Arguing with the Gita on Duty, from First Principles

If nothing can be justified all the way down, why get out of bed at all?

I’m not asking that to sound deep. I tried to answer it honestly, and the answer kept sliding away from me. Pull on why does anything matter and every thread bottoms out in a shrug. “…because it just does.” That’s the nihilist’s one move, and for years I thought my job was to out-argue it. I even ended the last post acting like I had, on a clean little line about duty, then shut the door because I was tired, not because I was done.

So I’m opening it again. And the honest version is uglier. The harder I push for solid ground, the faster the floor gives out. A proof. A God. A duty handed down from above. Every one of them goes the moment I put weight on it. This is the story of falling through every floor and finding, at the bottom, the one thing that doesn’t need a proof to hold you up. You act. You own it. You answer for it yourself. That’s duty… but not the kind anyone gets to hand you. Not even Krishna.

Fair warning before I start. I’m not a philosopher. I’m a systems guy who reasons, experiments, and changes his mind, so take all of this as me thinking out loud, not handing answers down. Which turns out to be the whole point, because by the end I’ve decided I don’t get to hand answers down to anyone but myself.

Start with nihilism

Let’s just ask the obvious thing. What is the meaning of life? …There is none?

That, basically, is what a nihilist says. And his one move is a good one: show me the reason. Why does anything matter? Because of X. Why does X matter? Because of Y. Keep pulling on that thread and eventually you hit “…because it just does,” which isn’t a reason, it’s a shrug. Every value you hold, pushed far enough, ends in something you can’t actually justify. So, the nihilist says, nothing is really justified. Nothing matters. Pack it up.

For years I thought the answer was to argue harder. Find the missing reason. Patch the hole. To be honest, that instinct is exactly what got humbled.

The limits

Here’s the thing that broke my confidence, and I have to be careful, because this is the spot where people say embarrassing things about mathematics.

The dream was always that something could be complete and self-contained. That you could build a system (of logic, of right and wrong, of a country, of a self) that holds together with no gaps and proves all its own truths from the inside. Mathematics was the best candidate. The cleanest, most careful thing we’ve ever built. If anything could finish its own proof, surely it was arithmetic.

It can’t.

There’s a short list of results that make this precise, and I want to actually walk through them instead of name-dropping them and moving on. Five people, five different fields, each one went hunting for a system that could close itself off and certify its own answers. Each one hit a wall. The walls are real theorems with real fine print, so I’ll try to state them honestly and then point at the shape they share. If I get the fine print wrong here, I become exactly the guy this section is about to warn you about.

Gödel: you can’t prove all your own truths from the inside

Start with the big one. Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem says: take any formal system that is consistent (it never proves a flat contradiction), mechanical (its rules and axioms are fixed and checkable), and strong enough to do basic arithmetic. Any such system has a true statement it cannot prove.1 Not a vague one. A specific, ordinary claim about numbers that happens to be true, and that the system can neither prove nor disprove from the inside.

How do you even show something like that? The trick is self-reference made rigorous. Gödel found a way to number every statement and every proof, so that sentences about proofs turn into sentences about numbers. Once a system can talk about its own proofs in its own language, you can build a sentence that points back at itself and says: “this sentence has no proof in this system.” Call it G. Now corner it. Suppose the system proves G. To prove G is to produce a proof of G… but G is the sentence “there is no proof of G.” So now the system is holding a proof of the exact thing that says no proof exists. It’s asserting both. A system that never contradicts itself can’t do that, so it can’t prove G. And G said it couldn’t. So G is true, and out of reach.

   a system that's consistent, mechanical, and does arithmetic
        │
        ▼   build one self-referring sentence
   G = "this sentence has no proof inside this system"
        │
        ├── if it PROVES G ... it's now holding a proof of the very
        │     thing that says "no proof exists" → it asserts both
        │     → contradiction, and we said it never does that
        │
        └── so it CAN'T prove G ... which is exactly what G claims
              → G is true, and the system can't reach it

   bolt G on as a brand-new axiom → bigger system → a fresh G′ appears
   the gap doesn't close. it just moves.

