B”H

I Nominate Kurt Godel for The Nobel Prize

I recently made this announcement in a conversation. Someone bound and determined to shoot down my grandiose, and seemingly baseless, pronouncement retorted: “You can’t nominate Kurt Godel for the Nobel Prize”. “Why?”, I asked simply, feigning innocence [See my article “Two Types of Intellect” in issue #145 (of Gift of Fire, the journal of The Prometheus Society) for an explanation of these lethal “Why?”s.]. “First off, you’re not on the Norwegian Nobel Committee”, my interlocutor said, in a transparent bid to take the wind out of my sails. That position is technically factual, but I was not about to be daunted by a mere technicality (or fact that wasn’t really germane). I dismissed the contention by stating: “That is merely due to the fact that I am not Norwegian.” I didn’t let him get another word in edgewise about the make-up of the Committee. “Second”, my would-be shooter downer continued, certain that the second point he was about to make would be the coup de grace that would render him the victor in this friendly altercation, “there is no Nobel Prize for Mathematics.” I began to salivate a bit as my prey fell into the trap that I had methodically and meticulously set for him. “Well, John Nash was granted a Nobel Prize.”, I stated. Amused I watched the wannabe poo-pooer bloating and gloating as visions of a victory he would never realize danced in his head. “John Nash was granted a Nobel Prize in Economics, not Mathematics”, he responded in a ‘so there’ tone of voice. “Exactly”, I responded calmly. I went on: “Although it may be argued that some of the other work that Nash did in pure math was more brilliant and original than the Game Theory, he was granted a Nobel Prize on the basis of how his Game Theory proved that economic activity is improved when it is conducted in a win-win manner. Nash’s work in economics is characterized by the inherently moral content of the work. Similarly, my intention is that Godel should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize because, when assiduously analyzed, it will be discovered that Godel’s Theorem proves that Humanity is inexorably moving in the direction of social anarchy, which I define as ultimate social freedom, i.e., society characterized by the generalized ability of its citizens to react morally to the unbounded and unexpected, without the need to aggressively impose arbitrary structuring laws. I contend that Kurt Godel is entitled to be a Nobel Peace Prize laureate on the basis of his Undecidability (or Incompleteness) Theorem, which, simply put, proved that there are problems that cannot be solved by any set of rules or procedures because this would always require a higher set of rules. Kurt Godel proved that any system of laws that we may contrive are going to reveal themselves be internally inconsistent at one point or another and we will have to devise laws that are greater in scope in order to iron out the kinks of the inconsistencies. That, of course, will avail us nothing, as the system of laws that is greater in scope than the system of laws that generated it because it was found to be internally inconsistent will, likewise break down, as did those that antedated it. Kurt Godel has shown that Human beings who devise laws for themselves to describe their societies, just as they devise mathematical laws in an attempt to describe their universe, will, upon observing, and admitting, that no number of revisions or sophistications will yield a system of laws that describes either an internally consistent society or description of physical reality, have to come to the conclusion that all laws must be abandoned. At that point two things will have occurred. We will be living in anarchy, unfettered by arbitrary and superfluous laws and we will be living in a physical universe unlimited by a mathematical grammar or syntax of any kind. We will have transcended mind and the unavoidable limitations that come along with living in a mind that generates systematizing laws.

Henry David Thoreau presaged the work of Godel when he wrote the following in his book WALDEN:
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
In writing out his Theorem, and making it available to other Human beings, Godel answered Thoreau’s request. He laid the foundation for the vision of Thoreau, the anarchist and lover and Humanity and nature. Thoreau, and then Godel after him, said exactly the same thing. The former wrote in the language that the INFJs among us resonate with and the latter in the terminology that the INTJs among us grasp intellectually.

Kurt Godel is, in my humble opinion, the paradigmatic mathematician, the mathematician par excellence. His theorem spans the entire range from “pure math” to “applied math” yet goes further than this, further than the math of any other – it describes and proves that ultimate freedom is built into the very laws of the universe. For this Kurt Godel deserves recognition and we deserve to admit to ourselves the ramifications of his work. We are destined to be increasing free. The Human mind has generated a mathematical grammar and syntax that not only describes a universe that urges us ever onward and upward, but inevitably transcends itself.

In summary: We are evolving, both in our consciousness and socially, into living (to be understood as being capable of creating at will) in the stateless state that Christopher Michael Langan calls Unbound Telesis (UBT) and what the mystical strain of Judaism calls Ayin – that which our minds now perceive as Nothingness, not because it is a void but only because we can not yet imagine unbound ontological potential. However, we are moving in the direction of being able to exist in that state which is no state at all. This is the promise that Thoreau and Godel hold out to us.


Now that I think about it, a wave of largesse and great pride in Humanity fills me. I nominate us all for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel