> Godel's theorems are our friend. It is even a friend in physics. With physics I think it is a "sieve" that conforms physical principle to have horizon conditions, whether uncertainty principles or event horizons in GR, that conform physical reality to fit within the Church-Turing thesis.
On 3 Jun 2021, at 13:28, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:It is Penrose's thesis that consciousness is a sort of Godel trick.
Back in the 1980s as an undergraduate I would have agreed with this, when I started reading about this. I read Hofstadter's book "Godel, Escher, Bach" and began pondering these things. I have however come to think there were problems with this. It is clear humans are not consistent Turing machines or computers.
Computers are infernally consistent,
and can compute numerical sequences, but they do not make an inductive leap in saying the set of natural numbers has infinite cardinality.
Humans can rather easily see the set is infinite and however make mistakes.
LCOn Wednesday, June 2, 2021 at 11:47:26 AM UTC-5 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:> Godel's theorems are our friend. It is even a friend in physics. With physics I think it is a "sieve" that conforms physical principle to have horizon conditions, whether uncertainty principles or event horizons in GR, that conform physical reality to fit within the Church-Turing thesis.Some claim Godel proved that the human mind is more than just a Turing Machine, but I disagree. Godel found a way to use numbers to write a sentence that talks about itself, it says "I am not provable in this formal system", and the operations of a particular Turing Machine are analogous to a formal system; however a human being can look at that sentence and see that it is true even though the machine itself could never produce it, therefore the human mind can do something the Turing machine can't. However, what Godel proved is that an operating system powerful enough to perform arithmetic THAT IS CONSISTENT cannot be complete, and he says no operating system can prove its own consistency. But when human beings are not doing formal logic exercises but just living everyday lives their operating system is most certainly not consistent, they can have two logically contradictory opinions at the same time, a brief glance at politics shows it is very common. And humans can be absolutely positively 100% certain about something, (that is to say they have proven it to their own satisfaction), and still be dead wrong. Godel's biography illustrates this point, he refused to eat and died of starvation because he was absolutely positively 100% certain that his food was being poisoned.So we are inconsistent Turing machines. And even today we could easily make a machine that could answer any question, provided you don't mind if it sometimes gave an answer that was wrong or even idiotic.John K Clark
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"Prohibition... goes beyond the bound of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded" -Abraham Lincoln.
"If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who lives under Tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson
The deeper problem is our tolerance of BS in the whole "human domain", which comes from the separation of theology from science, allowing its (mis)use in "politics". This trains people in believing in argument per authority, and obeying to tyrants. We will leave the Middle-Age when theology is back in science, i.e. back to doubt, theories and experimentation (like I illustrate directly with the canonical theology of the universal+ (Löbian) machine (the universal machine which is aware of its Turing universality, like PA or ZF, ...). Unfortunately, we continue to regress on this, and I am rather worry how it has been possible to let someone like Trump banalising racism and nazism so much. In my country, despite it is illegal to go in public with a nazi flag, or to harbour the swastika, some carnival have shown how much antisemitism is banalised and tolerated. That stinks, and show we have not learned the lesson of WWII (which is not finished in the Middle-East, also).
And then the climate change, which might be a consequence of prohibition, as the first industrial car producers asked right at the start why to use petrol, which change irreversibly the atmosphere instead of Hemp (and other plants) which do not. Prohibition is a trick used by racists (to imprison foreigners arbitrarily, or black people) and those who destroy capitalism by making the free-market into a market driven by crime (and confused then with capitalism).
Let us hope we manage to avoid genocides, but after Rwanda I have some doubt we will succeed.
Hard period for the good willing truth researchers...
Also, math and music are very well related. Some consider mathematics as silent music. Maybe Bob Marley's music would not be that cool without the ganga. How could we know that :)
Bruno