I was up at 4am 10.16 after recording my dream that had me in a reception area with my daughter Annah talking to a HRM fellow about Annah’s qualification to be hired for a job. As I was supporting Annah, we soon realized that I was projecting my Anima and as I continued speaking my focus shifted becoming more detailed and dynamic on why I should be hired. The HRM person’s attention turned toward me and one amplification is that I was at Fargo’s Microsoft office applying for a job. I then wondered, at 72 what might MS hire me to do? Of course, it would be about Romanyshyn (2007) consuming book The Wounded Researcher: Research with soul in mind and in particular right now Ch. 4 – Writing down the soul, which begins with this quote from Susan Rowland’s (2005:23) book Jung as a writer: “Anything derived merely from rationality risks being profoundly inauthentic unless it also bears witness to the destabilizing presence of the unconscious.”
Let me amplify further by saying that in writing down soul, I am being aided with Rowland’s work Jung as a Writer, where she systematically explores Jung’s writings approach. I have studied Romanyshyn and Rowland and they both emphasize that to understand something one has to experience it – I now sense that Robert, Susan, my grandfather Arvid author of “The Dogma of a Sinful Constitution”, my mother author of “Billiette Calling” and others are around now as I am writing this – hello everyone, pull-up a chair and let’s get further into this unfolding project. Susan Rowland Jung and writing
Last week I re-watched the movie Interstellar that I blogged about in the Tesseract entry after first seeing the movie December 2015. The movie’s director hired a UCLA astrophysicist to consult on the movie’s science and in the Tesseract library scene where pilot Coop communicates mathematical solutions for his daughter Murf’s equations that she needed to address the Earth’s ecocriticism issue is intriguing! What are the mathematical equations being transferred in this quantifiable connection scene. I think we will discover mathematician Kurt Gödel’s finger print is here.
I am re-organizing three home libraries; grandfather’s, mother’s, and mine. I have several books on space-time and the other day Rudy Rucker’s book Infinity and the Mind “pushed” itself out of a bookcase and into my field of vision. I looked over the chapters and Chapter Four: Robots and Souls attracted my attention since it is related to the recent blog Atlas is Shrugging! This blog entry came after watching the “60 Minutes Show” Artificial Intelligence where I fantasized that AI efforts will soon allow us to replace politicians with Bicentennial Men and Women, a big improvement! I then watched the Presidential debate ,10.09.2016, asking when will robots replace the ongoing Donald & Hillary Comedy Show?
What then pulled me deeper into Chapter Four was Rucker’s interviews with Kurt Gödel on his Incompleteness Theorem. David Malone’s 2007 documentary Dangerous Knowledge, traces the mathematical logic of Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing setting the stage for a Schlock Holmes like mystery. The idea of infinity is at the center of these mathematicians’ projects and forms the foundation of today’s work on artificial intelligence. Their mathematical reasoning resulted in Truing creating the first computer, which cracked the German Enigma machine in the movie The Imitation Game. These clips present a historical account of the evolution of mathematics and physics at the turn into the 20th Century. Malone’s film sets the scene for looking at time travel and my intuition that Donald Trump is a space-time traveler. In a follow-up blog I will examine Gödel’s contribution to artificial intelligence.
Dangerous Knowledge 1 Georg Cantor and Ludwig Boltzmann
Dangerous Knowledge 2 Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing
Many thoughts flowed from this dangerous knowledge. I remember studying 2+2 = 4 at Clara Barton; 3(x) + 9 = 18 at Agassiz; ax2 + bx + c = 0 at Central High; and aSb f(x) dx = F(b)-F(a) at UND. I did not go beyond differential equations and calculus so, when reading several of my library’s books like Infinity and the Mind, I muddle through the numbers until tiring, accepting the proofs, then turning to the philosophical views and their implications. All the great thinkers have a mathematics undergirding their theoretical paradigms and when I hit-the-wall in grasping Rucker’s mathematics, I looked at his Conversations with Gödel – he had three of them. My attempt here is to take something away from my encounter with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems – it will not be mathematical but I expect it to be philosophical.
Here is a concise presentation by Professor Mark Colyvan University of Sydney (2009) on Kurt Gödel and the limts of mathematics and in Part 3 Colyvan covers the issue of space-time and time travel, which Rucker talked with Gödel about and produced my intuition that Donald Trump might be a space-time traveler.
Kurt Godel: The World’s Most Incredible Mind (Part 1 of 3)
It is said that Kurt Gödel had a mind on the level of Aristotle, Pythagoras, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Hegel… quite a bunch to visit a pub with. Gödel died by starvation and exhaustion, similar to Jimmy Hendricks dying in his own vomit and exhausted. There is something about being a mathematician and a musician that drives some insane. Rucker observes that Gödel spent “his later years in ever-deepening silence.” However, once Rucker was able to open a dialogue with Gödel, he described it “much like direct telepathic communication”. Gödel’s mind was “unbelievable fast and experienced…as if he had already thought every possible philosophical problem through to the very end” (179). Gödel’s philosopher of choice was Immanuel Kant, which is another nodal point in the matrix of Gödel’s psyche we might explore. How would changing to philosopher Fredrick Hegel impact Gödel’s thought? For now, however, we need to study the first issue Rucker discusses with Gödel, space-time travel.
