A quote from John D. Barrow
Sunday, January 18th, 2009If a religion is defined as a system of thought which requires belief in unprovable truths, then mathematics is the only religion that can prove it is a religion!
via Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Penguin Books, 1992.
If mathematics describes the universe, it must describe a universe which contains mathematics, and therefore, itself. Self-reference in mathematics is not merely esoteric, it’s fundamental, and nowadays quite commonly understood. In fact, self-reference of formal systems is ubiquitous in computer science: one can write a program in a language X, that can compile and execute other programs in language X, including itself. Recursion on all kinds of scales appears everywhere in computer science; languages such as LISP are built around it.
Look again at the Penrose diagram, it seems a reasonable approach to the problem of fundamentalism is to apply a scientific (evolutionary) viewpoint to its existence. Instead of addressing our species’ reluctance to evolve with outrage, let’s understand and accept it as a part of the same natural system that brought us here in the first place. Let’s turn the system on itself.