David Peat

On Incompleteness 47It therefore makes sense to combine all that is best in these twovery different species—carbon-based humans and silicon-based computers.In the future, highly advanced computers may work side byside with humans, each “learning” from the other, and each performingto the best of their abilities. Such a future may also bring directneural connections whereby a human brain can enter directly to a computermemory, experience sensations from a remote site, or direct arobot by means of human thought and intention.The Dominance of LogicGödel’s theorem is about the world of mathematics, a result derivedthrough an ingenious system of self-referential logic. To go beyond itsdomain of reference, as I have been doing in the preceding paragraphs,is more an extrapolation than an inference. It would be truer to saythat Gödel’s theorem is one example of the way in which we havelearned to suspect grand, overarching schemes and ideas.The twentieth century saw some of the darkest passages in humanhistory; times when madness swept across entire nations and peoplespoke of collective evil, nightmare, and the rule of unreason. Paradoxically,such collective insanity possesses its own warped, internal reasoning;often these dark periods are characterized by an obsession withlogic, bookkeeping, and bureaucracy.Such paradoxical behavior is associated with insanity not only onthe social but also on the individual level. The paranoiac carefully justifiesher delusions of persecution. The psychopath, dissociated fromany identification with those around him, reasons out each step, yetarrives at totally absurd premises. Psychopaths may begin with the convictionthat they are superior to those around them, and in the sensethat all their mental energy is focused on this obsessive idea while othersseem to drift around from interest to interest and idea to idea, theymay have a sort of warped justification in their belief. From that pointit is a short step to seeing others as beneath them, and society’s lawsand conventions as applying only to such inferior creatures.In Graham Greene’s novel The Third Man, Harry Lime looks down