Sunday 24 May 2015

Sir Roger Penrose is arguably the next Einstein

          Sir Roger Penrose, a Knight on Tiles, an Emperor of the mind and the only person on earth after Albert Einstein who has the ability to visualize the 4 dimensional space-time and make necessary modifications to General Relativity at the planck scale. The only scientist who firmly believes that Quantum mechanics is both incomplete and as well as inconsistent defending Albert Einstein's famous quote, "God does not play dice". He was the only mathematician who understood the implications of Godel's undecidable theorems to physics and to consciousness very early in his career. The only cosmologist who went beyond the Big Bang and answered the question what happened before it.



Penrose is currently working on his Twistor theory completely alienated from the scientific community who are all working on an alternative theory called as the string theory. However Penrose is mostly known for his series of attacks against the proponents of Strong AI starting from Emperor's New Mind which won the New York Times best seller and one of the most important discovery of the 20th century and continued his attacks in Shadows of the mind which firmly established the conclusion that,
     "The inescapable conclusion seems to be: Mathematicians are not using a knowably sound calculation procedure in order to ascertain mathematical truth. We deduce that mathematical understanding – the means whereby mathematicians arrive at their conclusions with respect to mathematical truth – cannot be reduced to blind calculation!"
          —Sir Roger Penrose

What this implies is that a machine can never ever surpass human intelligence for all cases. Of course there can be complex machine learning algorithms which will give machines enough ability to beat humans while playing chess or driving a car or recognizing patterns but the inevitable conclusion seems to be a robot can never ever surpass the intelligence of human mathematicians.

The center piece of the argument comes from the Godel-Turing theorem derived by Roger Penrose in his book Shadows of the Mind. The argument goes like there are perfect mathematical statements where a machine will never halt or will run forever.

For example: 

1. Find a natural number which is not a sum of powers of 2.
2. Find an even number greater than 2 which is not the sum of two primes. (Goldbach's conjecture) .
For the first case the machine will never halt and for the second since we do not yet have a proof for the Goldbach's conjecture we do not know whether the machine will halt or not. Now based on such computations where a machine will never halt Penrose speculates if there is an underlying algorithm or a procedure that we humans are using to deduce whether a given computation performed on a natural number halts or not.
Let us assume A be the set of all computations known to human beings to deduce whether a given computation on a natural number halts or not. Or in other words if a computation C does not halt then A halts giving us the output that C does not infact halt.
Penrose takes us through a series of arguments using Cantor's diagonal argument  where he proves that such an sound algorithmic procedure A encompassing all known computations known to human beings if it exists will fail to stop for one given computation where we actually know that the computation C in fact does not stop. Or in other words A will run forever without halting when in fact C does not halt.  This is a contradiction the algorithmic procedure A encompassing all known computations was assumed to be the underlying procedure used by human beings to ascertain whether a computation will halt or not but as we have just now proved there will always exist a computation C where we know that the computation C will not halt but the procedure A fails to halt and there by fails to know whether C halts or not and therefore A cannot be the underlying procedure used by human beings as it leads to a contradiction which is quite obvious for anyone to see. Human beings are not Turing machines or a human mind is not a Turing machine.
“Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.”
– Kurt Gödel
“Gödel’s Theorem shows that human thought is more complex and less mechanical than anyone had ever believed”
- Rudy Rucker
The above proof is known as the Penrose's version of the Godel-Turing theorem.  Since I am a programmer and not a mathematician I completely understand this Turing's version of Penrose's argument against Strong AI compared to the pure Godel's version of it which was summarized by David Chalmers below.

"(1) suppose that “my reasoning powers are captured by some formal system F,” and, given this assumption, “consider the class of statements I can know to be true.”  (2) Since I know that I am sound, F is sound, and so is F’, which is simply F plus the assumption (made in (1)) that I am F (incidentally, a sound formal system is one in which only valid arguments can be proven).  But then (3) “I know that G(F’) is true, where this is the Gödel sentence of the system F’” (ibid).  However, (4) Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem shows that F’ could not see that the Gödel sentence is true.  Further, we can infer that (5) I am F’ (since F’ is merely F plus the assumption made in (1) that I am F), and we can also infer that I can see the truth of the Gödel sentence (and therefore given that we are F’, F’ can see the truth of the Gödel sentence). That is, (6) we have reached a contradiction (F’ can both see the truth of the Gödel sentence and cannot see the truth of the Gödel sentence).  Therefore, (7) our initial assumption must be false, that is, F, or any formal system whatsoever, cannot capture my reasoning powers."

