Legendary mathematicians Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing will meet for the very first time, in any history, and debate the nature of intelligence at the 2013 All Worlds Fair.
Gödel is renowned across the multiverse for proving that no logical system can be simultaneously complete and consistent, thus frustrating every effort to understand reality without paradox.
Turning is considered the grand-father of artificial intelligence – his name encoded in the atomic circuits processors of hundreds of computationally-based societies across multiple universes.
The two men, both deceased in this history, have been brought to 2013 San Francisco at enormous cost by the Archebishop Pascal of Pangea, who was a leading quantum neurologist before renouncing his laboratory after a long illness and founding the discipline of algorithmic gnosticism, which he claims is the only way to see the mind of God on its own terms.
“But,” the Archbishop asked in a recent paper on geometric proofs of miracles, “what is the nature of the mind that enables it to understand what it sees?”
Gödel, whom Einstein once called “perhaps the only man who understands me,” holds that intelligence requires a pre-biological capacity to experience aesthetic truth. Without that, he has written, there is no “understanding,” just “mechanism.”
“Intelligence, like numbers themselves, exist simultaneously as both literal and abstract entities,” he wrote. “Nothing else truly fits their behavior.”
Turing, by contrast, believes that there is nothing to intelligence but “mechanism.”
“Everything in the world reduces down to a binary process, on/off, or 0/1,” he wrote. “All the complexity that we see is ultimately a combination of particles either on or off in the trillions, a mass combinatoric that nevertheless has no room for ambiguity.”
There are, in Turing’s view, no such thing as “aesthetics” in the sense Gödel means them: there is only a biological machine, with no more “understanding” than a rock, chugging through computation after computation until it hits a pre-determined outcome.
The debate will be moderated by 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the first thinker in history to posit that there are not multiple forms of matter – but rather that all substance, including emotions and mental events, are ultimately one substance capable of manifesting multiple aspects.
Spinoza and his theory, called “Monism,” have been claimed by both sides in the debate as supporting their position.
News of the debate has sent shockwaves through intellectual circles of multiple galaxies. Simon Critchley, a philosopher at the New School for Social Research in New York and the editor of the paper’s philosophy blog “The Stone,” called this “the philosophical equivalent of the Hubble Telescope, or the CERN particle collider.”
“This may change everything,” he said. “Whoever publishes first will be a celebrity. What I wouldn’t give to have gotten a ticket so I could be there in that audience, hearing it first.”