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From: smaill@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Alan Smaill)
Subject: Re: Minsky's new article (was: Roger Penro
In-Reply-To: hpm@cs.cmu.edu's message of 22 Nov 1994 23:47:28 GMT
Message-ID: <SMAILL.94Nov23174201@papa.dcs.ed.ac.uk>
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Date: Wed, 23 Nov 1994 17:42:01 GMT
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In article <3atvug$jsm@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu> hpm@cs.cmu.edu (Hans Moravec) writes:

   There was a dramatic public exposure of one of the gaping holes in
   Lucas/Penrose Sunday:

   On page 7 of the current (94/11/20) Sunday New York Times Book Review
   is a review of Roger Penrose's new "Shadows of the Mind", by Hilary
   Putnam, well known philosopher (including of mathematics) at Harvard.

   Here are some excerpts:

  "But - even
   apart from the totally unjustified way this latter possibility is
   dismissed - there is an obvious lacunae: the possibility of a program
   we could write down but not succeed in understanding is overlooked!

   This is the mathematical fallacy on which the whole book rests."
 
Does this mean that you accept the alternative conclusion, that
is that any program that models our mathematical abilities must
be so complicated that we cannot understand it?

--
Alan Smaill                       JANET: smaill@uk.ac.ed.lfcs
LFCS, Dept. of Computer Science   UUCP: ..!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!smaill
University of Edinburgh           ARPA: smaill@lfcs.ed.ac.uk
Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, UK.            Tel: 031-650-2710
