I Am a Strange Loop

While I agree with Russell that something fishy is going on in Berry’s paradox, I don’t agree about what it is. The weakness that I focus in on is the fact that English is a hopelessly imprecise medium for expressing mathematical statements; its words and phrases are far too vague. What may seem precise at first turns out to be fraught with ambiguity. For example, the expression “nine cubed plus forty-eight, all times ten cubed plus one”, which earlier I exhibited as a description of 777,777, is in fact ambiguous — it might, for instance, be interpreted as meaning 777 times 1000, with 1 tacked on at the end, resulting in 777,001.

But that little ambiguity is just the tip of the iceberg. The truth of the matter is that it is far from clear what kinds of English expressions count as descriptions of a number. Consider the following phrases, which purport to be descriptions of specific integers:

• the number of distinct languages ever spoken on earth

• the number of heavenly bodies in the Solar System

• the number of distinct four-by-four magic squares

• the number of interesting integers less than 100

What is wrong with them? Well, they all involve ill-defined notions.

What, for instance, is meant by a “language”? Is sign language a language? Is it “spoken”? Is there a sharp cutoff between languages and dialects? How many “distinct languages” lay along the pathway from Latin to Italian? How many “distinct languages” were spoken en route from Neanderthal days to Latin? Is Church Latin a language? And Pig Latin? Even if we had videotapes of every last human utterance on earth for the past million years, the idea of objectively assigning each one to some particular “official” language, then cleanly teasing apart all the “truly distinct” languages, and finally counting them would still be a nonsensical pipe dream. It’s already meaningless enough to talk about counting all the “items” in a garbage can, let alone all the languages of all time!

Moving on, what counts as a “heavenly body”? Do we count artificial satellites? And random pieces of flotsam and jetsam left floating out there by astronauts? Do we count every single asteroid? Every single distinct stone floating in Saturn’s rings? What about specks of dust? What about isolated atoms floating in the void? Where does the Solar System stop? And so on, ad infinitum.

You might object, “But those aren’t mathematical notions! Berry’s idea was to use mathematical definitions of integers.” All right, but then show me a sharp cutoff line between mathematics and the rest of the world. Berry’s definition uses the vague notion of “syllable counting”, for instance. How many syllables are there in “finally” or “family” or “rhythm” or “lyre” or “hour” or “owl”? But no matter; suppose we had established a rigorous and objective way of counting syllables. Still, what would count as a “mathematical concept”? Is the discipline of mathematics really that sharply defined? For instance, what is the precise definition of the notion “magic square”? Different authors define this notion differently. Do we have to take a poll of the mathematical community? And if so, who then counts as a member of that blurry community?

What about the blurry notion of “interesting numbers”? Could we give some kind of mathematical precision to that? As you saw above, reasons for calling a number “interesting” could involve geometry and other areas of mathematics — but once again, where do the borders of mathematics lie? Is game theory part of mathematics? What about medical statistics? What about the theory of twisting tendrils of plants? And on and on.

To sum up, the notion of an “English-language definition of an integer” turns out to be a hopeless morass, and so Berry’s twisty notion of b, no less than Escher’s twisty notion of two mutually drawing hands, is an ingenious figment of the imagination rather than a genuine strange loop. There goes a promising candidate for strange loopiness down the drain!

Although in this brief digression I’ve made it sound as if the idea Berry had in 1904 was naïve, I must point out that some six decades later, the young mathematician Greg Chaitin, inspired by Berry’s idea, dreamt up a more precise cousin using computer programs instead of English-language descriptions, and this clever shift turned out to yield a radically new proof of, and perspective on, Gödel’s 1931 theorem. From there, Chaitin and others went on to develop an important new branch of mathematics known as “algorithmic information theory”. To go into that would carry us far afield, but I hope to have conveyed a sense for the richness of Berry’s insight, for this was the breeding ground for Gödel’s revolutionary ideas.

A Peanut-butter and Barberry Sandwich