And you can’t patch it. Add G as a new axiom and the bigger system is still consistent, mechanical, and arithmetical, so it grows its own new G. The hole isn’t a bug you fix once. It’s structural. There’s a second Gödel theorem that twists the knife: a system like this also can’t prove its own consistency from the inside.1 It can’t certify, using only itself, that it will never contradict itself. Hold onto that one. It comes back later.

Two things this does not say, because this is exactly where people humiliate themselves. It does not say math is broken. It says the opposite: if a system is consistent, then it’s incomplete. Incompleteness is the tax you pay for not contradicting yourself. And it does not say G is unprovable everywhere… a bigger system proves it fine. Nothing is cosmically unprovable. Unprovability is always relative to one particular system.2

Tarski: it can’t even define what “true” means in here

Gödel says the system can’t prove all its truths. Tarski went one worse: a system rich enough to do arithmetic can’t even define its own idea of truth.3 There’s no formula inside the language that correctly picks out exactly the true sentences. The system can describe what it can prove, but it cannot, from the inside, say what’s true.

Same engine, nastier payload. Suppose the language did own a perfect truth-test, some formula True(x) that’s right about every sentence. Use the same self-reference trick to build a sentence L that says “L is not true.” Now ask whether L is true. If your truth-test works, “L is true” holds exactly when L holds. But L itself says it is not true. So L is true exactly when L is not true. That’s the liar paradox, rebuilt as an honest formula, and a real system can’t house a live contradiction. So the thing that broke was the assumption: there was never a truth predicate inside the language to begin with.

   suppose the language owns a perfect truth-test:  True(x)
        │
        ▼   self-reference: build a sentence that points at itself
   L = "L is not true"
        │
        ▼   ask the test about L
   True(L)  ↔  L              (the test is supposed to be right)
   True(L)  ↔  not True(L)    (because L says it isn't true)
        │
        ▼
   true exactly when not true  →  contradiction
   →  there was never a truth-test inside the language

   the deep split:
   "is there a PROOF?"    → searchable, checkable → CAN live inside
   "is it actually TRUE?" → outruns every check   → CANNOT

Here’s the part I find genuinely beautiful, and it’s the cleanest line you can draw between Gödel and Tarski. Provability is something a system can define for itself, because “there exists a proof” is a thing you can search for and check step by step. Truth is not. Truth outruns every check the system can run on itself. So a system can hold a faithful map of what it can prove, but never a faithful map of what’s true. To define truth for a language, you have to climb out of it into a bigger one… and that bigger language can’t define its own truth either. Turtles, all the way up.

And again, the boundary. This is about formal languages and arithmetic. It does not say truth is fake, or relative, or a matter of vibes. It says truth can’t be pinned down by a system using only itself. From a wider vantage point it’s perfectly well-defined. Hold that thought too, because it’s the whole hinge of where I end up.

Turing: you can’t always know how it ends

Now leave logic and step into computation, which is closer to my actual day job. Turing’s halting problem: there is no general algorithm that can look at any program and any input and tell you, correctly and every single time, whether it will eventually stop or run forever.4

Be careful what that means. Any particular program either halts or it doesn’t. That fact is fixed, and for tons of programs it’s easy to settle. What’s impossible is one method that works for all of them, always halting with the right answer. And the proof is the same self-reference move in a hoodie. Suppose you had a perfect halt-detector H: feed it a program and an input, it always halts and always tells the truth. Then I can build a troll program D out of it. D takes a program, asks H what that program would do when fed its own code, and then does the opposite: if H says “halts,” D loops forever; if H says “loops,” D halts. Now feed D its own code. If D halts, it’s because H said it would loop, so H was wrong. If D loops, it’s because H said it would halt, so H was wrong. The all-knowing oracle blows the one case built to trip it. D is a perfectly legal program, so the thing that can’t exist is H.

   suppose a perfect halt-detector H(P, x): always halts, always
   right, tells you whether program P stops on input x.

   build a troll D(P):  run H(P, P), then DO THE OPPOSITE
        ├── H says "halts" → D loops forever
        └── H says "loops" → D halts now

   feed D its own code → D(D):
        ├── if D(D) halts → H must have said "loops" → H is WRONG
        └── if D(D) loops → H must have said "halts" → H is WRONG

   the troll is a fine program. the lie was the oracle.
   so no perfect, always-right H can exist.

