Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utpsych!christo
From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: Minds, machines, and Godel
Message-ID: <1991Feb1.063154.11307@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <1376@ucl-cs.uucp>
Date: Fri, 1 Feb 91 06:31:54 GMT

>
>In article <1991Jan16.035058.7465@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> David Chalmers stirs
>
>> Dull around here.  How about everybody tries to give the decisive refutation
>> of the Lucas/Penrose arguments that use Godel's theorem to "show" that human
>> beings are not computational (or more precisely, to "show" that human beings
>> are not computationally simulable)?
>> 
>> Just to refresh your memory, the argument goes like this: if I were a
>> particular Turing Machine T, there would be a mathematical sentence G (the
>> "Godel sentence" of T) that I could not prove.  But in fact I can see that G
>> must be true.  Therefore I cannot be T.  This holds for all T, therefore I am
>> not a Turing machine.
>
Didn't Whitely take care of this argument back in 1962 (_Philosophy_, _37_: 61)?
Even Hofstadter seem to think so (see comment in Bibliography of _G,E,B_)

-cdg-