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Consciousness as a Gödel sentence in the

language of science
Why the Hard Problem (might be) so Hard

ERIK HOEL
OCT 24, 2024

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Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

Let's say you lived in a universe where you really were some sort of incarnated
soul in a corporeal body. Or some sort of agent from a vaster reality embedded in a
simulation (depending on de?nitions, the two scenarios might not be that
diAerent). What would the science in such a dualistic universe look like?

It would probably look like this: in an incarnated-soul universe, the laws of

physics make sense, and are nice and rule-following, except for one notable
absence, which is that no one can explain how exactly corporeal bodies (or
simulated ones) have a you. The incarnated/simulated scientists would open up the
incarnating/simulating brains and say, “Hmm, it looks like it's following all the
physical rules, but we can’t explain how you ?t into this thing!” There would be, in
other words, an explanatory gap between being you and the incarnation of you.
Great scientists and philosophers would write books saying things like:

No explanation given wholly in physical terms can ever account for [it].

I regard [it] as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from [it].

I believe that the present laws of physics are at least incomplete without a
translation into terms of [it].

Which is exactly the kind of thing great thinkers write in our universe (here, David
Chalmers, Max Planck, Eugene Wigner, respectively).

What would the state of the rest of science be there? For one, their version of
neuroscience would lag signi?cantly behind. Which again, looks like our universe,
where there is no accepted lawful way to relate brain states to conscious
experiences—what it is like to be you. It is an odd position to be in, given the
success of science in so many other domains!

What else? Well, it’s likely that in the incarnated-soul universe, their version of AI
would suspiciously have nothing to do with how the brain works. It would be as if
they had discovered this totally orthogonal form of intelligence, one based more
on all the actual sensible physical rules, and not based oA of mysterious confusing
soul stuA. An orthogonality which, uh—and things are getting uncomfortable here
—is arguably also the case in our universe.

One could go whole hog and say that this all points to proof of religion. But which
one? What details? A gap of inexplicability doesn't recommend anything.

And it feels a bit too easy, right? For there is another explanation, one rarely
explored, which is that there is no way to set up a universe without this sort of
confusion. Which ends up being the same as asking: Are all scienti?c facts
knowable? Or is science fundamentally incomplete?

While I can’t claim certainty, science being fundamentally incomplete is at least

conceivable to me. It would mean that there are scienti?c facts that at ?rst look
tantalizingly discoverable, but then their true answers remain closed to us for
non-trivial reasons. (“Non-trivial” is important here—there are clearly many facts
trivially closed for us, like counting every atom in the universe.) Non-trivial
scienti?c incompleteness would be a diAerent beast. It’d be more like some
statements within science end in paradox, the scienti?c equivalent of “This
sentence is a lie.”

Scientists usually shy away from meta-scienti?c questions like that of scienti?c
incompleteness. I understand why! It seems too much like philosophy, which is
dangerous (something I was told during my PhD repeatedly). Dark and deep
waters. But of course, a very similar question was famously asked in mathematics,
and it has a very famous answer in Gödel's theorems (essentially that yes,
mathematics is necessarily incomplete). While the “genre” of incompleteness
proofs doesn’t aAect most working mathematicians, it also isn’t irrelevant—it
crops up like an ominous weed.

Here we must initially be wary: gesturing to incompleteness in mathematics is

merely an analogy. It is up for debate (or investigation) to what degree the analogy
holds. The various incompleteness results in mathematics (some are more famous
than others) conceptualize mathematics as a formal system, an abstract machine.
This machine requires de?ning things like symbols, a grammar, a set of axioms,
and inference rules—then you set the machine to run, and see if you can ?nd
within its working paradoxes.

What to do such paradoxes look like? A brief example is necessary to capture their
gist. Might as well do the most famous.

