Adventure
Men of adventure
Conquering the world
Conquering the world
The world of adventure
The world of adventure
The world of adventure
Our journey begins in a world of adventure… – Tom Waits

For me, writing is a form of address. Without a name in the upper left of a tablet, I find it virtually impossible to communicate. To facilitate my contribution, this thread is addressed to those may who find analogy in my own experience of theory building, a process that I have been engaged in for over a decade.

Logic as tool, not master.
Would I worship a hammer?

But first, the Lego analogy.
A mathematical theory in its presentation is as being given a small number of immutable exclusive Lego blocks. These are called axioms. These axioms are given rigour by definitions. Then you build. This building is evoked by driving propositions and postulates at your system. With your blocks, you build theorems, lemmas and proofs to process your propositions and postulates.
Euclid’s Elements is pretty much the template in this regard. To see how this was assimilated into general philosophical practice, take a look at any chapter of any one of Euclid’s thirteen books, then look at any chapter of Spinoza’s “Ethics” and you will see the thread of European theory building thats has persisted for nearly two dozen hundreds of years, bound by tradition, hallowed by usage…
However.

1881
Something entered the western consciousness. Not so much a decree, but a veto. The Michelson Morley experiment is something I will write about at greater length at a later date but the essence of this event is this; this experiment conceived to put the capstone on the Babel project Newton and Descartes. (As a matter of interest, Newton was not entirely happy with his mathematical structures concerning The Calculus – a concern not harboured by the proponents of his tools.)
However.

The experiment (fiest carried out in 1881 with results published in 1887) was designed to verify Newton’s theory of light, but it failed to do so. The marble model of Greek spheres and cones jumped to one of tissue in the rain. The impact on the construct of objective, absolute truth was cataclysmic. All bets were off. Release the bats.
It was not builders that were required anymore, but weavers. And weavers duly arose.

To my mind, the weavers are three with three new tools. *Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) *Kurt Gödel (1906 – 1978) *Georg Cantor (1845 -1918)
Einstein showed us how to fix a model when it breaks.
Gödel demonstrated absolutely the limits of logic.
And Cantor gave us the tools to handle the undenumerable infinities once these limits have breached.
In the context of this thread I will address Gödel in the specific context of modern theory building, as it is enshrined in essence in every fiber of my work.

The wobble……

Gödel proved (in 1931) absolutely that no matter sophisticated your logic machine, no matter how universal in scope, that there will always exist a proposition that will choke it. It will be “incomplete”…

What is an Axiom? My Shorter Oxford Dictionary declares, amongst other things, that an axiom is an “self-evident truth”… but what is truth???? This an inherent wobble right at the heart of the language tools that we are fabricating our blocks. But that’s OK. Gödel tells us that our system will be incomplete anyway, so lets not break our hearts trying to make it any other way… More to the point, is it not better that are axioms are built to be flexible? Incorporate incompleteness at the beginning. In fact, it makes sense to do so, as if it’s not, incompleteness will destroy it later and a complete rebuilding – the form of a paradigm shift – will be required, this new structure only to be destroyed at another point in time and space by some other lurking, skulking bohemiath.
So bring it on!!!!!!!! Make those axioms as funky as you like as it is not logic but consistency that is key….

Now what I have laid before you is the argument. It is the space that exists for analogy. Where analogy can be, can breathe. It can breath anywhere and everywhere in a theory, as because where logic cannot go, all we have in analogy. It’s all a story, this life, this universe, as much my story as it is yours.