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What happens if our mathematical system is proven to be inconsistent? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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From my "watched a YouTube video" understanding of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, a consistent mathematical system cannot prove its own consistency, and any seemingly consistent system could always have a fatal contradiction that invalidates the whole system, and the only way to know would be to find the contradiction.

So if at some point our current system of math gets proven inconsistent, what happens next? Can we tweak just the inconsistent part and have everything else still be valid or would we be forced to rebuild all of math from basic logic?

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[–] 2 points 9 months ago

It would be hugely impactful to the high levels of academic math, but I don’t think we’d see any meaningful effects elsewhere. Consistent or not, math works—it performs perfectly for finance, engineering, statistical analysis, and a finite but practically uncountable number of other things. Some abstruse inconsistency won’t suddenly break all that, and if it were discovered we would just keep on using the same “broken” math because it does the job.

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