Unmaking Sense

Episode 6.07: Linking the desire for simplification to Chaitin’s Omega number and its properties.

Our love of simplification has a lot to do with our desire for certainty and with the ability to predict the future, but what if the future isn’t predictable and the consequences of any action are simply unknowable? What then?

Episode 6.06: The Leibniz Project; that an explanation must be simpler than what is explained.

Our human love for simplification, for explanation, for things that try to reduce complex matters to simple matters is a natural extension of the limitations of our intelligence. Where does the notion that we can understand the universe come from? Why do we suppose that knowledge that is less than perfect is thereby somehow worthless? Or that our difficulties in understanding are defects in our personalities?

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.