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From: olaf@cwi.nl (Olaf Weber)
Subject: Re: Roger Penrose's New Book (in HTML) 1.0
In-Reply-To: jennings@chinook.halcyon.com's message of 11 Nov 1994 08:35:15 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.)

"Shadows of the Mind"

> I read Penrose's "Emperor's New Mind" and have a comment on that.

[ ... of course I deleted the meat of message, what else did you
expect on the internet ... ]

> Perhaps Penrose is correct in claiming that a machine will never
> think like a human. No programmer could ever write code that buggy
> on purpose. <g>

But they write code that buggy and worse all the time by accident.

More seriously, I've reached more or less the same conclusion, if by
another route: Goedel's theorem states that any "sufficiently complex"
formal system is either incomplete or inconsistent.  It seems to me
that a formal system describing how people think would be inconsistent
rather than incomplete.

-- Olaf Weber
