[FOM] The Lucas-Penrose Thesis

[Steven Ericsson-Zenith]

Dear FOM,

Just so that we are clear on exactly what it is that Penrose claims  
as regards the Goedel result. He does not claim, as I recall, that  
the result necessarily indicates that humans are not machines.

He does say (I'm paraphrasing p.141 of ENM) that the result should  
not be taken by formalists as a *necessary* limit of formalized  
mathematics, only as an indication that our logical formalizations  
and, in particular, the notion of logical truth are currently  
inadequate.

On this much I agree and also conclude that physical mechanics,  
machines as currently conceived, do not reflect the human mind (an  
erroneous assumption that goes back to Alan Turing). But this points  
not to some magic - emergent or otherwise - it simply points to an  
inadequacy in our mechanics.

This inadequacy is not, I believe, beyond repair - and this would  
appear to be consistent with Roger Penrose's intuition.

Now, this is not to say that the Hammeroff-Penrose proposal  
(Orchestrated Objective Reduction) fixes the problem - it does not,  
but then Roger knows this.

With respect,
Steven

--
Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering
http://iase.info