Re: Upload motivations (was SPACE: Lunar Billboard?)
Hara Ra (harara@shamanics.com)
Thu, 09 Jan 1997 22:06:36 -0800
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
> > Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
> > > I want the Final Answers. The burning search for that takes precedence
> > > over everything else.
> >
> > I think Kurt Godel made it clear that Final Answers don't exist for
> > systems more complex than tautologies....
> > | Hara Ra <harara@shamanics.com> |
>
> It is a common intellectual fallacy to take limited, specific, results
> in some field and extrapolate from them as if they were some fundamental
> law of nature. Much the way new-age mystics leaped on Quantum mechanics
> to justify their ideas about consciousness creating reality.
>
> What Godel proved--yes, proved as in final answer--is that in a system
> of symbolic mathematics sufficiently powerful to express assertions of
> basic number theory, there must exist assertions which are true, but for
> which no proof exists in the system. That is, the set "provable" is a
> proper subset of the set "true".
>
> This result applies only to symbolic mathematics, not to reality. To
> claim from it that "truth" is therefore unattainable is like saying
> "my car won't start, therefore travel is impossible".
Au contraire. If the brain can be modeled as a symbolic computation,
then what
it can compute is limited by Godel's Theorem.
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| Hara Ra <harara@shamanics.com> |
| Box 8334 Santa Cruz, CA 95061 |
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