally failed to do. Above all, you must define what a number actually is. Unless you know this, how can you know that what you are doing with it has any real meaning?

      Gödel conducted his work in the context of his Platonist beliefs, i.e. he believed that numbers have some timeless, transcendent reality. He interpreted his work as meaning that the human mind could only imperfectly apprehend this higher world of Truth. Yet, of course, for those people who didn’t subscribe to Platonism, Gödel’s work couldn’t possibly sustain this interpretation.

      Gödel’s masterwork is so mired in ambiguity that he himself had a radically different understanding of what he had achieved from most other people.

      Gödel – despite being a towering technical genius – was in many way astoundingly philosophically naive. Plato, one of Gödel’s guide lights, was very careful to distinguish the things of his transcendent domain of Forms (the intelligible domain) from the things of the mundane domain of temporal things (the sensible domain). All of the latter were inferior copies of the former.

      To Plato, Gödel’s work would have seemed absurd from its inception. The intelligible and the sensible can never be brought together (just as the rational and empirical can’t: they must always be the opposite sides of the coin in a dual-aspect monism).

      How could a Platonic Form be coded as something else? If it were, it would no longer function as a Platonic Form. How could the Platonic Form of the number one be mapped to the logical operator Not, for example? It’s a category error. It’s exactly what you can’t do with Forms. (In fact, the logical Not would have its own Platonic Form.)

      The Platonic Form for the number one is eternally, immutably and perfectly that, and can never under any circumstances be anything else. Exactly the same considerations apply in ontological mathematics. The number one is a specific energy and can’t be mapped to any manmade word or symbol.

      Gödel’s whole enterprise, which he believed was somehow supporting Platonism, was in fact an outright attack on Platonism, and didn’t make any sense at all with regard to the central tenets of Platonism.

      Gödel cavalierly mixed and matched intelligible and sensible concepts. He committed the cardinal sin of making Platonic Forms mutable, i.e. changing their meaning, depending on context. The number one can only ever mean the number one. It can never mean anything else. You can’t say, as Gödel did, that the number one can sometimes signify something other than the number one. The number one can’t be both mathematical and metamathematical. It’s one or the other, and, in fact, it’s always mathematical. Indeed, Platonically, there can’t be any such thing as metamathematics.

      Metamathematics is the study of formal systems and the concepts used in mathematics, and is sometimes called proof theory. In Platonism, the Forms themselves are a necessarily, eternally, immutably complete and consistent set of Forms that constitute absolute, infallible knowledge. Our task is to know these Forms, and thereby take possession of absolute knowledge. For Plato, we know these Forms as part of our deep nature since our immaterial, immortal souls belong to the same order of existence (our souls reflect the Form of Life). Our mortal lives in the sensible world have corrupted us and made us forget our primordial knowledge of the Forms, but, through being philosophers (lovers of wisdom), we can regain our lost knowledge of perfection.

      Platonically, you know mathematics by knowing all the Forms that make up mathematics. You don’t refer to some other subject called metamathematics to understand mathematics. Mathematics explains itself. You can’t go outside or beyond mathematics to explain mathematics. That would be to claim that mathematics is dependent on something else – such as logic – but Plato never said any such thing, so how could any Platonist such as Gödel maintain otherwise? If mathematics is ontological – which it is – you can’t appeal to anything non-mathematical and non-ontological to explain mathematics. There can’t be ontological metamathematics standing behind ontological mathematics. This would inevitably lead to ontological meta-meta-mathematics, and so on, in an absurd infinite regress.

      Ontological mathematics is the end of the line. Had Gödel understood this, he would never have bothered with his project. Of course, what Gödel was actually doing was reacting to all of the non-Platonist mathematicians with whom he was surrounded, and trying to put them in their place. However great a logician and mathematician he was, he wasn’t a first rate philosopher, and certainly not someone who truly understood Plato’s system. You cannot use non-mathematics to explain mathematics. You cannot convert Platonic Forms into other Forms, or code them as other things (i.e. things different from their inherent, immutable meaning). Given that, Gödel’s work makes no sense Platonically.

      Gödel’s whole coding scheme was driven by non-Platonic considerations, and, without that coding scheme, he had nothing. What he achieved in the end was to show that there are fatal problems in every approach to math that denies its ontology and which tries to cast it in other terms. He didn’t say anything about actual mathematics.

      *****

      In Platonic mathematics, every mathematical Form has a unique identity, so, by definition, you can’t give it a second identity by making it represent something else. This, in Platonic terms, would constitute illusory and actually false knowledge, i.e. it wouldn’t be knowledge at all, but opinion, belief or pure sophistry.

      It’s impossible for any Platonic Form to be inconsistent and/or incomplete with regard to itself, or with regard to any other Form (since all Forms constitute absolute, infallible knowledge).

      To embark on Gödel’s project was already to have abandoned Platonism, but perhaps it was exactly Gödel’s plan to show that any non-Platonic approach to mathematics, using non-Platonic metamathematics, must fail.

      *****

      "[Gödel devised] a well-formed formula which used a negative existential quantifier to say that a certain (very large) number did not have a carefully constructed arithmetical property, where the very large number turned out to be the Gödel number of the well-formed formula itself, and the carefully constructed arithmetical property was the one possessed by the Gödel numbers of wffs that were unprovable in the given system. The essential move is to take a two-place predicate, F(m, n), and then consider the case where m = n, thus converting the two-place predicate into a somewhat peculiar one-place one." – J. R. Lucas

      Such considerations, no matter how sophisticated, cannot apply to Platonic, tautological or ontological mathematics. When Gödel embarked on his project, he was reacting to all manner of fallacious ideas about what mathematics actually is, and his result is relevant only in that context.

      GIGO means garbage in, garbage out. If you start from a fallacy, what can you hope to accomplish? If you can’t see that you have started from a fallacy, you have committed, as Nietzsche scathingly put it, an irrefutable error, i.e. your error is one you cannot refute, hence you believe it to be true ... but that doesn’t mean that it is true. Many of humanity’s greatest truths are actually these irrefutable errors. Of course, they can be refuted, but no one takes the refutation seriously. They are too invested in these errors. Their careers, and everything they think they know, depends on them.

      The whole of metamathematics is just one giant, albeit ingenious and impressive, error! The error is exposed as soon as ontological and tautological considerations are applied to mathematics, i.e. as soon as mathematics is saved from axiomism, logicism, formalism, set theory, and so on.

      Wittgenstein regarded Gödel’s result as nothing but a logical conjuring trick. That’s exactly what it is.

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