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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Roger Penrose's New Book (in HTML) 1.0
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Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 00:19:13 GMT
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In article <39vac3$ba6@news.halcyon.com> jennings@chinook.halcyon.com (James Jennings) writes:
>Forgive me for coming in late and for not having read Penrose's new
>book. (I haven't yet deduced it's title from this thread.) I read
>Penrose's "Emperor's New Mind" and have a comment on that.
>
>Penrose wants to show that the human mind is not merely a computer. He
>tries to do this by exploring the theoretical limits of computation, the
>known limits of the human mind, and alternate models of computational
>processes.
>
>What it comes down to is this (in my opinion of course). Suppose there
>is a problem A and a proved theorem that says:
>"There is no algorithm that can solve A in finite time."
>And suppose real people solve examples of A all the time. Penrose would
>conclude that people do not think using algorithms. There must be
>something "magic" about human thought.

How do you get from not using algorithms to magic?

