It’s very counter intuitive. As the other commenter suggested I was referring to Gödel and his incompleteness theorem.
Actually if the system you made up doesn’t work it would be possible to prove that it does inside that system as you can prove anything inside a system that doesn’t work.
That is why my comment is not entirely accurate it should actually be: Until you prove that if the system works you can’t prove that the system works.
Can you spot the difference in the logic here?
Nobody is practically concerned with the “incompleteness” aspect of Gödel’s theorems. The unprovable statements are so pathological/contrived that it doesn’t appear to suggest any practical statement might be unprovable. Consistency is obviously more important. Sufficiently weak systems may also not be limited by the incompleteness theorems, i.e. they can be proved both complete and consistent.
Oh, what if the Riemann hypothesis is such a statement then? Or any other mathematical statement. We may not have any use for them now, but as with all things math, they are sometimes useful somewhere unexpected.
It’s extremely unlikely given the pathological nature of all known unprovable statements. And those are useless, even to mathematicians.
I think the statement “this system is consistent” is a practical statement that is unprovable in a sufficiently powerful consistent system.
Can you help me understand the tone of your text? To me it sounds kinda hostile as if what you said is some kind of gotcha.
