Sunday, March 06, 2005
Must-read article
On Einstein, Godel, time, science, math, thought, and man...found here.
Here's a taste that I found extremely fascinating:
And again, I find more evidence for God in the universe... =)
UPDATE: Here's something a bit less serious and much more funny from the same article:
Here's a taste that I found extremely fascinating:
Some thinkers (like the physicist Roger Penrose) have taken this theme further, maintaining that Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have profound implications for the nature of the human mind. Our mental powers, it is argued, must outstrip those of any computer, since a computer is just a logical system running on hardware, and our minds can arrive at truths that are beyond the reach of a logical system.If this conjecture is true, it would be absolutely breathtaking. But then, of course, it could just be that when a logical system like a computer reaches a certain complexity it can do the same sorts of things our mind does (after all, our mind could just be an extremel complex logical system). But then again, it could be something much more like the conjecture states.
And again, I find more evidence for God in the universe... =)
UPDATE: Here's something a bit less serious and much more funny from the same article:
“There it was, inconceivably, K. Goedel, listed just like any other name in the bright orange Princeton community phonebook,” writes Goldstein, who came to Princeton University as a graduate student of philosophy in the early nineteen-seventies. (It’s the setting of her novel “The Mind-Body Problem.”) “It was like opening up the local phonebook and finding B. Spinoza or I. Newton.” Although Gödel was still little known in the world at large, he had a godlike status among the cognoscenti. “I once found the philosopher Richard Rorty standing in a bit of a daze in Davidson’s food market,” Goldstein writes. “He told me in hushed tones that he’d just seen Gödel in the frozen food aisle.”
Comments:
Post a Comment