This is the future-shaped one, and to be honest it’s the one I feel in my gut. You’re a process running inside the very story whose ending you’re trying to predict. And the second your next move depends on the prediction, you can spite it: tell me for certain this path ends in ruin and I’ll swerve, which makes the prediction wrong. That self-defeating loop is the everyday rhyme of feeding D its own code.

Rice: …and it’s not just halting

You might hope halting is a freak special case. One annoying question we happen to be locked out of. Rice’s theorem kills that hope. It says basically every interesting question about what a program does is undecidable, all at once.5

Two words carry the whole theorem, and dropping either is how people overstate it. The property has to be semantic (about the program’s actual behavior, the function it computes, not how the code is written) and non-trivial (some programs have it, some don’t). Any property of that kind… “does it ever output 0,” “does it compute the squaring function,” “does it loop on every input”… has no general decider. It has to be about behavior: “is the source under 100 lines” or “does it stop within 50 steps” are about the text or a bounded run, and those are perfectly decidable. Rice only bites on what the program means, never on what it looks like.

The reason is a clean reduction back to Turing. Suppose you had an oracle for some behavior, say “does P compute squares?” Hand it any program A and input i. I glue together a new program T: first run A on i, throw the result away, then behave like a known squares program. Watch T’s behavior. If A halts on i, T falls through and computes squares, so it has the property. If A loops on i, T gets stuck on that first step and computes nothing at all, so it doesn’t. So your behavior-oracle, asked about T, just told me whether A halts on i. And we already know nothing can do that. So the behavior-oracle never existed.

   want: an oracle that decides one behavior of any program,
         say "does P compute squares?"

   to test "does A halt on i?", glue together program T:
        ├── first run A on i      (finishes ONLY if A halts on i)
        └── then behave like B    (B = a known squares program)

   A halts on i → T falls through → T computes squares → HAS it
   A loops on i → T stuck forever → T computes nothing  → LACKS it

   so the behavior-oracle, asked about T, just decided halting.
   nothing can decide halting → the behavior-oracle can't exist.

That’s why this one feels almost rude. Halting was one unanswerable question. Rice says the entire category of questions about what a system eventually does is closed to any general method. Halting was just the first domino.

The honest fence, same as the rest: this is about programs, a precise formal object. It does not say a person is unpredictable, or the future is mystical, or planning is pointless. You can still run things forward and watch. You can still prove specific cases. What you can’t buy is the universal oracle that reads the setup and hands you the ending.

Arrow: now do it with a whole country

Everything so far was one system alone in a room: my reasoning, my language, one running process. Kenneth Arrow asked the social version. Forget proving yourself… can a group even blend its members’ honest preferences into one fair group choice? He found a wall there too, in pure economics, no logic paradoxes required.6

Arrow’s impossibility theorem: once there are three or more options on the table, there is no rule for turning everyone’s rank-ordered preferences into a single group ranking while satisfying four pretty mild fairness conditions at the same time. The conditions are almost insultingly reasonable. Accept whatever preferences people actually have (don’t ban anyone’s ranking). If everyone prefers A to B, the group prefers A to B. The group’s A-vs-B verdict depends only on how people rank A vs B, not on where some unrelated option C sits. And nobody is a dictator whose personal ranking just becomes the group’s while everyone else is ignored. Arrow proved those four can’t all hold at once. The only rule that keeps the first three is a dictatorship. The fourth always has to break.

The seed of why is the Condorcet paradox, and it’s worth seeing with your own eyes.7 Three voters, three options, every voter perfectly sensible:

   three honest voters, each one internally consistent:
        Voter 1:  A > B > C
        Voter 2:  B > C > A
        Voter 3:  C > A > B

   take the majority on each pair (2 out of 3):
        A vs B → A wins (voters 1,3)
        B vs C → B wins (voters 1,2)
        C vs A → C wins (voters 2,3)

   so the group "prefers":   A → B → C → A    ... a loop, not a ranking

   that's just ONE rule (majority) tripping.
   Arrow's the general trap:
        "if everyone agrees, the group agrees"   (Pareto)
             │  + "the A-vs-B call ignores C"     (independence)
             │  + "the group ranking can't loop"  (transitivity)
             ▼
        that decisive power has to spread to every pair, then shrink...
        ...down onto ONE person who always gets their way.
        the only rule left standing is a DICTATOR.

