Dear Reading Diary 3

22.01.13
Undecidable Questions

Another thought of Heinz:
There are two kinds of questions in our world, those which are decidable, and those questions which are undecidable.

Examples for decidable questions are:
Am I sitting in front of my laptop while I write this or am I flying over the moon? Well, I´m in front of my laptop.
Does it snow today in my hometown or do we have a clear sky? Easy, i look out and see: It´s snowing.
What´s the name my parents gave me? ...You get the idea.
Also every mathematical question (or at least most of them as far as I know...) are decidable:
What equals two plus two? Four is the same as two plus two.
Wittgenstein thougt similar and went so far to say: mathematics doesn´t express thougts. Because our thougts usually circle around undecidable questions.And we don´t have right or wrong thougts.

Undecidable means that there is no clearly "right" or "wrong" answer.
Examples:
What do I eat now?
 Do i make myself a tasty toast, or do I make a call to the pizza-service? Or do i eat something different? Or nothing at all? So many options, and noone could tell which decision is THE right one to make.

Coming to think about it, we mostly deal with undecidable questions. We´re so used to them that we don´t even recognize with how many undecidable questions we are confronted every day. We simply choose what appears best in comparison to all alternatives.
Judging from our experience plays a big role in that decision progress, as well as our subconsciousness.

I read of a guy who got a certain brain damage, after which he could just think purely rational anymore.
 The ideal person according to a Ratio-lover like Kant you might wonder?
 Well, this new circumstance this guy had to live with turned out to be a curse.
He wasn´t able to make the simpliest decisions anymore:
He could spend hours pondering about the question which jam to put on his bread. His brain couldn´t give a clear answer if it´s wether right to eat strawberry jam or apricot jam for breakfast.
So we´re making more or less irrational decisions all the time. It´s our daily business. Or else  we wouldn´t survive.

Lately i heard, that a reason for the fat salaries of managers is the circumstance that they have to decide over undecidable questions.
 If questions of higher managment for businesses would be decidable, managers wouldn´t be needed anymore, as all answers would be as clear and decidable as mathematics.
In that way we all are managers.

The conncection to the previous entry: To decide what is ethical is an undecidable question.
Concerning morals we tend more to the decidable questions: Just look into the current catalogue of rules and decide then if your action is right or wrong according to moral laws.
To act ethically is harder. There´s only to ask your conscience what to do.