Unmaking Sense

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

We imagine that when we name things we name something substantial, perhaps even permanent. But if the access that we have consciously to our true selves, our nonconscious selves is only fragmentart through a window of very narrow bandwidth into our nonconscious minds, the names by which we refer to ourselves refer to something that is essentially unknown and unknown able: by you, by me, by everyone.