Every voter is coherent. The group is a circle: A beats B beats C beats A. That’s just majority rule failing. Arrow’s real result is bigger and meaner: every rule that meets those fairness conditions collapses into one person deciding, majority rule included. The standard proof literally shows the “decisive” power getting forced to concentrate, pair by pair, down onto a single pivotal voter. So don’t confuse the two. The Condorcet cycle is one rule tripping. Arrow is the trap that catches all of them.

The fences here matter a lot, because “Arrow disproved democracy” is a popular and badly wrong thing to say. It does not say democracy is impossible or every election is rigged. The “dictator” is a logical consequence of demanding all four conditions, not a description of any actual government. It’s specifically about blending ordinal rankings… methods that use intensity (score voting, approval, anything where you rate instead of just rank) step outside Arrow’s frame and dodge it, which Arrow himself granted. What it does kill is one specific fantasy: that somewhere out there sits a perfectly neutral formula that fuses a billion honest preferences into the single fair “will of the people,” if only we were clever enough to find it. Above three choices, that formula provably isn’t there. Somebody, somewhere, always has to give something up.

Different fields, different problems. But the pattern rhymes:

   ①  my MIND / reasoning   →  want: prove every truth   →  limit: GÖDEL
   ②  my BELIEFS / values   →  want: justify myself       →  limit: TARSKI
   ③  my SOCIETY / India    →  want: one fair answer       →  limit: ARROW
   ④  the FUTURE            →  want: know how it ends      →  limit: TURING / RICE

I want to fence this off hard, because turning Gödel into cosmic poetry is a famous embarrassment. There’s literally a whole book about people doing exactly that.2 My life is not a formal system. A marriage isn’t a Turing machine. People aren’t theorems. I am not claiming these theorems apply to my life like a proof.

What I’m claiming is smaller, and I think it’s fair. The urge to “make sense” of your life is the urge to turn it into a system: something that closes, something that proves out. And every time that urge builds something tight enough to ask is this complete? can it justify itself? can it be fair to everyone?, it runs into a limit. Even in mathematics, the friendliest case there is. So when I demand that my life prove itself all the way down, I’m not being rigorous. I’m asking for the one thing the most rigorous discipline we have already showed you can’t get.

Nihilism fails its own test

So nihilism wins, right? Even arithmetic has a gap in it, nothing justifies itself, the void is mathematically certified?

This is the part I missed for an embarrassingly long time.

Those limits don’t single out meaning. They apply to everything: to mathematics, to logic, to prediction, and (here’s the turn) to nihilism itself. “Nothing can be justified” is a claim too. Ask it to justify itself, and it runs out of reasons exactly like everything else does. Nihilism fails its own test. The argument that’s supposed to demolish meaning demolishes itself in the same breath.

So the limits don’t hand meaning a defeat. They do something stranger and more useful: they make “no final proof” the normal condition of everything. Once nothing proves itself all the way down (not the believer’s universe, not the nihilist’s void, not the theorem on the page), then “it can’t be justified all the way down” stops being an accusation against anything in particular. The nihilist’s whole punch came from treating meaning’s missing proof as some special scandal. It was never special. Nobody has it.

And notice what actually fell over in all this: not just meaning, but certainty in both directions. The believer who’s sure everything matters, and the nihilist who’s sure nothing does. Both of them claim to have seen the whole picture. There is no whole picture to see. You don’t get to be a confident anything.

What’s left when both certainties go? The only thing that doesn’t need a proof to happen: actually doing something. You act. Not because you proved it matters, and not because you proved it doesn’t, but because acting is the one move available to someone who can’t get either proof. That’s not a triumphant conclusion. It’s more like the only thing still left on the table.

Where that duty line comes from

For years I carried around a line from The Wheel of Time: “Duty is heavier than a mountain, death lighter than a feather.” Lan Mandragoran’s whole grim dignity is in it, and I ate it up.

Then I went looking for where it came from, and it got dark.

   Sima Qian (~91 BCE)
      "the difference is what you use your death for"
      → he chose disgrace and life, to FINISH HIS WORK
            │
            ▼   the words get borrowed... and flipped
   Meiji army oath (1882): "stop thinking. obey. die when told."
            │
            ▼
   kamikaze + Mao's "Serve the People" (1944): die for the cause
            │
            ▼
   Robert Jordan → Lan → me

The line isn’t Jordan’s. He borrowed it. It runs back through Mao’s “Serve the People,” which used the exact image to mean die for the people,8 and through an 1882 oath that Japanese soldiers were made to memorize, which used it to mean your one duty is to obey and die when you’re told to.9 A sentence built, quite literally, to make a young man stop thinking and walk into his death.

But keep going all the way back, and it flips completely. The original is Sima Qian, a Han historian who was sentenced and offered the “honorable” way out: suicide. He refused it. He chose mutilation and disgrace and life, so he could finish the history he was writing. His point with the mountain-and-feather line was the opposite of the army’s. A death spent now would be light as a feather, pointless, so his real duty was to live through the humiliation and make his life weigh something.10

So the same sentence that armies used to switch off a man’s thinking was coined by a man who used his thinking to refuse the death everyone expected of him. That stopped me cold. Because it means the word “duty” has done both jobs. It’s named the thing you reason your way to, and the thing that gets installed in you so you’ll quit asking questions.

Which forced a question I’d been dodging. When I feel “duty,” which one is it? Something I worked out and chose, or something planted in me so I’d stop looking?

Cross-questioning myself

Here’s where I have to show the actual back-and-forth, because I didn’t reason this in a straight line. I kept answering, then turning around and attacking my own answer.

First answer: there are two kinds of duty. The chosen kind (Sima Qian) and the installed kind (the army oath), and the trick is to tell them apart.

But that’s too tidy. What even makes the chosen one “real,” if nobody’s commanding it? If it’s just me picking it, isn’t that the same as “whatever I feel like today”?

Second answer: the weight comes from how well you carry it. Not from a commander, not from the bare act of choosing. From the doing. A duty you’d drop the second it hurt was never a duty.

But be careful. “Do it well” can’t be the whole test, because the kamikaze pilot did his duty extremely well. So it can’t just be skill. It has to be: chosen, and owned, and carried well. And “well” has to mean the quality of the doing, not the result. The moment you let the outcome grade you, you’ve handed your life back to luck.

Third turn, and this one surprised me. I’d been splitting duty into “chosen” versus “installed.” But that split is wrong. There is no installed duty. Everything is chosen. The soldier who obeys chose to obey. Even doing nothing is a choice. “I had no choice” is, almost always, a thing we say so we don’t have to own the choice we actually made.

So if everything is chosen, then “chosen” can’t be the thing that separates duty from obedience. They’re both chosen. The real line moves somewhere else:

   everything is chosen
        ├── DUTY      = chosen AND owned      ("this is mine. I did it.")
        └── OBEDIENCE = chosen AND disowned   ("I had to. orders. no choice.")

The difference isn’t choice versus no-choice. It’s owning the choice versus hiding from it. And that’s exactly what that army oath was for: not to give men a duty, but to dress a choice up as fate, so they wouldn’t have to own it. (Someone pointed out to me that a philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, makes a related objection properly: a life spent only sorting and owning, with no room for the things you can’t control, like love and grief and loyalty, is a hollow one.11 I think that’s right, and I don’t want to lose it. Owning your choices is a tool, not a personality.)

Where I agree with the Gita, and where I don’t

I should say where a lot of this is coming from. I’m Indian, I grew up around the Gita, and it’s the one piece of philosophy in this whole post that I’ve actually read, rather than had described to me secondhand. So let me put my own thoughts next to it honestly.

On the how, the Gita already said most of this, and said it better. Krishna’s whole pitch to Arjuna (who’s frozen on the battlefield, basically having the nihilist’s breakdown: why do any of this, every outcome is grief) is karma yoga. Do the thing in front of you, do it as well as you can, and let go of the fruits.12 “Skill in action,” he calls it.13 That is nearly word-for-word the thing I crawled toward on my own: the weight is in the doing, not the outcome. So when I say release the result and judge yourself by how you acted, I’m not being original. A two-thousand-year-old text got there first. I read it a few years back and kept arguing with it the whole way through, though I never really sat down and formalized why. A lot of it just felt heavy-handed.

But here’s where I get off the bus.

The Gita doesn’t leave duty up to you. Arjuna’s duty isn’t something he reasons out and picks. It’s svadharma, the duty of his nature and his station, and standing behind it is Krishna, who is literally God, telling him this is what he’s for. The detachment is beautiful. The source of the duty is the part I can’t swallow. Because “do your duty because it’s the role the cosmos handed you” is, if I’m honest, uncomfortably close to the very thing I got suspicious of a few paragraphs ago: duty installed from above so you’ll stop asking. Swap “the cosmos” for “the Emperor,” and you’re standing right back at that memorized army oath.

So I keep the practice and drop the backing. Act without clinging to the result? Yes, completely, that part I’ll take for life. But not because a god or my birth handed me a script. Because I looked at the thing, and chose it, and I’ll answer for the choosing. The Gita treats the duty as given and the detachment as the hard part. I’d flip it: the detachment I’ll take gladly… it’s the “given” I don’t buy.

Maybe I’m misreading Krishna. I’m a layman, not a scholar, and people far smarter than me have spent whole lives inside those eighteen chapters. But that’s honestly where a careful read leaves me. The Gita is the best manual I know for how to act, and I quietly refuse its answer for why.

Is a duty right, or just chosen?

Fine. Everything is chosen, and duty is the chosen thing you own and carry well. But I still hadn’t answered the question underneath all of it:

Is a duty right because it’s actually right? Or is it right just because I chose it?

If it’s right on its own, out there, then a good person recognizes it and picks it up. If there’s nothing out there, then choosing it is what makes it right. Both options hurt. If there’s a real “out there” right, where does it live? Everything that could establish it ran into a limit. But if choosing makes it right, then how is the tyrant not right by his own choosing? How is anything wrong?

Here’s where I landed, and I’m genuinely unsure, so hold it loosely.

I don’t think there’s a universal right. I think we decide our own truth. We choose our path, and sometimes that path runs flat against the world, because we’ve decided it’s right for us. Even the dharma the Gita treats as cosmic, I suspect, is mostly upbringing and environment wearing a bigger costume. If the “universal good” were actually universal, it wouldn’t shift so neatly with where you happened to be born.

But doesn’t that collapse into “anything goes”? For a while I patched it with: reality judges. You don’t get to certify yourself; you act, the world reacts, and that reaction settles it. That felt safe. It put a referee outside me.

Then I poked it, and it fell over. Because, be honest, what is “reality judging” me, really? It only seems like the world is judging. In honesty, it’s my own perspective doing the judging. We give other people that power; they don’t hold it by right. If going to jail is a bad outcome, it’s bad because I decide it’s bad. The world just supplies the cell. The “this is bad” is a sentence I write.

   the WORLD  →  the fact      (I'm in a cell)        ← the world owns this
       me     →  the verdict   ("this is bad")        ← I own this

This is basically Stoicism, which I only found out after the fact. It’s the one strand of this I’ve actually read a little of. Epictetus opens his handbook by splitting the world into what’s yours (your judgments, your choices) and what isn’t (everything else), and saying we’re rattled not by things but by the opinions we form about them.14 I argued my way there and then learned the Stoics had it two thousand years ago. Ah well. That’s usually how it goes.

The price

So I’m the judge. That feels powerful right up until the bill arrives.

If I’m the only judge of my own life, then I’ve given up the right to make anyone else wrong. The kamikaze decided his death was glorious. The tyrant decides his conquest is good. And all I can say back is “by my judgment, not yours,” and they say the exact same thing back to me. There’s no neutral referee I can appeal to over their heads, because I just admitted the referee was always me.

The cost of being impossible to conquer is that you don’t get to conquer anyone else’s verdict either. You only get to be free.

That one took me a while to swallow, and I’m honestly not sure it isn’t a cop-out. But here’s what keeps it from being a shrug: can’t make them wrong is not can’t fight them. I can still judge a tyrant evil with everything I am, and resist him with everything I’ve got. I just don’t get to wait for the universe to sign off on me first. People resist without permission all the time. They just stand, and the standing is the verdict. Refusing to need to be proven right isn’t refusing to act. If anything it’s the only kind of resistance nobody can take from you, because they can take the outcome but never the way you carried yourself through it.

Which is, I notice, exactly where the last post ended too. Control the doing. Release the outcome. I just didn’t understand, last time, why. Now I think it’s because the outcome was never mine to be graded on, and the verdict was always mine to give.

Where this leaves me

Years ago I’d have called all of this bleak. There’s a line people quote at me, from Camus (a French writer I’ll admit I haven’t actually read), about a man condemned to roll a rock uphill forever, only for it to roll back down every time, and how you’re supposed to imagine him happy anyway.15 I can’t vouch for the book. But the part that stuck with me, secondhand, is that the honest reply to a universe that won’t explain itself isn’t giving up and isn’t pretending. It’s just to keep pushing the rock. I’m not sure about the happy part. I buy the pushing.

Here’s the shape I ended up with, and I want to be clear it’s a shape I’m trying on, not one I’m sure of:

   everything is chosen
        ↓     (even obedience; "I had no choice" is usually a lie)
   nothing proves itself all the way down, and neither does the void
        ↓     (so "no final proof" is the normal condition, not a verdict on meaning)
   so I decide my own truth, and I own it
        ↓     (the world owns the facts; I own the verdict)
   the price: I can't make anyone else wrong, only free
        ↓     (but free to resist without waiting to be proven right)
   so: act, own it, judge yourself by the doing, release the rest.

There’s something funny about where this lands. The whole search ran outward (mind, beliefs, society, the future), looking for something solid out there, and running into a limit every single time. And the only thing it found to stand on was all the way back inside: the one judge left is the same self that the whole uncertain mess produced, turning around to judge it. The thing being judged and the judge are the same thing. I’m not even sure that’s allowed, logically. But it might be the most honest place a person actually stands.

So no, I haven’t solved anything. To be honest I’m less certain than when I started, not more, which the engineer in me hates and the rest of me is slowly making peace with. I’m reasoning and experimenting my way through something that doesn’t have a proof, and pretending otherwise would just be one more system trying to close itself.

But the next step is always there anyway, asking to be taken. So I’ll take it, own it, and try to do it well. That part, at least, is mine.

Footnotes

  1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/ ↩ ↩2

  2. Torkel Franzén, Gödel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse (A K Peters, 2005). https://philpapers.org/rec/FRAGTA ↩ ↩2

  3. “Tarski’s undefinability theorem,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem ↩

  4. “Halting problem,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem ↩

  5. “Rice’s theorem,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem ↩

  6. “Arrow’s impossibility theorem,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem ↩

  7. “Condorcet paradox,” Wikipedia (cyclic majorities: every voter is internally consistent, yet the group’s pairwise-majority preference runs in a loop). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox ↩

  8. Mao Zedong, “Serve the People” (1944), which quotes Sima Qian’s mountain-and-feather line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serve_the_People ↩

  9. “Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors” (1882), which Japanese military personnel were required to memorize until 1945. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Rescript_to_Soldiers_and_Sailors ↩

  10. Sima Qian, “Letter to Ren An” (c. 91 BCE), primary source via Columbia University’s Asia for Educators. https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/cup/sima_qian_letter.pdf ↩

  11. Martha Nussbaum on neo-Stoicism: emotions are judgments that attach worth to things outside our control, and pure detachment is impoverishing. https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2012/11/an-interview-with-martha-nussbaum-on-neo-stoicism/ ↩

  12. Bhagavad Gita 2.47 (“your right is to action alone, never to its fruits”). https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/2/verse/47/ ↩

  13. Bhagavad Gita 2.50 (“yoga is skill in action,” yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam). https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/2/verse/50/ ↩

  14. Epictetus, Enchiridion: what is and isn’t “in our control,” and “men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.” https://www.colorado.edu/herbst/sites/default/files/attached-files/the_enchiridion_epictetus.pdf ↩

  15. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942): the absurd, revolt, and “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus ↩