Footnote BNs.537

BNs.537. In The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics by Roger Penrose (Oxford 1989), the distinguished mathematician and physicist promoted the idea that Goedel's incompleteness theorem proves that human cognition -- or intuition -- must entail more than computation, and urged that quantum effects in the brain could provide a physical explanation. No AI system could intuit the way humans do, he argued. In a followup book, Shadows of the Mind -- A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Oxford 1994), Penrose went to great lengths to rebut reader arguments that Goedel's theorem is false or that it did not apply.

Though I was, for technical reasons, not fully persuaded by Penrose's reasoning, it is quiet evident Alfred Tarski's "undefinability of truth" theorem is relevant to the AI "consciousness" controversy and gives at least some support to Penrose's views.

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