How God has been sowing the spiritual seed in my mind since my teenage?

The Problem of Evil and Cosmic Fatalism has disturbed me since my teenage years. I have said this many times in this blog as well as in my author website. I was heavily influenced by Roger Penrose and his ideas since my teenage years.

The Penrose-Lucas argument, The Andromeda Paradox, Twistor Theory, Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Orchestrated Objective Reduction, The Penrose Tiling Problem, Fine Tuning problem, Quantum Mechanics is Incomplete, Quantum Measurement problem etc., all these ideas of Roger Penrose had a strong influence on me, in fact I can safely say that it was Sir Roger Penrose, the Nobel Prize laureate who initiated me into the Pagan Mystery Religions (I know Sir Roger Penrose is an agnostic atheist). What I mean by this is that if Roger Penrose had not existed then I would have remained as an atheist through out my life and I would have never doubted scientific realism and positivism. Without these ideas of Roger Penrose I would never have the motivation in me to look into an alternative epistemology.

Now on the religious side the scholar who influence me a lot was Devudu Narasimha Shastry his two works MahaBrahmana and MahaDarshana introduced me to the esoteric secrets hidden in the Upanishads and the Vedas. Apart from him, Emperor Julian (Hymn To King Helios-Aion-Mithras) and  Saint Paul of Tarsus (Pauline Letters) have also influenced me strongly. I was not aware of Valentinus and Valentinianism at that time of my teenage and I must say along with these charismatic figures, the text, Mithras Liturgy from the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris also had a great impact on me.

Even after reading all these religious works, I would not have made the leap of faith into Esotericism if I was unaware of Roger Penrose and his works. This is the reason I say it was Roger Penrose who initiated me into Platonic Realism and the Pagan Mystery religions. He made me doubt the current scientific paradigm at that time.

I must also admit that Hubert Yockey, the physicist and information theorist who believed that the origin of life is an unsolvable problem also had a very strong influence on me. Remember Hubert Yockey never doubted Darwin's theory of Evolution and cumulative natural selection, he always insisted that once life originated on earth it was quite natural for evolution to kick in but he raised serious concerns on the natural origin of life and the error correcting mechanisms put in place in the replication and translation of genome and the genetic code.

The below article that I submitted to my College Magazine called Disha was published in the year 2009, more than 17 years ago. As you can see the topics which I mainly discuss in this blog hasn't changed much over the years, however my views on these topics have evolved over time but the theme of my research remains the same. This is the strong evidence of how God was planting these ideas in me since my teenage. 

Now after 17 years since I wrote that article, when I look back, I have evolved into Valentinianism (Jesus Christ), Orphism (Chronus and Ananke), Vedism (a strong adherent of God Savitr and Niyati (Rta)), Zoroastrianism, and Mithraism.

Do you know where I am finally resting now? I am finally resting my life in fatalistic Zurvanism, in Zurvan, The God of Infinite Time. This doesn't negate or contradict my beliefs, I can very well defend and show, how all the above religions which I believe in are actually in support of Zurvan and Zurvanism. 

It is Zurvan and Zurvanism alone which clearly solves the Problem of Evil and Cosmic Fatalism, the two main concepts which has disturbed me since my teenage years. I strongly believe, fatalistic Zurvanism and Zurvan, The God of Infinite Time will provide the Final Restoration and Immortality to Homo Sapiens. I am officially converting my faith into fatalistic Zurvanism. Franz Cumont, Nyberg and Widengren were right, Zurvanism was an ancient proto Indo-Iranian-European religion predating all other religions.

ChatGPT confirms Strong AI is impossible

The ultimate goal of the Artificial Intelligence community is to create a Strong AI system or at the very least try to replicate or simulate AGI. As a software architect I design software systems for various industries and domains. I usually ask ChatGPT to review my software design and use it as a co-pilot while designing software systems.

As I was conversing with ChatGPT, out of curiosity I asked the million dollar question to ChatGPT, “are you conscious?” and here’s how the conversation went.

I have added the screenshots of my conversation with ChatGPT above to show that I am not lying to anyone on this. This is what an intelligent system who was trained on the entire knowledge base of humanity has concluded, ChatGPT thinks that strong AI is impossible unless there is some ground breaking discovery or a revolution is made in modern physics. 

