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Gregory Chaitin

At Mind Matters News: The Philosopher’s Zombie Still Walks and Physics Can’t Explain It

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. Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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? Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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 Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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. " Read More ›

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.” Read More ›

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. Read More ›