Deep philosophical arguments are often unpleasant to be in -they get heated, and you can often find yourself defending some pretty depressing ideas. They can be bad enough sober, but if there's ever a bad time to argue over the meaning of life, it's when you are under the influence of large quantities of liquor.
An acquaintance of mine (names have been omitted protect the sort-of-innocent) learned this lesson the hard way last quarter, taking down several healthy mixed drinks and proceeding to present the thesis that life is meaning.
Now, it's hard enough to argue for some grand importance of humans, but starting from such a ridiculous argument as this one is worse. Also, having recently ingested half a bottle of cheap whiskey and being outnumbered three-to-one in the argument by people much more sober than you, it must be damn-near impossible.
Nonetheless, he defended it with incredible zeal. The argument got ugly. Harsh words were exchanged, voices raised, and diagrams drawn. Just when it seemed things had reached an impasse around hour two, we had a breakthrough: He started crying and repeating everything is meaningless.
While it was unquestionably the greatest argumentative victory I've ever taken part in, reducing a stout, heavily intoxicated optimist to a sobbing mess of nihilism is not as fulfilling as one might imagine. My own arguments were too convincing for my own good. I began to wonder if everything really is meaningless, if humans really are merely the product of a random process -here only because of their proficiency at reproducing. Are we nothing more than mammals who should therefore do it like they do on the Discovery Channel?
The evidence around here can be grim; Athens is sometimes a fairly depressing place. Court Street at 2 a.m. often has the distinct feel of a nature documentary, except the animals cannot walk straight. Don't get me wrong; I am an active participant in those shenanigans, and you'll pry my Thursday pitcher of Killian's out of my cold, dead hands.
That's what made this all the more troubling for me. I am a human, prone to the same types of stupidity as all other humans, and to think that I am somehow inherently above animal or robot status would require me to think that this is true of all humans.
It wasn't much later that I encountered something that made humanity's case look a little less bleak. It's called the Incompleteness Theorem, and it was discovered by Kurt Gödel for his Ph.D. (making him way, way smarter than you or me). It's implication for formal logic and mathematics is huge, but let's leave those to some bigger nerds to explain.
What's interesting is the way in which the theorem is proved. Basically, it starts with any logical system -which is just a set of rules to figure things out -and uses the system to make statements about the system itself. This is done by encoding statements in the system into numbers, so that you can talk about the statements using basic arithmetic.
Some of these code numbers get so large that it would take more paper than has ever existed on Earth to write them out, and more time than a life age of the Earth or a computer to solve them. That doesn't matter though; what's important is that it can be done in principle.
Gödel uses this method to create a proof in the system that says you can't prove me. Now, as humans, we know that if the proof were lying, we would be able to prove it, which we cannot. Therefore, we know that it is indeed true. A computer, however, can only work in its logical system and would have nothing to say about this proof other than huh? Take that, computer.
What this means is that humans have a type of intelligence that is not purely algorithmic. Some kind of intuition or insight -an ability to see new truths that we were not already preprogrammed to arrive at. It means that a computer, no matter how fast it is, will never be able to fully emulate the human mind. This doesn't necessarily mean that humans are more important than things that cannot think like that.
We are not necessarily smarter than animals or inherently good
or even at all important. But it is a start, and it does mean that we are more than just some input-output system designed to find only sex and food. And that is nothing to cry about.
-Ben Kington is a senior philosophy major, and though he speaks confidently about the implications of the incompleteness theorem, it is actually a topic of great debate. Argue with him via e-mail at bk198002@ohiou.edu. 17
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Ben Kington