As with many proofs in the “incompleteness genre” Gödel's theorems are based
on self-reference. Basically (and warning: one must radically simplify here) Gödel
uses a form of encoding (an interpretation of what the system is doing) to read a
formal system S as talking about itself. He then constructs what’s known as a
“Gödel sentence.” A Gödel sentence is basically a more complex version of the
classic “This sentence is a lie.” It instead claims that “This sentence is not
provable in S.” Now just think about it: If that sentence were proved to be true,
then it would render S inconsistent, because it’s proving true something it says
cannot be proven (inconsistency). On the other hand, if S is consistent, it must not
be able to prove the sentence, meaning incompleteness—certain things are true
(because the sentence is indeed not provable), but you can’t prove them from
within.

Here's a pause (with smooth jazz) to work through that yourself if you like.

Similarly, it’s worth asking: (a) can science be thought of as a formal system? And
also (b) Is there anything in science that, if you squint, looks like a Gödel
sentence?

As to the ?rst ask: obviously science is an incredibly messy process, the details of
which change depending on exactly what natural phenomena you seek to explain,
how practices vary between ?elds, heck, even departmental politics. Yet the
messiness of science in an applied sense doesn’t outright preclude it being
modellable as a formal system. Crack any basic high school textbook and you will
oaen ?nd some (obviously super?cial) formal description of science.

source

We could imagine empiricism as a very complicated formal system, replete with

epicycles, with various inference rules to arrive at scienti?c truths, and so on. We
can even see kernels of formalizing science in ideas like Karl Popper’s notion of
science as being primarily about falsi?cation (although Kuhn’s antithesis of
science as a series of paradigm shias seems more diccult to capture formally).
Again, it seems at least conceivable that science could be viewed as an abstract
machine, perhaps one whose sole goal is even rather simple—like an abstract
machine for rejecting hypotheses.

While there has been a smidgeon of modern work on conceptualizing science as a

formal system, there’s been not nearly as much as the question deserves, nor much
exploration of what it mean for diAerent scienti?c ?elds (no asking: Where would
incompleteness crop up?).

In fact, incompleteness might necessarily creep into science due to its reliance on
mathematics itself. This is what Stephen Hawking thought. While he’s known for
his triumphal pursuit of a Theory of Everything, toward the end of his life
Hawking concluded that such a theory was impossible. His reasoning? That
science owed too much to mathematics, and therefore undecidability crept in—
science inherited paradoxes from mathematics.

All this stuA has a long intellectual heritage. The question of whether physics
could be grounded in a set of axioms was one of Hilbert’s 23 problems for
mathematics that he posed in 1900. He wrote:

The investigations on the foundations of geometry suggest the problem: To

treat in the same manner, by means of axioms, those physical sciences in which
mathematics plays an important part.

Good enough for Hilbert, good enough for me. In fact, Hilbert would be interested
to learn that we already know that physics appears to include undecidable
properties. There are a number of these, again, all remarkably little discussed. E.g.,
in 2015 a Nature paper literally titled “Undecidability of the spectral gap” showed
that an important physical quantity—the diAerence in energy between ground
state and the initial excited state of a material—is formally undecidable. It is also
triggered by recursion (basically, they encode questions about spectral gaps into
spectral gaps).

So in a sense, we can already say that science is incomplete! At least, we know

there are physical properties that cannot be actually discovered (in a rigorous or
systematic manner). So it's very much not a foregone conclusion that scienti?c
incompleteness is true. And if it were true, it would be a very good explanation for
why the Hard Problem of consciousness is so damn Hard.

I'm certainly not the ?rst person to point out that there are oddities around
consciousness and self-reference. But I actually think a lot of the work doesn't
directly touch on scienti?c incompleteness—it's the sort of thing that people
think exists keshed out in detail somewhere, but then struggle to put to a clear
source.

E.g., consider Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind, which argues that humans
can understand undecidable statements in ways that computers can’t, and
therefore the human mind is not a computer. Yet, whether or not the mind is a
computer doesn’t really tell us if science is complete, nor if the dicculties in
understanding consciousness comes from scienti?c incompleteness.

In Colin McGinn’s The Mysterious Flame he argues for a “mysterian” position

wherein consciousness is— you guessed it from the name—necessarily a mystery.
However, McGinn thinks that consciousness is solvable scienti?cally in principle,
it’s just that humans themselves lack the intelligence (just as a dog lacks the
intelligence to ever understand General Relativity). For, say, a superintelligent AI,
consciousness would be no problem.

