A History, A Theory, A Religion: Information Seen as a Paradox in the World Today

James Gleick’s “The Information’s”  focus on Alan Turing’s perspective on logic and symbolism directly correlates with much of the religious background I grew up with as a child. Growing up in a pre-dominant Roman Catholic upbringing from kindergarten through 7^th grade, my elementary school’s focus revolved around a major theme in the Catholic Archdiocese in which Catholic schools  were “An education you could have faith in.” Entering the public school system in 8^th grade, I was quickly introduced to the vast array of opportunities and overall differences that existed between public versus private schooling; however, one of the things that continued to stick with me and my faith filled life, consisted of the core values and symbolism my faith revolved around. Turing’s symbolic reasoning and perspective truths through the use of numbers and “machines” created a paradox much like that viewed by the outside world on faith and religion today.

On Steve Paikins, "The Agenda," James Gleick was interviewed to talk about his newest book The Information and a clip from that video below, (section 8:00-9:32) shows some of the paradoxical controversies going on between the world and religion today in regards to knowing what truths truly are these days.

It's indeed always been a struggle for religions to define things as truth or factual, but at the limits of providing proof comes the importance and emphasis of faith and believing and following what one wants to choose to be true on their own merits.

Faith as defined first on the Google homepage, consists of : “A strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.” Growing up as a child, often times faith was a paradox to me because I needed to see things in order to believe them to be true. However, when it comes down to religion, I grew to take a new approach in regards to what I believed and the symbolism I grew to know and understand as taught to me by my family and teachers genuinely strengthened my faith to become what it’s grown to be today. Without much of that symbolism like the lessons I've learned from the Bible, weekly Sunday's of going to church, and overall religiously influenced teachings throughout my upbringing, who knows where my faith would lie today.

An example of this symbolism can be seen as a comparison between Turing’s machine trilogy in terms of analyzing numbers and their outcomes, as outlined in the quote below, correlating with the religious symbolism of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit also known as the “sign of the cross” or the triology, that is a profound symbol within the Catholic church from birth.

  Picture: A Catholic baptism in which the priest is blessing the child with the sign of the cross.
 

“The Turing machine sets about examining every number to see whether it corresponds to a computable algorithm. Some will prove computable. Some might prove un-computable. And there is a third possibility, the one that most interested Turing. Some algorithms might defy the inspector, causing the machine to march along, performing its inscrutable business, never coming to a halt, never obviously repeating itself, and leaving the logical observer forever in the dark about whether it would halt” (211).

In Turing's analogy, or algorithm of the machine, either something will be proved computable, un-computable, or ultimately inconclusive potentially repeating on forever. As described be Gleick, "Turing encoded instructions as numbers mapping one set of objects onto another...using the play of symbols and the idea of mapping in the sense of finding a rigorous correspondence between two sets." Going on further to express that the machine in itself is paradoxical, but proved some numbers are un-computable.  Ultimately stating that, "An un-computable number is in effect, an un-decidable proposition. Any formal system, therefore, must have un-decidable propositions. Mathematics is not decidable. Incompleteness follows from un-computability" (212).

Therefore although religion may appear to be a paradox to some people today, the play of symbols like that of the sign of the cross and the idea of mapping serve to be a tremendous influence on one's beliefs and the correspondence between faith as a formal system. Since the Catholic faith, or any faith for the matter is seen as a formal belief system, followed by a multitude of different people, there must be some un-decidable propositions. The symbolism much of the faith revolves around thus helps keep many of these formal belief systems going strong from generation to generation.