The “zombie” argument does what it is supposed to do: Shows that consciousness, the motivating force in our lives, is not really a material thing.
Tag: Gregory Chaitin
At Mind Matters News: Randomness is not a scientific explanation
Eric Holloway: … randomness is unprovable, which was proven by three different computer scientists: Ray Solomonoff, Andrey Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin. The only thing we can know is that something is not random. Hence, we can never know that something originated from randomness.
Gregory Chaitin: Why “impractical” things like philosophy are actually quite useful
Chaitin reflects on the fact that if he had to do practical work 60 years ago, there wouldn’t be practical research today based on the Omega number. But that raises a question: If materialism were true, why does theoretical stuff matter so much?
Gregory Chaitin asks, if the universe is information, not matter, does that help explain consciousness?
Chaitin: The normal view if you dabble in metaphysics is that the universe is made from mathematics. That’s a Pythagorean idea, that God is a mathematician. And I prefer to say God is a … a computer programmer or a programmer.
Gregory Chaitin on why human creativity is not computable
Creativity is what we don’t know. Once it is reduced to a formula a computer can use, it is not creative any more, by definition.
Math paradoxes show us that the world we live in is not and cannot be purely naturalist
Robert J. Marks sometimes uses the paradox of the smallest “uninteresting” number to illustrate proof by contradiction — that is, by creating paradoxes
Gregory Chaitin on the dead hand of bureaucracy in science
Chaitin: I have a pessimistic vision which I hope is completely wrong, that the bureaucracies are like a cancer — the ones that control research and funding for research and counting how much you’ve been publishing. I’ve noticed that at universities, for example, the administrative personnel are gradually taking all the best buildings and expanding. So I think that the bureaucracy and the rules and regulations increases to the point that it sinks the society.
At Mind Matters News: Why don’t we see many great books on math any more?
Decades ago, Gregory Chaitin reminds us, mathematicians were not forced by the rules of the academic establishment to keep producing papers, so they could write key books.
Gregory Chaitin’s take on: Was math invented or discovered?
Chaitin, best known for Chaitin’s unknowable number: “Some mathematics, I think, is definitely invented, not discovered. That tends to be trivial mathematics … But other mathematics does seem to be discovered. That’s when you find some really deep, fundamental mathematical idea, and there it really looks inevitable. “
Kurt Gödel was unhappy with atheism and finally he blasted one fashionable type to smithereens
More scandalous still, Gödel was not a Darwinist: “I believe that mechanism in biology is a prejudice of our time which will be disproved.”
Gregory Chaitin (of Chaitin’s number fame) muses on what makes the great mathematicians stand out
Chaitin offers some thoughts on Georg Cantor and Srinivasa Ramanujan as well, both of whom thought that their math discoveries were divinely inspired.