A third example would be the extremely classic Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas
Hofstadter—a wonderfully playful book on recursion and the mind. In fact, I’ve
found that people oaen think that Gödel, Escher, Bach’s central hypothesis is about
scienti?c incompleteness! But it’s really not, at least explicitly. If you read the later
I am a Strange Loop it becomes clear that what Hofstadter was trying to say is that
consciousness just is symbolic recursion in the brain. Personally, I think this is
quite a low bar theory, since presumably even a Skyrim NPC might possess
rudimentary symbolic recursion, and we don’t think they’re consciousness (an
arrow to the knee doesn’t really hurt them). Regardless, the idea of scienti?c
incompleteness is orthogonal to the idea that symbolic recursion is the root of
consciousness—here, the claim is not that consciousness comes about via
recursion, but rather that within science a theory of consciousness would itself be
recursive.

One of the earliest proto-statements of the idea of scienti?c incompleteness I’ve

found is actually in Nobel-Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek’s mostly
forgotten book on psychology, The Sensory Order. And honestly, his argument is
not very good. Basically, he just thinks you can’t understand a natural
phenomenon without possessing signi?cantly greater complexity than it, and we
don’t possess enough neural complexity to understand our own brains (this seems
immediately undermined by counterexamples, like indicating that we could never
actually understand how weather works, etc).

But none of these make direct arguments about scienti?c incompleteness, which
is why I spent a chunk of my book The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free
Will, and the Limits of Science, developing it. Trying to make it as direct as possible,
there I de?ned scienti?c incompleteness as the idea that:

A theory of consciousness is like a Gödel sentence written in the language of

science.

I'll openly admit there is no direct evidence of this. But there is circumstantial
evidence, and some viable paths toward a philosophical proof.

E.g., no matter which way we broadly turn on what is traditionally called the
“mind-body problem” we end in paradox. On one side, once we encode ourselves
in the scienti?c worldview we realize that something is missing (our
consciousness). Thomas Nagel, in The View from Nowhere, gives a great metaphor
for this: imagine that the scienti?c worldview is literally a map (of the universe,
presumably). It might be complete and coherent, as if axiomatically consistent.
But there is a piece of information obviously missing from the map: the YOU ARE
HERE sign. And this extra information that relates you, the observer, to the map
itself, is not captured anywhere on the map itself.

Edward Steed

Can we then go too far to the other side and believe that consciousness does not
exist? This also seems paradoxical. Aaer all, we only know the world through our
own consciousness. Every tidbit of science that you know is known only through
your consciousness. In fact, it’s arguable that science is just a set of corroborated
?rst-person experiences! Imagining science without consciousness asks us to
throw away the entire foundation of our knowledge, the one thing we are truly
sure of, and what mediates all our other information—paradoxically, including our
certainty of the facts of science itself.

Allow me to get even more head-scratchingly gnarly for a moment with my own
example of how paradoxes crop up in our thinking about consciousness in exactly
the way you would expect if scienti?c incompleteness were true.

In the popular “zombie argument” by David Chalmers, the conclusion is that

materialism is false because a possible world populated by “zombies” is
conceivable (wherein a zombie is someone much like ourselves—but while
neurons are ?ring, and atoms are moving, there is a total lack of subjective
experience). If such a world is conceivable, then this means that the normal laws
of physics don't ?x consciousness in place. It seems like you need some sort of
extra laws that go beyond physics. So pure materialism can't be true.

But let's say that a zombie makes the zombie argument. They imagine a possible
world ?lled with zombies and ?nd it conceivable and therefore conclude that
materialism is false. But wait! Materialism is true in the zombie world! So
therefore, the zombie argument would be wrong. Its validity relies on a hidden
premise that the person making the argument is themselves not a zombie.

