Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the halting problem

Ahh, ok, thanks Bytegeist. Unfortunately that thread is similar to the one that I linked to in my OP, in descending into a heated debate…

Anyway, I gather from reading that thread that statements which are neither provable nor disprovable within a system are (usually/always?) due to them implicitly encoding some form of self-reference within them, and that Gödel’s in particular shows that, in the case of any system obeying the axioms of Peano arithmetic, and that they may be very well hidden as apparently simple statements of pure arithmetic.

Ok, this is really interesting. I’m just going out on a limb here (and please excuse my sloppy language), but would it make sense to say that every level of Turing oracle-ness peels away another “layer” of problems from the space of all problems, making them computable, like peeling all layers of some (very transfinite) onion. As you add more and more layers of oracle-ness, you will be able to compute the answers to more and more problems, however, but the set of problems which you cannot solve will approach some steady set?

If that’s the case, then what would this final set of problems that you cannot solve look like? Would they all be very trivial forms of self reference? Basically, would an infinite-order Turing oracle be able to solve anything that wasn’t a “clear” (for some definition of clear) paradox (similar to the problem of asking God to create a rock so heavy that even He could not lift it, to throw in a metaphor)