ABSTRACT
Though the material in this paper spans five fields (Computer Science,
Mathematics, Physics, Philosophy, and Statistics), the talk will be
presented in a way that is accessible to all audiences. (The author is
willing to make more detailed and technical presentations at other times on
any topic covered in this talk.)

Science studies what is broadly called "Nature." The general topic of this talk is the deeper Reality behind Nature. The philosopher Plato said that at the deeper levels, all things (including all physical objects) exist only in the realm of ideas. The author has a theory, denoted by TK, that agrees with Plato and goes beyond, by asserting: (i) Axiom I: Nature consists of logical-mathematical (log-mat) systems only, and all log-mat objects are a part of Nature, and (ii) Axiom II: Consciousness of "animate" beings gives them the experience of the physicality of some parts of Nature.

Axiom I has implications in the Foundations of Physics, and TK shall be briefly compared and contrasted with the eight major existing theories that are, in many ways, mutually inconsistent. It will be pointed out how, to a certain extent, TK serves to partly explain and unify these theories, and goes beyond them. It is argued, in agreement with Einstein and in disagreement with Bohr, that the Foundations of Physics is not in
Probability Theory, and that the seeming randomness arises because of other reasons. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, dealing with the product of the standard deviations of non-commuting variables, will be touched on.

"Consciousness" shall be defined in a precise sense in the context of
log-mat systems, An animate entity is one that has the capacity to be
self-conscious. Using Goedel-type arguments, some theorems shall be
presented showing how Consciousness arises in log-mat systems. We discuss why an animate computer cannot be created.

It is argued that processes occurring in Nature are quite analogous to a
computer program, and that the quantum phenomena (such as the so-called "non-locality") occur under a different paradigm than the ones conceived so far.

(Refreshments will be served at 2:30 p.m. in Room 008 of the Statistics
Building)