Life, The Mind, and Everything

📝 Abstract

Incompleteness theorems of Godel, Turing, Chaitin, and Algorithmic Information Theory have profound epistemological implications. Incompleteness limits our ability to ever understand every observable phenomenon in the universe. Incompleteness limits the ability of evolutionary processes from finding optimal solutions. Incompleteness limits the detectability of machine consciousness. This is an effort to convey these thoughts and results in a somewhat entertaining manner.

💡 Analysis

Incompleteness theorems of Godel, Turing, Chaitin, and Algorithmic Information Theory have profound epistemological implications. Incompleteness limits our ability to ever understand every observable phenomenon in the universe. Incompleteness limits the ability of evolutionary processes from finding optimal solutions. Incompleteness limits the detectability of machine consciousness. This is an effort to convey these thoughts and results in a somewhat entertaining manner.

📄 Content

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Life, The Mind, and Everything
The Implications of Incompleteness and Algorithmic Information Theory for Evolution, Consciousness, and Epistemology

Gary R. Prok

President, Ruby Sneakers, Inc.

Abstract Incompleteness theorems of Gödel, Turing, Chaitin, and Algorithmic Information Theory have profound epistemological implications. Incompleteness limits our ability to ever understand every observable phenomenon in the universe. Incompleteness limits the ability of evolutionary processes from finding optimal solutions.
Incompleteness limits the detectability of machine consciousness. This is an effort to convey these thoughts and results in a somewhat entertaining manner.

Keywords: incompleteness, halting, Rice’s theorem, algorithmic information theory, AIT, evolution, consciousness, epistemology

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Life, The Mind, and Everything “You believe what you want to believe.” – Thomas Petty

Prelude This is a collection of things I have been pondering for a long time. I have made every attempt to make this work accurate and unbiased. I have tried to poke my own holes in my thought processes and correct what could be corrected and discard what could not. A few of these thoughts are original, but many were learned from others. The intended reader is one with an engineering or scientific bent and an open mind. With the intended reader in mind, I allowed myself to use big words without worrying that it would seem like I am trying to impress. At times it is nice to use big words.
Although some of the concepts presented here are not original, they are stubbornly ignored and remain unassimilated into the philosophies of many scientists and students of science. It is my hope that this work will present old concepts in a new way to make them more difficult to ignore and will present new concepts to complement the old. For some time, now I have believed in a principle. Let’s call it The Principle of Divine Undecidability. It is simply that the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven and any effort to do so is futile. If God exists, most major religions would be in trouble if The Principle of Devine Undecidability was false. Religion would unfairly discriminate against those that cannot understand a proof of divine existence. Only the dull would be damned. The only out would be another principle where ignorant belief is perfectly fine-tuned to offset inability to understand; anything else would not be fair to the dimwitted. On the other hand, if God does not exist, this Principle means that this non-existence cannot be proven – not even by all the king’s horses and men.
Some folks claim Divine Decidability. Some believe that logic and science can prove the existence of God and all of creation. Increasingly, others seem to think that science has disproven the existence of God and can explain all that is observed. I think that these folks may not be quite as Bright as they say that they are. I hope that reading this will help doubters to see that not everything that is true can be proven.
Some people say the word “faith” like it’s a bad thing. Every worldview requires faith.

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Overture “Really don’t mind if you sit this one out. My words but a whisper, your deafness a shout.” – Gerald Bostock

Since the dawn of The Enlightenment, humankind has climbed a tower of knowledge, clinging to the hope that reason would ultimately offer a way to climb high enough to view and understand all of the wonders of this universe. Even though great minds of the 20th century reasoned that reason itself placed significant and humbling limitations on this quest, we still struggle upward for complete understanding. Humankind overcomes humbling with hubris and continues to cling to the hope that we will ultimately peer over these limitations and ultimately take our rightful seat as the universal master. We cannot.

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The Limits of Science “The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark. It scares you reckless, but in time you see things clear and stark.” – Declan McMannus

Introduction Our accumulated understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and all of science, has lifted the veil of mystery from aspects of the human experience that were once thought to be controlled by the supernatural. We now know that weather is controlled by global wind patterns, regional pressures, the heat of vaporization of water, and many other physical phenomena in a complex ballet. We know that traits from our ancestors are passed on in DNA. We know that a thrown ball follows a roughly parabolic path and the variances from that path are controlled by aerodynamics and, to a much lesser extent, general relativity.
Calculus and imaginary numbers allow us to predict the behavior of subatomic particles through quantu

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