"Science cannot tell whether the world-spirit is good or evil, and its halting argument for the existence of a God might equally well be turned into an argument for the existence of a Devil."
Conversation
i find it hard to understand much of this chapter honestly because i think it's grappling with a problem i find hard to really empathize with, something like whether physics inevitably leads you into a kind of nihilism or not?
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one thing that really strikes me here is that lovecraft and eddington share a strong concern with understanding the *spiritual significance* of discoveries in physics and astronomy. lovecraft wants to know: what does it *mean* that the universe is so vast and empty?
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i want to know what it was like to be an intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century just reeling from the incompleteness theorem, relativity, quantum mechanics, all these blows to what i imagine seemed like an unassailable rational-newtonian universe
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what calls "the collapse of rational certainty" which i think is in some way very much lovecraft's subject
meaningness.com/collapse-of-ra
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speaking of which also wrote a thing about lovecraft and nihilism that also seems very relevant:
buddhism-for-vampires.com/lovecraft-harm
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we're drifting away from portals now but that's how these deep dives go. i reread "the collapse of rational certainty" which is great. one of the footnotes references "a century of controversy over the foundations of mathematics" by chaitin, also great!
arxiv.org/html/nlin/0004
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there's a bunch of nice background about the foundational crisis in mathematics i don't want to summarize, then a description of chaitin's own work in algorithmic information theory, better than any i've read from authors who are not chaitin
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chaitin defined a real number called the halting probability, which he finds a little horrifying - and i never properly got this sense of horror from anyone else's description of this stuff. what he finds horrifying about it is that it "maximally unknowable"
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the bits of the halting probability have "no structure" to them whatsoever - it's not possible to compress them in any way, they are "mathematical truths that are true for no reason, they're true by accident! And that's why we will never know what these bits are."
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in the context of lovecraft and horror and nihilism the halting probability is this sort of bizarre encroachment of total senselessness into mathematics; it's impossible to make any sense of the halting probability whatsoever, its bits are random in a very strong sense
Replying to
but it's funny because i was never introduced to algorithmic randomness as a *horrifying* thing; the way it was introduced to me was "hey, someone came up with a way to define the randomness of a *specific* infinite sequence, isn't that cool?" which, yes, that is cool!
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which feels related to this:
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