I see a little Arostotle in that statement.
But then again, I am probably all wrong on him too. By saying there is a Prime Mover (or movus non movus as I was taught) but not saying that the Prime Mover is God, isn't that the same as saying what you said?
OT: An old post of mine to somewhere:
This is something of a misstatement of Penrose's position. The
fundamental question is not whether *thought* is non-algorithmic, but
whether *physics* is non-algorithmic; even Penrose believes that
thought is something that takes place via physical processes in the
brain, so if physics is Turing-computable, so is the brain, and hence
so is thought.
Now I will grant that Penrose's efforts to prove the noncomputability
of consciousness directly are somewhat strained. That's irrelevant
here. The problem is that we don't know whether the physics of the real
world -- quantum mechanics, that is -- is Turing-computable. But we do
know that classical physics is *not* Turing-computable: it has been
proven that a system of classical bodies can perform operations no
Turing machine can emulate.
So the situation is that we don't know whether real physics is
Turing-computable, but we know that the large-quantum-number
approximation to real physics isn't Turing-computable, which lends at
least some likelihood to the possibility that the real physics
underlying the approximation isn't computable either.
Thus, the initial quoted statement from Arnautov -- "Unless you can
demonstrate that human thought is non-algorithmic," etc. -- is almost
exactly the reverse of reality. Unless you can either
demonstrate that physics is algorithmic, or present an example of an
algorithm that displays human-equivalent sentience, there is no reason
at all to suppose that human thought *is* algorithmic. |
