Lines Without Borders

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Language is cool.

In my course on discrete mathematics, I am given arguments with the goal of proving the validity of them and the truthfulness of their claims. Ultimately these statements of something (anything) could be reduced to a set of symbols that can then be plumbed for an answer to determine its truthfulness. Within this world view, everything is either true or false, unless we produce undecidable statements such as the Liar's Paradox:

I am lying now.
This statement is false.

The paradox here is if you presume the preceding statements are to be either, true or false, what are these statements actually saying?

Language is special that way. Without it, we may not be able to arrive at paradoxes like the above. Yet it is this language which prevents us from going further. It's almost screaming out to us to question some of our foundational understanding of knowledge.

I feel there is so much more to discover which we cannot know (yet). Humans are blessed with creativity, a kind of purposeful birthing of pseudo-contemplation, of strange dreams that blend into reality to inspire us. And these inspirations and discoveries will come to be recorded in languages, either in novels or journals, in mathematical formulas, in musical compositions, or in unexplored spaces that occupy the "lost in translation". Language equally improves our understanding as it does to limit it, a constant reminder to continually go beyond possibility, to improve the boundaries of the knowable. That's just damn cool.

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