NOT(NOT(NOT(NOT(NOT(NOT(LOGICAL))))))

Logicomix - Completed 5/11/2009

The Incredible Human Journey - Started 6/11/2009

Logicomix is finished - even the notes section which did get a bit heavy. Of course my suspicion that Russell would come out explicitly in favour of declaring war on Germany in 1939 was wrong - he simply appealed for the audience at the lecture to use logic to come to their own conclusions, which gives the impression that the lesson is that logic cannot be applied to real life. Listening to some of the conversations here, I have come to the conclusion that Project Management is an acceptance of the failure of logic to be applied to the modern business world; that everything needs smoothing along a rocky path, strewn with illogic and, worse still, deliberate obstacles placed in the road by people with agendas that might not gel entirely with yours. It has taken me n years to realise this, overcoming my autism in the process. I am now swimming gently downstream instead of trying to power fruitlessly towards the source of the river.

Big Bang Boom

More on the enigmatic Siegfried "Mad Jack" Sassoon in this article in the Guardian. It is of course a good thing that Sassoon's papers look likely to stay in the country but I don't often get excited about such archives. They must only cause excitement in hard-core scholars of the person concerned. I suppose I might like scouring Ted Hughes' papers for signs of the lost Sylvia Plath journal but that would be literary groupyism (nice word - I shall use it again). Sassoon and Owen were indeed the real thing when it came to war poetry. Moving as some of the stuff by other poets was, Sassoon and Owen's words both celebrate the bravery and recognise the stupidity of the war they fought in.

This links nicely with Logicomix which uses the device of a lecture given at an American University by Bertrand Russell (a pacifist who had been jailed during WWI for his campaigning against the war) on the day Britain declared war on Germany in 1939 to describe his life story. Russell was claimed as their own by US isolationists who said that America should stay out of the war. However, and I have yet to read the final section, I think he actually came out in favour of the declaration which must have caused a riot. Final report hopefully tomorrow.

I'm not sure what the next book will be - I'm not sure whether to class Logicomix as light relief or heavy learning so it's not clear whether I need a palate-cleanser or a weighty tome. Comment me up!

The Incompleteness Theor....

I hadn't actually read the section of Logicomix which contained the picture I posted as the heading for yesterday's entry and so did not realise that it was the moment that Russell discovered the self-containing set paradox - Does the set of sets which do not contain themselves contain itself? The answer being the simultaneously rather glib and profound - If it does it doesn't and if it doesn't is does! A lovely bit of self-reference. Actually I was going to write "deeply, profoundly" but that would be what I hope is a tautology.

My hypnagogic dreams for last night involved quite a lot about the Incompleteness Theorem. Principia Mathematica is Russell and Whitehead's attempt to define logic completely; it contains 362 pages that prove that 1+1 =2 and yet Kurt Godel proved that proof would always require something outside the proof meaning that mathematics will always be reliant on something else - see God Over Djinn etc. Of course this applies to the whole universe. Not that any of us will ever be able to define all knowledge but I have the nagging feeling that no matter what we try to do to extend our knowledge, something will always be out of our reach - an analogy to the "something outside the system" that Godel realised. This suggests that there is an infinity of extras outside any defined system. Is the whole Universe like this - is there always going to be an infinity of knowledge outside what we already know? If we assume there is a finite number of particles in the Universe, then there must be a finite amount of information in it - realising of course that a large finite number used as the basis for combinations to describe information results in a much greater number; however it is still finite. Then of course extending the system might apply to whatever there is outside the Universe that we have access to, though this seems to knock over whatever is considered the current First Cause. All this has given me a headache which seems well within the system and therefore probably on page 2 or 3 of PM so I think it is time to go off and think of something slightly simpler.

Turtles All The Way Down

Well this is the first time I have actually got hold of a version of Windows in the same month it came out and very impressive it is. I have to admit that somewhere I think there is still an application I wrote still running under Windows 3.1 so to be on Windows 7 this early is a big thing at deWeyden towers. It starts up in seconds, displays myriad wireless networks belonging to the neighbours and connects automatically giving for wire-free working (darn those pesky power cables) and looks and feels like the future. I know that Apple people have been used to this sort of shiny, happy interface for a long time (and on such dinky devices) but let me revel in this quantum leap. Youngest was most happy to find out that all his Thomas games would run on the new machine though I was disappointed to discover that my disk of Stephen Hawking reading all of A Brief History of Time does not have the requisite number of bits to run at all and so we must just imagine that gravelly computer voice as we read the words on boring old paper.

I only tried the Stephen Hawking program because it opens with Bertrand Russell making a speech in the style of Monty Python as part of a dialogue with a lady who believed that the universe was "turtles all the way down" and indeed there is a Turtle pictured in Logicomix where it supports four Elephants who in turn hold up the Earth on their backs. Logicomix also has a beautifully measured scene of Russell seeking out Cantor who has gone mad as Guass predicted of anyone who stared directly at infinity. Cantor of course found that there was more than one type of infinity and so maybe his madness was compounded by this - infinity squared anyone - we've not got past infinity-plus-one in our house. Youngest uses infinity-out-of-ten to describe how happy he is which is technically infinity so all hunky-dory here then.

Logicomix

Swine Flu notwithstanding, I have finally finished Annie's Box - the official date is last night - 31st October 2009 and the next book is that illustrated above - Logicomix - a Graphic Novel of the life and work of Bertrand Russell and various other big thinkers of the 20th Century. This is a beautifully drawn work stuffed with the elements that made Godel, Escher, Bach such a great book. The fact that the writers and artists exist in their own work is part of this but then again anything written in the first person is just so and therefore far more common that some post-modernists would like you to think.