Papers^γ

This is not a usual scientific paper, not a metaphysical tractatus either. It is accessible for for people with different backgrounds. Author tries to convince us that "the core of the human mind is simple and its structure is comprehensible". If I understand correctly, he believes that we (humanity or an individual?) will eventually develop a mathematical theory allowing us to understand our own understanding. Nevertheless, we should surmount a strange barrier of unclear shape and unknown size to achieve the goal. The power of our imagination could help... Who knows ? Some phrases are very remarkable, for example : * *In reality, no matter how hard some mathematicians try to achieve the contrary, subexponential time suffices for deciphering their papers.* * *For instance, an intelligent human and an equally intelligent gigantic squid may not agree on which of the above three blobs are abstract and which are concrete.* * *To see what iterations of self-references do, try it with "the meaning of". The first iteration "meaning of meaning" tells you what the (distributive) meaning really is. But try it two more times, and what come out of it, "meaning of meaning of meaning of meaning" strikes you as something meaningless.* The mind experiment from the third point suggests that our brain uses some type of hash function dealing with self-referential iterations. The special hash function that have the following property: it is possible to take a inverse of such hash, but it takes some time; inversion of a double hash becomes more complicated; its virtually impossible to inverse a triple-hash application. If "hash inversion" and "understanding" are linked in some way, this could lead to something interesting... The hash function in this case works like a lossy compression algorithm.