Go away if you want well-reasoned insightful commentary by an expert. I don't understand this stuff.
The word "paradox", to me, refers to a line of reasoning which leads to an unacceptable result. It is an indication that either (1) our assumptions are in error, (2) our mode of reasoning is in error, or (3) we made a trivial mistake, a mental "typo". Most paradoxes are resolved, with no great fanfare, by noting (3). Paradoxes which don't immediately succomb to this analysis usually tell us something much deeper about valid reasoning.
The word "logic", to me, refers to formal reasoning and deduction. The study of logic -- and the goal of mathematical logic -- is thus to understand the processes that we use to arrive at and hold our formal beliefs. In the context of mathematics, this seems at first glance a sufficiently cut-and-dried subject that we should be able to write down our understanding quite precisely. As the paradoxes below demonstrate, this does not seem to be the case. Why?
Note: I am not particularly well trained in mathematical logic, so my observations below may be missing some crucial considerations; however, a few conversations with people who should know better have so far failed to clear things up for me. Perhaps you can?
Note: This page will change when (if) I understand the issues better.
Does S contain itself? If it does, then by definition it must not; but if it doesn't then by definition it must. Oops.
Thus various complications have been developed -- for example, "typed" sets: type 0 might be the integers, and now a set of type N can only contain objects of lower type. This successfully, though some say inelegantly, wards off self-referential statements such as Russell's Paradox. There are alternative complications; it seems a matter of mathematical preference which insect-repellent you choose.
The main lesson seems to be that it can be hard to tell whether a well-formed mathematical statement actually defines a mathematical object. This is elaborated on in the next paradox.
Suppose that number is n. There are only finitely many sentences of 50 words or less, so there must be infinitely many unspecifiable numbers remaining. Thus n, the least of them, exists. Thus we can consider n to be specified by the sentence above, which contains 11 words. 11 < 50. Oops.
Maybe we are too loose in our definitions, and need more rigor.
Sure enough, the paradox goes away if we require "specified" to mean "computed by a Turing machine". n still exists, but now we don't have any way to compute it. (For example, the obvious program which tries all TMs smaller than "size 50" won't be able to deal with ones which don't halt.) So the paradox disappears, and (if you're Chaitin) a theorem appears in its place.
But most mathematicians believe in at least some nonconstructive things -- things which can be talked about with for-alls and there-exists and so forth as in second order logic, say with axioms for arithmetic (and for convenience also alphanumeric strings). Let's formalize Berry's paradox in that context.
This version goes
where S is a predicate for "formula s specifies integer m"; more precisely, S says there-exists-uniquely m satisfying s. s is an alphanumeric string, and S has to translate that string into logical requirements on m -- tedious but I believe quite straightforward. But the size of S is presumably less than 2^50, and as above we can prove that the statement above "n = min ..." is uniquely satisfied by some n. So n can't be in the set of which it is the least member. Bummer.
My lack of understanding here leads me to sympathize with constructionists.
Any insight?
My humble and naive opinion is that set theory is a can of worms. Can we found mathematical logic not on set theory, but on a much more concrete theory of algorithms and string manipulation? I once thought that this would fix things up, but alas, the following paradox involves essentially no set theory at all.
I stumbled across this paradox years ago when I was thinking about classes of algorithms... primitive recursive, general recursive, total recursive... Then I asked, "Is the set {Turing machines which provably halt on every input} enumerable or non-enumerable?" Let us here fix the formal system to be F, which happens to be 'Erik's Favorite and most Fulfilling Formal Theory'.
First I'll give you the intuitive sketch (in the form of a paradox), and then I'll be a little more careful and identify what I think is the faulty reasoning, and then mention the conclusions & questions I came to. Here goes:
Consider the set of provably halting Turing machines, that is, Turing machines for which you can prove that they always halt, no matter what the input is.
I will now argue that this set is both enumerable (like the integers) and non-enumerable (like the real numbers).
Let's start by being more careful and explicit. First of all, what you can prove depends upon what assumptions you make and what you accept as valid reasoning -- in short, your formal system. So, let's agree to use your favorite formal system F. (Most mathematicians, myself excluded, would choose Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, I guess. But a formal theory just of Turing Machines and whether or not they halt will suffice.)
Having your formal system explicitly written out allows us to write an algorithm for checking proofs. Thus (1) goes through fine. The problem is in (2). We can make P just fine, but let's be more careful answering "does it always halt?" and "can we prove that it always halts?" First observe that if you're a loser and your favorite formal system contains the axiom "0 == 1" (or is otherwise inconsistent), then every Turing machine can be proved to halt (whether or not it does). Thus P will sometimes try to run a program which never halts, so P won't halt either. Great: there's no paradox if F is inconsistent. Progress.
