Emperor's New Mind

This is my first attempt at not-so trivial art of blogging. I fail to understand why people blog or even read blogs for that matter. I decided to get my hands dirty to understand the very reason. For the first post, I have nothing interesting to write. So I guess I will start with some of the activities I am doing these days. Recently I finished the book The Emperor's New Mind. It was certainly a great read. Mr. Roger Penrose (Yeah, the same guy who is responsible for Penerose diagrams we study in General relativity and black holes). The debate is this book is the same old formula used by many sci-fi robot movies, only the approach is different. The debate is on Will robots ever be able to emulate humans. First of all, the definition of behaving like humans is not clear at all. The only definition or test we can use is Turing Test proposed by the great British mathematician Alan Turing. The test is basically an interrogation test, A judge interrogates two players A(Human) and B(Machine). Both try to prove that they are Humans. If B can succeed in convincing that judge that it is a human, it deserves to be called human. In this test also, the kind of interrogation that can be performed is also not very clear. So still the definition is not very clear. But we move on with this definition. Penerose argues for the fact that Robots will never emulate humans. The reasons he gives are very convincing. The most convincing reason is the Godel's Incompleteness theorem. In 1900, the great German Mathematician David Hilbert proposed a program to formalize all of mathematics with some basic axioms and some inference rules(Which are so intuitively true that No one doubts their validity). He proposed that from these very basic axioms and inference rules, we should be able to prove or disprove any statement that can be stated mathematically. Moreover, this system of axioms and inference rules should be consistent. Here consistency means that you can't infer both a statement and it's opposite from these set of axioms and inference rules. World's finest brains began to work on Hilbert's Dream. Whoever could do this , was guaranteed a name in golden letters in mathematics history. But in 1931, Kurt Gödel the austrian genius dropped a bomb on mathematics whose damage won't be recovered till the eternity. In a very simple and short paper, He proved that no matter what are your axioms and inference rules, in every theory there will be statements whose trueness or falsity will never be determined. If you find that unconvincing, try to think of trueness or falsity of the statement "This statement is false." Moreover, he proved that consistency or inconsistency of the theory cannot be decided by rules or axioms of the theory. On one short paper, he crushed the Hilbert's dream. Penerose forms the very same theorem as base of his argument. The basic argument is that an undecidable statement is true in some sense because if it had not, be would be able to find the counterexample by exhausting out all the cases. Now try this problems on a robot, Give him a "Set of axioms" and "Set of Inference Rules". The robot will keep searching till eternity and won't be able to decide the trueness of some statements. The very fact that we can see the undecidability of such statements makes us different from robots. It seems very convincing to my naive mind. The rest of books deals with problem of determinism and consciousness. He tries to propose a idea for solving quantum measurement problem. He also proposes that very quantum measurement is the process which gives direction to time. And the very direction of time gives meaning to our consciousness. The rest of book is an adventurous trip to the the world of science and mathematics. I would highly recommend this book who is looking for an adventurous and intellectual journey. I would like to sum up this post by a statement which is favorite of mine, Reality is stranger than science fiction.