Gödel’s work I take it will never suffer the fate of Freud’s. The bones of it bleaching on the ground or whatever.

My railings against the platonists are a thing of the past. Assuming at last that one could, what would be the advantage of ignoring the transcendent nature of mathematical truths. There is nothing else that all men are compelled to agree upon, and when the last light in the last eye fades to black and takes all speculation with it forever I think it could even be that these truths will glow for just a moment in the final light. Before the dark and the cold claim everything.

Did you want to take a break?

I guess. If you like.

Did you want a cigarette?

No. I’m all right.

It’s not understood, is it? What mathematics is.

No.

Will it ever be?

No.

Your friend Gödel was really a hard line platonist.

Yes. He thought that mathematical objects had the same reality as trees and stones.

That seems an odd view.

It is an odd view. I suppose other mathematicians tend to take Gödel’s views at face value, but those views could reflect a skepticism concerning reality itself. As for myself I’ve never seen a six. I dont know what could possibly constitute a mathematical object. In my experience everything mathematical is in the form of a directive. The numerical concept of six is totally inert. Gödel wasnt always a platonist, but he’s not the first scientist to accept an implausible theory simply because it explained the facts. After the 1931 papers it was clear to him that we are capable of mathematical insights that a Universal Truth Machine is not. But why Gödel could see no problem with the notion of mathematical abstractions as factual entities I couldnt tell you. Platonists seem more or less silent as to the origin of mathematics and remarkably unconcerned as to what might be the purpose of computation in an uninhabited universe. I think spookthink is a lot more common among mathematicians than is generally supposed. In the end Gödel became something akin to a Deist. Not that he pursued any sort of spiritual practice. It’s a tradition that runs from Pythagoras to Newton to Cantor. Who after all attributed a supernatural origin to the transfinites. Aleph Zero. Aleph One. It couldnt have helped his cause. His notions of relative infinities had to await the death of an entire generation of German mathematicians before these notions could even get a hearing. Is the Universe intelligent? Isnt that what’s at stake? My brother used to say not very. Perhaps sufficient unto the day. Gödel never says outright that there is a covenant to which all of mathematics subscribes but you get a clear sense that the hope is there. I know the allure. Some shimmering palimpsest of eternal abidement. But to claim that numbers somehow exist in the Universe with no intelligence to enable them does not require a different sort of mathematics. It requires a different sort of universe.