The arguments against Strong AI was the first trigger point which converted me from an atheist to a Gnostic. The stakes are high for the creation of a Strong AI system. If anyone can show me a strong AI system then I will surely give up my belief in Gods and religion and will convert myself into a militant atheist. Such a Strong AI system will immediately disprove my belief that consciousness arises from the non-physical minds in the Platonic realm.

This conversation with ChatGPT has give me a lot of motivation and courage to search for alternative theories of consciousness and this conversation has also increased the urge in me to revive the ideas of Neo-Platonism and to practice Theurgy in order to escape from the prison of Plato's cave.

Check out my below website to understand why Platonic Realism is still relevant in the modern world.

platonicrealism.com

Falsifying Penrose's Orchestrated Objective state reduction

Sir Roger Penrose is of the opinion that quantum states reduces to a classical state in a non-random non-computational way due to mass displacements between entangled quantum systems.

In the below paper he has given an experiment to empirically falsify his viewpoint.

Quantum computation, entanglement and state reduction

I am a very big fan of his non-computable approach to human thought process but I am not a huge fan of his orchestrated objective state reduction. Nevertheless we must appreciate his willingness and courage to put his viewpoints to be tested against mother nature. Who knows he might be right of the opinion that quantum particles behave differently under the influence of gravity.

On the other hand Caslav Brukner and others is of the opinion that a gravitational wave will be no different from other waves and it too will end up in a superposition of states satisfying the quantum superposition principle. Penrose is of the opinion that it would contradict with the principles of general relativity in such a case. Its time we have a face off between these two giant successful scientific theories. 

A very good example of non-computability

Strong AI is impossible without conscious machines.

RP. I can give examples of non-computational things, but it’s not obvious why they are non-computational. The one I like the best is the tiling problem. You have these shapes made out of squares glued together, things called polyominoes. You’re given a collection of these, a finite number of different sorts but an unlimited number of each sort, and you are asked: can you use these shapes to cover the entire plane without gaps or overlaps?

That is an example of a non-computational problem. That is to say, there is no computer programme which will answer yes or no for any given set of tiles: no programme where you can feed in the information of the tiles into the computer and ask it, will they tile the plane or not. Although the answer "no" can be computational, the answer "yes" is not computational. That is to say there is no way of being sure, for an arbitrary set of polyomino shapes, that they will tile the plane. It’s quite a subtle piece of mathematics to show that this is a non-computational problem. There is no computer programme whatsoever that can make this decision for any possible given set of tiles.

CC. Okay, so there are some non-computational problems. Now your argument is that there are some of these problems which cannot be solved computationally, but which can be solved by bringing in human consciousness. How does this argument go?

RP. You have to phrase the problem in the right way. In the case of the tiling problem, the way it works is like this. Suppose you were given a computer programme which would answer correctly "yes" or "no" to a set of tiles, but sometimes it will say not come to any conclusion at all (you could certainly have computers like that). Then by knowing that the computer doesn’t give you the wrong answer, from the computer’s construction you could build a set of tiles which the computer will get stuck on: a set of tiles which you know will tile the plane, and which you also know will not be able to be answered correctly by this computer.

CC. But when you say "you know" what is it about me as a conscious human being that enables me to know, what particular faculty is it that I’m applying?

RP. It’s the understanding really. It’s basically Gödel’s theorem, but you have to know that the computer doesn’t give the wrong answers. Gödel’s theorem is telling you, if you like, that the procedures we’re prepared to accept as proof cannot ever be limited to specific computational procedures: they’re never computationally limited because once you can phrase the rules of the computational system then you can see how to transcend them. So provided that you trust those rules, so that you’re prepared to count following the rules as constituting a proof, then you can see how to get methods of proof which are outside it. Our mathematical understanding, or mathematical intuition as Gödel would put it, is something outside computation.

CC. Is the open-endedness of this procedure crucial here? I take Gödel’s theorem as producing some proposition that you can’t prove, but always with a bigger system in which you can prove it. But you don’t just stay with the bigger system - isn’t the crucial point here that you can always keep going out to yet another proposition that you can’t prove?

