Published February 10, 2026 | Version 1.0
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Incompleteness, Undecidability, and Normativity: A Case for a Logos

  • 1. ROR icon Moorpark College

Description

This paper argues that any consistent, effectively axiomatized formal Theory of Everything (TOE) that decides all physical facts about physically realizable finite computation cannot be syntactically complete, by Gödel incompleteness and Turing style undecidability. This is a limit on formal provability or predictability within a TOE, not a claim that reality itself is incomplete, and it does not imply that human minds outrun computation. The second part argues that “truth,” “validity,” and “correctness” are normative notions, and that purely descriptive causal accounts do not by themselves yield objective normativity without an additional bridge principle. On an abductive reading, if objective normativity is not fully reducible to descriptive causal facts, then positing a nonphysical ground, one candidate being a Logos not dependent for its existence on anything else, is reasonable.

 

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Incompleteness, Undecidability, and Normativity_ A Case for a Logos Andrew Zhang.pdf

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Dates

Submitted
2026-02-10

References

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