caryoscelus:~#

short history of skeptic: “crap, i don’t know anything about universe and how am i supposed to learn? surely i can’t rely on senses, but i also can’t trust my mind since it errs so much. lets invent an easy mechanical way to do it”

“yay, we have predicate logic and later boolean logic. surely nobody would make a mistake with True, False and a bunch of binary operations. one can always doublecheck using these simple operation tables”

“but that doesn’t give us much. hey, isn’t there such a thing as geometry? lets take a look”

“oh crap, it’s all based on senses. lets put some axioms and derive everything from them using our great infallible mechanical logic”

“now that’s better. but wait, our axioms are based on senses!”

“we can’t trust senses, but we want geometry. lets port it onto algebra”

“he-he, aren’t we so cool? knowing so much about the world! with just a few easily checkable rules!”

“ooh, actually algebra is quite complex. we are making mistakes again. damn, we need axiomatic system for it too!”

“he-he, now we are talking!”

“infinity? did someone say infinity? isn’t that the same as god? ah, fuck it, we have them in our math, so we must deal with them using our great tools!”

“but the Pi still sure looks scary! and those weird infinite sequences..”

“surely it ‘looks’ like there are more real numbers than integers, but that’s senses again!”

“duh, algebra cannot into this. we need to build a set theory to deal with infinite sets. surely something will work out”

“and remember we started with notion of predicates? surely every predicate has a set of numbers which satisfy predicate”

“hmm, did i just say set of numbers? but what about set of sets? surely there’s a predicate ‘is a set’, so must be a set containing other sets”

“…and the universe is just one fucking big set of all sets. isn’t that cool?”

a certain barber walks into the room

“no, no, we have our own private universe! it has nothing to do with your dirty reality and dirty barbers!”

“but hey… what if… what if there is a ‘barber’ set? set of all sets that aren’t elements of self?”

“aww, universe on fire! math is doomed! there is no truth! we’re back to square one!”

skeptic is depressed for a while

“but hey, if we just restrict sets and create classes?.. won’t it all work out?”

“and then we can add some lambda calculus, turing machine isomorphism and that thing to describe morphism - category theory”

“and have computer prove everything that can be proved! mu-ha-ha!”

skeptic’s subconsciousness: “and now all the cool kids will be able to play with programming and games that they would code. nobody would have time to find blind spots in our complex math castle”

evil laughter is unheard by skeptic because they exist in sound-proof math universe

THE END

(a certain greek philosopher was not allowed on scene; not that he tried)