Fine. That's a premise, but so what? Well, if the zombie argument were to be valid,
then no utterance or behavior or experiment could tell the diAerence between a
zombie and a non-zombie. Nor any amount of self-rekection or introspection.
There could even be some zombie version of Descartes (let’s call him Zescartes)
who concludes he is indubitably conscious, then makes the zombie argument. But
for Zescartes, the zombie argument returns the wrong conclusion: materialism is
false, despite it actually being true in his world. And there's no way for Descartes
or Zescartes to tell themselves apart.

So the zombie argument itself ends in paradox. If it were valid without the
premise of already being conscious, a materialist zombie could use it to argue
against materialism, indicating inconsistency. On the other hand, if it is valid only
with the premise of consciousness, then any conscious being can always make the
zombie argument, and then notice that whether or not they are a zombie cannot
be resolved by introspection or empirical evidence, indicating incompleteness.
The existence of consciousness appears to be the kind of true fact that cannot be
proven from the inside.

Here's a pause (with frenetic jazz) to work through that yourself if you like.

More evidence for scienti?c incompleteness comes from an examining how

science has historically developed, with consciousness lagging behind.

As philosopher Philip GoA notes in Galileo’s Error: Galileo made speci?cally sure
to carve out qualitative properties (in modern terms, essentially facts about
consciousness) from science to begin with. And it was really this removal (in his
book The Assayer) that ?nalized the scienti?c method—it told scientists what
kinds of things focus on, and what kinds of things to ignore. As GoA points out, if
Galileo were returned to life in the modern era, he would immediately say that of
course science is incomplete, since he, a religious man, never designed science to
talk about souls anyways!

Galileo’s restriction of the purview of science to the material and mechanistic

looks to me much like Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s attempts
to remove self-reference (and its associated paradoxes) from mathematics in their
infamous Principa Mathematica. Their attempt was based on creating a tier of
types of sets (the mathematical entities that they tried to ground all other math in).
Their strategy disallowed tiers to “talk about” (contain) members of a similar tier.
It only kind of worked, merely delaying paradoxes from creeping in.

This bracketing looks to me a lot like what Galileo did to science, removing
consciousness and allowing it to proceed. In fact, even now in consciousness
science, people talk about diAerent “strengths” of theories of consciousness. E.g.
for a philosopher like Chalmers, the distinction between the Hard versus Easy
problems of consciousness, or for a scientist like Anil Seth, the distinction
between weak versus strong theories of consciousness. All these are basically
admittances that some bracketing is already happening.

In summary, we know this: (a) It is conceivable that science could be some sort of
formal system, (b) Some properties of nature have already been proven to be
undecidable, (c) Arguments in philosophy of mind oaen end in paradoxes
indicating inconsistency or incompleteness, and (d) The historical development of
science, and even the contemporary science of consciousness, resembles a series
of bracketings very similar to how mathematicians tried to remove self-reference
and paradoxes.

All of this ?ts perfectly with a world that is scienti?cally incomplete.

Obviously, we must indulge a ?nal instance of self-reference. If scienti?c

incompleteness is true, how do you—yes, you—exist in a world that is
paradoxical? How do you relate to it, I mean? If it is indeed a fact that there are
questions about the universe that are true but cannot be proved, this unfortunately
recommends no particular religion, points you to no higher mysteries. It is merely
a blankness, a clouded-over wall that extends in?nitely in all directions.

But still, upon ?nding such an inaccessible wall, we humans cannot help our
nature. We cannot help but wonder: what’s behind the wall?

What do you do when something just

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Rohan Banerjee More Letters, Less News 11 hrs ago Liked by Erik Hoel

Now that's a great cliffhanger ending...

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1 reply

Aodh Séamus Dissident Deliveries 11 hrs ago Liked by Erik Hoel

Nice work, enjoyable read, thank you. Regarding the section on philosophical zombies, I wonder
whether the claim that p-zombies could “imagine” anything is nonsensical? I understand these
theoretic entities to mimic humans in every way except that they don’t have any subjective
experience, no qualia — something I suspect necessary to be able to imagine/think at all. P-
zombies are merely meat-puppets running an algorithm, right? Perhaps they don’t even work as a
thought experiment because they are not possible even in principle.
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