RP. It is like that, that’s right. And in fact in our understanding we’re using this kind of procedure all the time; it’s not limited to sophisticated mathematical logic. Imagine you have some procedure at which you work away, and you think you’ve got the rules right; and then you get worried and think maybe it’s not doing everything … so you step back and you look at what it is that you’ve put into that system, and you think about what are the implications of the kinds of rules you’ve been using. This sort of reasoning ¾ stepping back from the system ¾ is doing the same thing as Gödel’s theorem, and you always have to bring your awareness in to do that. 

CC. So the insight you’re talking about is self-reflexive: looking at your own thinking in order to enlarge it ?

RP. I think that’s essentially right; that’s basically what you’re doing.

An interview with Professor Roger Penrose - Published in Network,May 2000 Interviewer: Chris Clarke

I think Penrose has made an important discovery here that in order for machines to have the capability of strong AI surpassing human intelligence they have to be conscious beings first because without awareness it is virtually impossible to analyse self-referential statements (emphasizing bold words from RP) and therefore machines without this fundamental quality in them would never be able to transcend Gödel's statements and therefore forever remain below the levels of human intelligence. It is our nature of Self awareness which helps us in our mathematical understanding and allows us to transcend Gödel's statements.

But Self awareness or the procedures of mathematical understanding itself might be something which you cannot simulate it on a computer i.e. human thought process or awareness itself might be non-computable (Penrose proves this in great lengths in his Shadows of the Mind) which in such a case the proponents of Strong AI are doomed because without conscious machines there can be no Strong AI but without a non-computable machine simulating human thought process there can be no conscious activity.

Roger Penrose: Quantum Mechanics is internally inconsistent

Uncertainty in quantum mechanics: faith or fantasy?

Yet there remains a profound conundrum in the contradiction between the continuous deterministic U-evolution and the discontinuous probabilistic R-evolution, as we shall be seeing in §6. In any case, a probabilistic and discontinuous outcome (R) certainly could not be the result of a continuous deterministic process (U), unless some approximation procedure is involved. Most physicists appear to take refuge in the puzzling issues involved in finding the right ‘physical interpretation’ of the quantum state and its modes of evolution. For my own part, I would regard it as likely that the linear quantum mechanics that we now use is merely an approximation to some more refined nonlinear evolution that we shall someday discover, and according to which both the U- and R-evolutions would arise as excellent approximations in their respective contexts. If this proves to be the case, then the present-day inconsistency between the U and R procedures could be removed.

This is a banging paper by Sir Roger Penrose which clearly outlines his take on Quantum Mechanics.

My take on this is along with the arguments of John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner that a non-physical mind collapses the wave function since it doesn't obey the Schrödinger's equation and influences matter to behave differently when it encounters itself with the former.

Winger's friend paradox by Eugene P Wigner 

"Consciousness causes collapse"

In his 1932 book The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, John von Neumann argued that the mathematics of quantum mechanics allows for the collapse of the wave function to be placed at any position in the causal chain from the measurement device to the "subjective perception" of the human observer – the notion of such a chain, more specifically a chain of interacting systems in which the values of one system is correlated with that of the immediately following system, has since become known as the von Neumann chain. In 1939, F. London and E. Bauer argued for the latter boundary (consciousness). In the 1960s, Eugene Wigner reformulated the "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment as "Wigner's friend" and proposed that the consciousness of an observer is the demarcation line which precipitates collapse of the wave function, independent of any realist interpretation. See Consciousness and measurement. Very technically, Wigner identified the non-linear probabilistic projection transformation which occurs during measurement with the selection of a definite state by a mind from the different possibilities which it could have in a quantum mechanical superposition. Thus, the non-physical mind is postulated to be the only true measurement apparatus. This interpretation has been summarized thus:

The rules of quantum mechanics are correct but there is only one system which may be treated with quantum mechanics, namely the entire material world. There exist external observers which cannot be treated within quantum mechanics, namely human (and perhaps animal) minds, which perform measurements on the brain causing wave function collapse.

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.