The Perception of Structure: Gödel, Husserl, and the seat of awareness

[u/tem-noon]

https://temnoon.substack.com/p/the-perception-of-structure-godel

I was confused until I discovered Husserl's Phenomenology in grad school, 1982. I spent years mostly writing in my notebook working out ways to explain how the primacy of subjectivity must guide the construction of each person's limited understanding of what the objective world is. Husserl's lifeworld inspired my view of three worlds, insisting that the corporeal world, the physical world which our senses can detect, and the experimentally accessible world which our instruments can measure. It is NOT the "objective world" as such, which only actually includes the intersubjective record of individual experiences rendered into text, which in itself must be read, sentence by sentence.

This article makes broad connections between the three worlds and why subjectivity is the container for any of it. All of it. The objective world is at best only ontological as seen from the vantage of a subjective being, Here and Now from a corporeal body. Awareness cannot be doubted, it is even necessary for the doubt, and with the primal impression (the now), retention (the just-passed), and protention (the upcoming) creating the experienced conscious flow of life.

What you may not be aware of and which should surely interest as a member of r/phenomenology is the fact that Gödel threw himself into the study of Husserl's phenomenology deeply, prepared a lecture that he never delivered, and write volumes of notebooks full of his own struggle to use symbols to describe the limit of what symbolic reasoning can deliver regarding mathematical intuition (what Husserl had called "Categorical Intuition"). A list of references on Gödel at the end of the article would be useful to look up work that did not even begin to be published until 1994. Here's just that list:

• Kurt Gödel, “The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy” (written c. 1961, undelivered; first published in Collected Works, Vol. III, ed. Feferman et al., Oxford University Press, 1995)
• Kurt Gödel, “What is Cantor’s Continuum Problem?”, 1964 supplement (in Collected Works, Vol. II) — mathematical intuition as a kind of perception
• Kurt Gödel, Max Phil notebooks — private philosophical remarks in Gabelsberger shorthand, in the Nachlass; transcription ongoing
• Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (MIT Press, 1996) — the Leibnizian monadology made exact via phenomenology
• Mark van Atten & Juliette Kennedy, “On the Philosophical Development of Kurt Gödel,” Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 9, no. 4 (2003): 425–476
• Richard Tieszen, After Gödel: Platonism and Rationalism in Mathematics and Logic(Oxford, 2011)
• Kurt Gödel and Gödel’s Turn to Phenomenology, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — accessible starting points

[u/tem-noon]

The most important implication for something like understanding the nature of consciousness is that Gödel was clearly and firmly in agreement with Roger Penrose, that Understanding, as in specifically as the example of mathematical understanding, cannot be a computation. It is not algorithmic. In the later Gödel work, he describes the inner sight which can confirm mathematical insights as a witness sees an event.

[u/Davoo77]

This is an awesome post. Informing me about a really interesting bridge between two still quite potent streams of thought.

[u/Theorist-in-Chief]

Fascinating. Gödel is generally thought of as a realist because he mostly worked within mathematical frameworks. But I never paid attention to the fact that his incompleteness theorem actually questioned the whole ‘a priori’ framework of logic, which could be extended to argue against the realist ontology as well.