On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 10:10 AM Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > > On Wed, 13 Jun 2018 12:43:12 +0000, Alister via Python-list wrote: > > > I have a theory that it's impossible to prove anything, but I can't > > prove it. > > Heh, that reminds me of Stephen Pinker's comment from "Enlightenment Now": > > "one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason" > > but on the other hand, Kurt Gödel successfully proved using mathematics > that (sufficiently powerful) maths is either inconsistent or incomplete, > and we can never tell which. In a sense, Gödel proved that it is > impossible to prove *certain* things which are true, or disprove some > which are false, but we have no way of proving which are which.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding of the Second Incompleteness Theorem is that a consistent, sufficiently powerful formal system cannot prove its own consistency. It doesn't mean that we can't prove it in some other way. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
