There are a number of things Chaitin talks about that seem problematic to me. But the mathematical joy remains.
Central to the disconnect for me is a series of related statements beginning with- "A law has to be simpler than what it explains." "To understand is to compress." "The laws of physics must be simpler than what they explain." Why does a law have to be simpler? What is simpler? I suppose that is the reason to be for complexity science that life appears to more likely move from simpler to more complex. But more than that I am wondering what drives the desire to see the world this way. This point of view, it seems to me, is what stops certain streams of mathematics and philosophy from being able to address life in both the formal in informal senses. Certainly biological life. To me understanding life and to a very great extent biological life is the human mission. Finding a theory of life based on the statements Chaitin iterates including "to understand is to compress" will most likely not tell us much about life or more precisely living. The experience of death teaches this. The experience of death teaches me the gravity of the distinction between theories based on definitional systems and living and dying...(only yesterday leaving my house for the day I found a hatchling from the oriole nest under the eave had fallen from its nest and lay dying or dead.its body still bloody and wet from leaving its shell and the ants by the thousands eating the chick.) What I like most about mathematics is the feeling of being able to hold the whole world in my head. It is a very powerful feeling...being able to reduce the enormous complexity and importance even power of the world and hold it in my mind.even more the ability to manipulate its structure through symbols and come up with new conclusions. In some way this experience gives me the feeling of being as powerful as the world. The exchange and sharing of these systems of symbolic manipulation is an extremely exciting and intimate experience. Chaitin's discussion of "uncomputable numbers" and "countable infinity" gives me this excitement and intimate feeling. For a moment I feel a sense of immortality, of transcending the distance between one and another, transcending our biologically bounded existence. I think it is this experience of transcendence and intimacy that draws people to mathematics and not its cousin philosophy with its endless if beautiful verbosity. To me the message of mathematics is the desire and need for intimacy and transcendence-an overwhelming desire approaching the desire for life itself. I am uneasy. even disquieted with the logic (mathematics) that simplifying my experience of life or of life itself can make it more comprehensible or meaningful. Rather I think there are as many mathematics as there are lives and each one tells us more about our nature. Ann Racuya-Robbins Founder and CEO World Knowledge BankR https://www.wkbank.com/knowledge/Comments_on_Chaitin https://www.wkbank.com <https://www.wkbank.com/>
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