Afterlife: Kurt Godel's thoughts (Endings)

by David Turell , Tuesday, January 02, 2024, 16:19 (116 days ago) @ David Turell

In letters to his mother:

https://aeon.co/essays/kurt-godel-his-mother-and-the-argument-for-life-after-death?utm_...

"His rationale for belief in an afterlife is this:

"If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?

"He deepens the rhetorical question at the end with the metaphor of someone who lays the foundation for a house only to walk away from the project and let it waste away. Gödel thinks such waste is impossible since the world, he insists, gives us good reason to consider it to be shot through with order and meaning. Hence, a human being who can achieve only partial fulfilment in a lifetime must seek rational validation for this deficiency in a future world, one in which our potential manifests.

"Before moving on, it is good to pause and capture Gödel’s argument in a nutshell. Assuming that the world is rationally organised, human life – as embedded in the world – ought to possess the same rational structure. We have grounds for assuming that the world is rationally organised. Yet human life is irrationally structured. It is constituted by a great potential but it never fully expresses this potential in a lifetime. Hence, each of us must realise our full potential in a future world. Reason demands it.

***

"As he neatly summarises in the fourth letter to his mother:

"What I name a theological Weltanschauung is the view that the world and everything in it has meaning and reason, and indeed a good and indubitable meaning. From this it follows immediately that our earthly existence – since it as such has at most a very doubtful meaning – can be a means to an end for another existence.

"Precisely in virtue of the fact that our lives consist in unfulfilled or spoiled potential makes him confident that this lifetime is but a staging ground for things to come. But, again, that is only if the world is rationally structured.

***

"The reasons that he gives to his mother in the letters display his rationalist proclivities and belief that natural science presupposes that intelligibility is fundamental to reality. As he writes in his letter dated 23 July 1961:

"Does one have a reason to assume that the world is rationally organised? I think so. For it is absolutely not chaotic and arbitrary, rather – as natural science demonstrates – there reigns in everything the greatest regularity and order. Order is, indeed, a form of rationality.

***

"When seeking meaning, we find that the world is legible to us. And when paying attention, we find patterns of regularity that allow us to predict the future. For Gödel, reason was evident in the world because this order is discoverable.

***

"Gödel believed the world’s deep, rational structure and the soul’s postmortem existence depend on the falsity of materialism, the philosophical view that all truth is necessarily determined by physical facts. In an unpublished paper from around 1961, Gödel asserts that ‘materialism is inclined to regard the world as an unordered and therefore meaningless heap of atoms.’

***

"Despite living in a materialist age, Gödel was convinced that materialism was false, and thought further that his incompleteness theorems showed it to be highly unlikely.

"The incompleteness theorems proved (in broad strokes) that, for any consistent formal system (for example, mathematical and logical), there will be truths that cannot be demonstrated within the system by its own axioms and rules of inference. Hence any consistent system will inevitably be incomplete.

***

"Gödel showed that no formal mathematical system could ever do so or prove definitively by its own standards that it was free of contradiction. And insights discovered about these systems – for instance, that certain problems are truly non-demonstrable within them – are evident to us through reasoning. From this, Gödel concluded that the human mind transcends any finite formal system of axioms and rules of inference.

***

"Gödel thought the theorem’s results dealt a heavy blow to the materialistic worldview. If the mind is irreducible to the physical parts of the brain, and mathematics reveals a rationally accessible structure beyond physical phenomena, then an alternative worldview should be sought that is more rationalistic and open to truths that cannot be tested by the senses. Such a perspective could endorse a rationally organised world and be open to the possibility of life after death.

***

"Gödel thought the theorem’s results dealt a heavy blow to the materialistic worldview. If the mind is irreducible to the physical parts of the brain, and mathematics reveals a rationally accessible structure beyond physical phenomena, then an alternative worldview should be sought that is more rationalistic and open to truths that cannot be tested by the senses. Such a perspective could endorse a rationally organised world and be open to the possibility of life after death.

Continued