Vagueness, Weakness, Infinite Loops, Fragility

As stated in a previous post, I hold that the ecological age is one of hypocrisy, weakness and lameness. I mean these in very precise and, you may be surprised to hear, positive senses. These are good things about our age.

Why? Because it means we are coming to terms with our status as one object among many.

I have an intuition that natural languages are inherently weak. Artificial languages such as logics that try to beef up the weakness become brittle. Why? Because they try to exclude contradictions.

I've investigated one kind of contradiction quite recently, the Sorites paradox. I think this paradox arises because of something to do with objects, not simply (our) interpretations of objects.

What is that something? Along comes Mark Changizi to explain how natural languages must be vague, because of another paradox of condradiction: Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Changizi calls it the halting problem (and its smaller cousin, the always-halting problem). This is because Alan Turing devised an ingenious way to prove Gödel using algorithms, and in so doing, opened up the field of artificial intelligence.

He also opened the way to seeing all objects as inherently fragile, as an early post on Gödel argues on this blog. For every object, there is some kind of silver bullet (at least) that will destroy it. That's what being an object means. Being an object means you can be destroyed. You are fragile. You don't want to be fragile? You can't be an object.

I think Changizi is dead on, because I think that languages are archaeological records of relationships between objects, objects that are inherently fragile.