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Article 5251 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: tomh.bbs@cybernet.cse.fau.edu
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Self-reference in Goedel's theorem
Message-ID: <0J9qJB1w164w@cybernet.cse.fau.edu>
Date: 24 Apr 92 21:36:56 GMT
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Organization: Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
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I think self-reference is required in a Goedel type statement;
in order to create a sentence that is true but not provable one
needs to jump outside the system, so to speak, to create a
statement that has semantic content.  Any purely syntactic
statement that's true will be reachable from the axioms.
The self-reference is a way of creating a semantic content-
one that is inherent in the statement and not simply assigned
to it by a human..

Unless there is some way of creating a statement with inherent
semantic content that is not self-referential..  Semantic content
is probably more of a key concept, but I don't know how it can
be untangled from self-reference.

Tom Holroyd
Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431 USA
tomh@bambi.ccs.fau.edu


