[FOM] The Lucas-Penrose Thesis

[Stewart Shapiro]

>  1. Is there any subscriber on the FOM-list
>     who thinks the Lucas-Penrose Thesis is
>     true or plausible or can be made true or
>     plausible?

I can't help you with this one.

>  2. Can someone recommend a paper where it
>     is established convincingly, once and
>     for all that the argument for the
>     Lucas-Penrose Thesis is no good, and
>     sibling arguments also using Godel's
>     Incompleteness Theorem to establish
>     something similar are doomed?

I would not be so pompous as to claim anything like "once and for all", but 
I have argued that the idealizations needed to make the incompleteness 
theorem relevant keep the issue far removed from anything anyone would 
recognize as mechanism.  See my "Incompleteness, mechanism, and optimism", 
Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 4 (1998), 273-302.  Also, "Mechanism, truth, and 
Penrose's new argument", Journal of Philosophical Logic 32 (2003), 19-42.