Rucker addresses Gödel’s 1949 less well-known paper A remark on the Relationship between Relativity and Idealistic Philosophy. Gödel and Einstein were colleagues at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and they often strolled the grounds chatting about relativity. Imagine after walking with Einstein, getting up to speed, Gödel wrote and published an extension of relativity theory! In this paper Rucker says Gödel “attempts to show that the passage of time is an illusion. The past, present and future of the universe are just different regions of a single vast space-time. Time is part of space-time, but space-time is a higher reality existing outside of time” (180).
Rucker suggests that in addressing this “time –bound notion of the universe,” Gödel constructed “a mathematical description of a possible universe in which one can travel back through time. His motivation was that if one can conceive of time-traveling to last year, then one is pretty well forced to admit the existence of something besides the immediate present” (180). Here is a visualization of the Gödel universe where time travel to past is seen as a possiblity.
Rucker is not comfortable with this idea and sites the grandfather paradox: “What if I were to travel back in time and kill my past self? If my past self died, then there would be no I to travel back in time, so I wouldn’t kill my past self after all. So then the time-trip would take place, and I would kill my past self. And so on. I was also disturbed by the fact that if the future is already there, then there is some sense in which our free will is an illusion” (180).
Rucker goes on to state that “Gödel seemed to believe that not only is the future already there, but worse, that it is, in principle, possible to predict completely the actions of some given person”, and objecting to this in “that if there were a completely accurate theory predicting my actions, then I could prove the theory false – by learning the theory and then doing the opposite of what it predicted. According to Rucker’s notes Gödel’s response was, “It should be possible to form a complete theory of human behavior, i.e., to predict from the hereditary and environmental givens what a person will do. However, if a mischievous person learns of this theory, he can act in a way so as to negate it. Hence I conclude that such a theory exists, but that no mischievous person will ever learn it. In the same way, time-travel is possible, but no person will ever mange to kill his past self’. Gödel then laughed his special awareness laugh and ended with ‘The a priori is greatly neglected. Logic is very powerful’” (181).
At another time Gödel responded to the free will issue saying, “There is no contradiction between free will and knowing in advance precisely what one will do. If one knows oneself completely then this is the situation. One does not deliberately do what is opposite of what one wants”
To this question: Did a mischievous Trickster Donald Trump find a way to time travel back the night in the 3rd Presidential Debate and kill his Self? When I first read about Gödel space-time-travel idea, I thought this might apply to Trump – but I was not sure if it fit. I fell asleep that night re-reading Rucker, then tucking this in for dreams to address. That night I dreamt I was walking onto Central High Auditorium stage with another classmate to play our instruments. Seems he may have also had a flute or a violin. I had not prepared for this and he began playing a few notes and then stopped, waiting for me to then play. I tried to blow a note and was only able to get a squeaky note out. He played well again and then stopped; I still could not play a note.
My dream seems to be indicating that trying to apply Gödel space-time-travel idea to Trump is not consistent – I could sense this and could not see a way through this maze. I then remind us that at the end of the trickster cycle the savior complex appears. Maybe Trump did kill his self the night of the 3rd debate and in three days he will arise from the dead, ascend to the Presidency, and begin walking on water for the American people. I need to sleep again on the logic of this and remain alert to what is unfolding. What happens to the logic if we consider Trump to the the Antichrist? What is the negation of Christ, the negation of the negation of Christ, and then leading to the absolute negation?
However, Göde’s idea that “It should be possible to form a complete theory of human behavior, i.e., to predict from the hereditary and environmental givens what a person will do” is still under consideration. This is what many on the Planet are wishing they could do with Donald Trump – understand and predict what he is going to do. There is a paradigm to explore this and what we are looking into is that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem evolving from 2 + 2 = 4 is similar to the Individual Self evolving from atoms, molecules, and proteins. Interesting project!
Rucker tried to visit Gödel again and was told he was very ill. In the middle of January 1978 Rucker had this dream standing beside Gödel’s bedside: “There was a chessboard on the covers in front of him. Gödel reached his hand out and knocked the board over, tipping the men onto the floor. The chessboard expanded to an infinite mathematical plane. And then that, too, vanished. There was a brief play of symbols, and then emptiness – an emptiness flooded with even white light.” The next day he learned Kurt Gödel had died.
In Rucker’s dream there is “a brief play of symbols” which seems to reflect Gödel’s comment that “The a priori is greatly neglected. Logic is very powerful.” What does this mean? It seems to mean that understanding that 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples is an a priori and a posteriori – that is in understanding mathematics we understand the human Self. This takes us to studying artificial intelligence and the possibility of a Sunny getting angry – the the legacy of dangerous knowledge is still with us.
I had a dream last night, 10.24, which in some way seems to be a repeat. I was working together with my daughter Annah on a project that requires re-examining an existing database and discovering, retrieving information, that is needed for an ongoing project. A possible amplification is that “Cantor’s Continuum Problem is undecidable on the basis of our present-day theories of mathematics. For the formalists this means that the continuum question has no definite answer. But for Platonist like Gödel, this means only that we have not yet ‘looked’ at the continuum hard enough to see what the answer is” (182).
We must keep in mind that it is The Magician that guides The Fool, The Trickster Trump. sas
Rucker, Rudy. (1982). Infinity and the mind: The science and philosophy of the infinite. New York: McGraw Hill.
Related Posts:
Trump: The Killing Trick
Atlas is Shrugging!
Dark Knight Rising
Trickster Donald Trump
I Ching on Donald Trump
Dark Knight Rising
Air Kiss of Death
The Fool and The Magician
Donald Got His Gun
Bulworth “Lonesome” Trump
Hacking into the Trap
American and Russian Shadow Projections
