Friday 23 November 2012

Is Nature Consistent?


By theoretical appointment, materials posturing in the quantum mode are unpredictable - a muse which annoyed Einstein who said that Nature didn't throw dice.
And Godel, seeking to undermine the then currently popular mathematical view of Nature, established to almost universal academic acclaim the inconsistency or unprovability of certain mathematical statements in any supposedly mathematically defined system, showing that Nature wasn't mathematically assayable.

Wittgenstein, too, stumbled over the revelation that there is no logical principle that stops two colours from occurring at the same visual point or space, and so suspended the idea that logic provided the "scaffolding" for the structure of the world.

Notwithstanding the fact that the notion of unpredictability leaves us wanting a definition for it, and, that Godel had pulled off a mathematical fraud by assuming that self-reference could be configured as a mathematical statement, and, that Wittgenstein didn't know that two colours can occur at the same visual point - the idea that Nature, even a fully physically defined Nature, is inconsistent ought to have been with us for some time:

For any two observers each will see a different colour, or hear a different accent. Colours and sounds do not inhere in the world, they are forms cast upon it, and these castings or forms are variable. Nature, really, has never been consistent or inconsistent, truth or illusion, until we came to cast our templates, our conceptual sieves and nets over it. Indeed it is these very templates, sieves and nets that creates or constructs objects, for there are no self-defined objects in Nature. Nature doesn't have its own outlines drawn around the objects we construct within it. The idea of the consistency and inconsistency of Nature, or it's order and chaos, merely points to our obtaining or not obtaining our own arbitrary forms upon its formlessness, its object-lessness. But then that's what Wittgenstein said.

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