Human beings can make contact to the Platonic world of numbers and mathematical truths which is not feasible for machines and it is for this reason that they can never ever surpass the intelligence of human mathematicians. A simple bitter truth which Plato and the other pagan mystery religions discovered long before modern science was born. The Empirical world is just a mere shadow copy of the real Platonic realm which exists independent of us.

Now we know that just if you do big number crunching doesn't mean you are thinking and somehow you've made a machine to think. Thinking is much more than just number crunching. The proponents of Strong AI are no where near to it. Even though modern artifical intelligent machines are able to act on their own without being programmed for it explicitly deep down in its chip there still lies a set of implicit machine learning algorithms which does the trick for them. What it means is that any such alogrithm can be transformed into a formal system and the Godel's Incompletness theorems can be applied to it showing that there will always be one statement where human beings know that the statement is true but the machine can never ever utter it. Hats off to Sir Roger Penrose he surely deserves a nobel prize for this discovery.
 

Sunday 3 May 2015

Gospel of Truth is truly a joy for all philalethists

"Gospel of Truth is a joy to those who have received from the Father of Truth the gift of knowing him."

At a time when I was starting to feel that there is no one on this planet who can understand my beliefs and went into a deep depression Christ, the saviour gave me a hope by introducing me to a 2nd century Gnostic Christian named Valentinus.

If there is ever a book which I want to keep in my hand till my last breathe then it would be this book because it defines me completely, my way of thinking and my way of living. When I was absolutely demoralized the one thing which gave me strength was Valentinus' Gospel of Truth. 

Gospel of Truth upheld my beliefs and made me a much stronger person than I was ever was by showing that I am not alone in all of this that once there lived people who shared the same beliefs which I had held on to.

It gave me that self evidential proof which I needed to confirm myself that my revelation was real and my scepticism about our place in the cosmos was right. When I could back up my beliefs with evidence from the Pauline Epistles originally written in Greek I couldn't have asked for anything more than this.

Yes, the Pleroma, the body of Christ exists and this world was modelled according to the Pleroma above and our world is not the only world that exists out there independent of us. This concept of Pleroma was the very keystone of the Valentinian theology or the Paul's Pleroma theology.

Right from my teenage I had a sufficient leaning towards the Pauline Epistles, after all he was the appointed Apostle to the Gentile nations and although the word Gentile in those days always meant Greeks the mission of Saint Paul was to spread the message of the Gospel to the whole world both to Gentiles and to non-Gentiles alike. I knew that Paul was saying something completely different from what the rest of the apostles were saying and many people were saying that he corrupted the teachings of Jesus, others called him a false Apostle and some even went as far as saying that Paul was a priest of Mithras. Yes, lots of theories were floating around and everyone thought that they had cracked the problem of Paul convincingly but I always believed that truth is far from what meets the eye.

It was only after studying Valentinianism I could truly appreciate the calibre and the divinity of the great doctor of the church, Saint Paul of Tarsus. I knew he was saying something very interesting but I still had to find that one clue which could finally allow me to speak good of him and Valentinianism was that one missing part of the puzzle.

The rest of the Bible though was always uninteresting to me as it is for all Gentiles which was opinionated by even Julian, the Emperor himself who said that Christianity was always presented to him in an uninteresting manner.

Some might be wondering how could a man like myself who practices hard polytheism can truly appreciate and admire the founder (Saint Paul of Tarsus) of a monotheistic religion (Christianity) who believes in the concept of Trinity, the Father, the son and the Holy Spirit. 

The answer to that is Jesus Christ never ever established any church on earth, he always taught that the church is the pleroma of God (Ephesians), he never ever envisioned a physical church here on earth and never ever appointed any Pope to preside over it. Contrary to the strong popular belief that Pauline Christianity won out against all other forms of Christianity it was neither the Pauline nor the Jesus of Nazareth's Christianity that won out instead what won out was the Christianity of the Byzantine empire, what won was Roman imperialism, what won was the Christianity of Constantine who wanted to use it as a political tool to control the masses and the current Roman Catholic Church is the product of this course of events.

Valentinian Christians are the true Pauline Christians who received a succession of apostolic tradition starting from Saint Paul himself. This is exactly what the gnostic Ptolemy writes in his letter to Flora that we too have received a genuine apostolic tradition. Catholics do not understand the Pauline Epistles they are in two minds when it comes to Pauline Epistles whether to completely do away with the Law as Paul instructs them or to fully abide by it as Jesus advises them in his sermon on the mount. When pressed hard to give an answer they often go mum without knowing what to say.

In my honest opinion, Valentinus, Saint Paul and Yajnavalkya are all speaking about the same Holy Father, Savitr. Enjoy reading Gospel of Truth if you are interested.