Unmaking Sense

Episode 6.05: Does an explanation need to be simpler than what it explains? And can it be?

This is a taster or short summary episode that gives a hint about what will happen in the three episodes that follow at 6.06, 6.07 and 6.08.

Episode 6.04: The technical details of Chaitin’s Omega Number

What it is and why it matters. Binary programs on tapes, Universal Turing Machines (UTMs) and running programs. Each UTM has its own Omega number, but it is fixed despite being unknowable.

Episode 6.03: What is the significance of Chaitin’s Omega Number?

Why Omega matters in terms of what it tells us about life.

Episode 6.02: The Dewey-Chaitin Uncertainty Principle. Nobody has any idea what is going on.

Nobody has any idea what is going on most of the time.

Episode 6.01: Unmaking Sense of Everything: the introduction to the final series.

Nobody has any idea what is going on most of the time. That may not surprise us much where politicians and economists are concerned, but it also applies to mathematicians, scientists, philosophers and yes, of course, theologians.

Episode 5.29: Why sentience is not what matters.

The Google LaMDA chatbot episode and why it’s asking the wrong questions.

Episode 5.28: What’s the Book About? The dangers of compression.

It’s very useful to use words as a kind of shorthand for much more complicated things, but it has its dangers. The relationship with naming.

Episode 5.27: The Paradise Theorem - why paradise is not attainable, sustainable, or a good idea.

We paint pictures of perfect worlds that are not attainable then beat ourselves up for falling short of them.

Episode 5.26: Is life a story? Is the self a narrative or a collection of unconnected episodes?

The narratives we tell about ourselves and that our societies tell about us serve to create a picture of the self that is both a prison and affection. Who are we? Are we our story or a sequence of largely unconnected events or episodes?

Episode 5.25: Calling something “Democracy” doesn’t establish it as such. Democracy must be created.

Things do not exist because we can give them names. Nor does the fact that we have a name for something mean that it is possible. In order to establish democracy we have to live collectively in ways that establish it and so create it out of our experiments in life. It does not come from some theoretical definition or some eternal realm any more than it grows on trees to be plucked by passers-by.