From: Alan Sondheim (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Nov 01 2005 - 14:44:46 PST
"That said, since the real is unrepresentable precisely because it is
inconsistent, I think any attempt to _represent_ the real is, of course,
doomed. And, to that extent, all this talking about it gets us no closer
than never having considered it."
I've often wondered about this, which is standard theory at this point re:
(re)mediation, representation, etc. It's worthwhile taking in fact the
opposite tack - that in fact the real is completely consistent and trans-
parent; certainly Wolfram and Penrose tend towards that. Inconsistency
does _not_ imply something is unrepresentable, any more than, say, Skolem
or Church or Godel or whatever imply that the mathesis of physics is
contradictory. (In fact Godel himself was a platonist.)
In other words, the "of coures" above is, like anything else, open to
question, and I think the matter is far from settled - if anything it's a
symptom perhaps of theory (in the Fr. sense) and its poverty at the
moment.
- Alan
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revised today )
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