Now maybe you aren't a loser, and you have every reason to believe that your favorite formal system F is sound and consistent. Fine, let's assume F is sound and consistent -- and thus if you can prove that a Turing machine always halts, it always will. It's what we believe anyway (most of us, at least). So, accepting this assumption, then yes, P will always halt. And therefore, it follows also that P really is different from all the M enumerated by E. Next question: can we _prove_ that P always halts?
This, exactly, is the rub. For a good F, you won't be able to prove (within F!) that P always halts. But I did notice that P provably halts if F can prove the theorem, or has the axiom, that "if 'S' is provable, then S is true". Formally, it becomes difficult (but possible) to even phrase this theorem, but we can work with something simpler, such as "if proof_checker(proof,'TM m halts') == 'valid', then m halts". If F has this theorem, then then the paradox hits in full force.
Conclusion and interpretation: No consistent and sufficiently strong formal system can prove its own correctness. This is not a new result -- it's essentially Lo\:b's Theorem (a variant of Godel's second incompleteness theorem) in the context of rigorous mathematical logic: "If you can show that (if you can show it then it's true) then you can show anything." I like to think of it as an analysis of religious (or academic) fanatics: If you don't accept the possibility that your way of thinking is wrong, then you are, with certainty, wrong.
A few more comments. This all means we can explicitly write down a very concrete theorem, "P always halts", which must be true of our formal system if it's worth its salt. But this theorem is unprovable (in F). Now, since we just agreed that we believe "P always halts" as much as we believe in F in the first place, we must also believe equally in the new formal system F' = F union "P always halts". If we apply our "paradox" to F', we get a new program P' which also always halts (or at least, we believe this as much as we believe in F).
And it's turtles all the way down.
What bothers me is that it seems to me, intuitively only, that accepting the formal system F is tantamount to accepting F' and F'' and F''' and all the rest. And yet we can't say "Here: I have encapsulated all my mathematical beliefs in this here formal system F"... there always seems to be another belief you hold, which wasn't a part of F.
That you really do hold this belief is indicated by a fanciful gambling argument. I present to you a TM T, and I tell you I'm going to determine its input by coin tosses. I've got a really _smokin_ fast quantum-DNA-chaotic-spectral-manifold-catastrophy-theoretic universal Turing machine simulator, which takes half as much time to simulate every successive step of the TM. It has a little green light, which turns red when the TM halts. I'm taking bets: will T halt on the next input I give it? What odds would you accept? $500 to 1? You can examine T if you wish. Suppose you find a proof that T always halts. Now what odds will you take? I see no reason to wimp out on any odds -- that $1 is yours! OK, now the next TM T, upon examination, you identify as exactly P, as we discussed above (it uses the same formal system you used in your proof to identify the nth provably halting TM, and runs it on input n, and adds 1). What odds will you take? I see no reason to wimp out on any odds -- that $1 is yours! But there is no proof that P always halts within the original theory... Hence we have not (in F) fully formalized the mathematical reasoning that you use in practice to make absolute claims.
In other words, I seem to have convinced myself that, if I believe in the axioms and mechanisms of the formal system F, then I also believe that P must halt for all inputs. To me, this seems to be what should constitute "proof". But if we can't prove this in the formal system, then the formal system does not capture the reasoning that I used to draw my conclusion about P (which is a very specific statement about a very specific Turing machine). I would be very disappointed if no formal system can possibly codify my mathematical thinking, because this would seem to imply that my own beliefs do not rest on a finite foundation -- if to believe "P always halts" requires a new "act of faith" (or axiom), and on and on...
(A robot mathematician could surely follow the arguments above; and yet its beliefs demonstrably rest on a finite foundation. Is the robot necessarily inconsistent? Or must it necessarily use a different logic from the one we used here?)
The only way out seems to be to say that I actually don't necessarily believe the results of formal system F. And thus using F is more a useful engineering principle than a way to Truth (be it definable or knowable or not). Either that, or my mathematical beliefs are a different kind of formal system than that which is commonly studied in mathematics.
So, is math broken? For sure, it's weird.
To me, this seems draconian, and misses the points that (1) presumably we're already fine with formal system F, but it omits consideration of some seemingly meaningful beliefs, and (2) omiting talk of self-referential objects also makes your system incomplete in coverage, since there really are self-referential objects.
To wit: It seems to me that self-reference is a real phenomenon, and thus must be included in any system of logic buff enough to handle real phenomena. For example, I can easily write an assembly language program which prints itself. That's pretty well-defined & real. Or (less well defined): I can study (perhaps not successfully or completely) how my mind works.
A system of logic can easily be written down which "knows itself", just as the assembly-language program can dis-assemble itself. (BTW, I don't think that the "standard" logic systems found in math books can do this.)
It seems to me to be important to understand what's OK to do in a logic which knows itself. Clearly, not everything that we're used to doing is OK now -- as shown by the paradoxes.