Stephen Colbert channeling Kurt Godel
For those of you who can’t watch the video, here’s the nerdy part, hastily transcribed:
Their song “That’s What Makes You Beautiful” isn’t just catchy, it has a great message. “You don’t know you’re beautiful. That’s what makes you beautiful.”
First of all: great dating advice. Remember girls, low self esteem – very attractive to men. Guys always go for the low hanging fruit, easy pickings.
Second: the lyrics are incredibly complex! You see, the boys are singing “You don’t know you’re beautiful, that’s what makes you beautiful.” But they’ve just told the girl she’s beautiful. So since she now knows it, she’s no longer beautiful!
But – stick with me, stick with me, oh it goes deeper! – but she’s listening to the song, too. So she knows she’s not beautiful. Therefore, following the syllogism of the song, she’s instantly beautiful again!
It’s like an infinite fractal recursion, a flickering quantum state of both hot and not. I mean, this lyric as iterated algorithm could lead to a whole new musical genre. I call it Mobius pop, which would include One Direction and of course the rapper MC Escher.
They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach but honestly, talking about recursion, fractals, and flickering quantum states does far more to win my love. We can find intellectual stimulation in anything!
And there’s more – we can go nerdier!
Stick With Me, Stick With Me, Oh It Goes Deeper
Let’s analyze the dilemma a bit further:
- She can’t KNOW she’s beautiful because, as Stephen points out, that leads to a logical contradiction – she would no longer be beautiful.
- She can’t KNOW that she isn’t beautiful, because that also leads to a logical contradiction – she would be beautiful again.
- It’s impossible for the girl to know that she is or isn’t beautiful, so she has to be uncertain – not knowing either way.
- This uncertainty satisfies the requirements: she doesn’t know that she’s beautiful, therefore, she’s definitely beautiful and can’t know it.
It turns out she’s not in a flickering state of hot and not, she’s perpetually hot – but she cannot possibly know it without logical contradiction! From an external perspective, we can recognize it as true. From within her own mind, she can’t – even following the same steps. How weird is that?
Then it hit me: the song lyrics are a great example of a Gödel sentence!
Gödel sentences, from Kurt Gödel’s famous Incompleteness Theorems, are the statements which are true but unprovable within the system. Gödel demonstrated that every set of mathematical axioms complex enough to stand as a foundation for arithmetic will contain at least one of these statements: something that is obviously true from an outside perspective, but isn’t true by virtue of the axioms. (He found a way to coherently encode “The axioms do not prove this sentence to be true.”) This raises the question: what makes a mathematical statement true if not the fact that it can be derived from the axioms?
Gödel’s findings rocked the world of mathematics and have had implications on the philosophy of mind, raising questions like:
- What does it mean to hold a belief as true?
- What are our minds doing when we make the leap of insight (if insight it is) that identifies a Gödel sentences as true?
- How does this set us apart from the algorithmic computers, which are plagued by their own version of Incompleteness, the Halting Problem?
I had no idea pop music was so intelligent!
Was the boy band comparing her, not to a summer’s day, but a turing-complete computer? Were they glorifying their listeners by reminding us that, according to some interpretations of Incompleteness Theory, we’re more than algorithmic machines? Were they making a profound statement about mind/matter dualism?
I don’t know, but apparently I should turn on the radio more often.
[For related reading, see various analyses of Mims’ “This is Why I’m Hot”]
As they say in the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation: Share and Enjoy!