Abstract
In this paper I shall address an issue in philosophy of mind related to philosophy of mathematics, or more specifically to the nature of mathematical knowledge and reasoning. The issue concerns whether the human mind is fully algorithmic. I shall develop my answer against the background which is created by Kurt Gödel’s celebrated incompleteness theorems. In what follows: (i) I shall first sketch the main programs and responses to the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind; (ii) then, I shall provide an informal overview of the two Gödelian incompleteness theorems; (iii) finally, I shall present and comment upon some of the main views advocated by Gödel about minds and machines, mind and matter, and the contrast between Turing machines and the so-called Gödel minds. In the process, Gödel’s very unorthodox and unfashionable views against computabilism, neuralism, physicalism, psychoneural parallelism, and even against the underlying philosophical presuppositions of the Turing machines will emerge. Shocking as they, understandably, are, as compared to the standard psychological and philosophical orthodoxy underlying the received computabilistic views on mind, Gödel’s own views are worth exploring and they fully deserve our undivided philosophical attention. Gödel is, after all, the founding father and one of the essential inspiring sources for the whole domain and range of topics that I address in my paper.
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Gödel believed the human soul is immortal, that science will prove that fact one day. His philosophical hero was Leibniz.
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By ‘mechanism in biology’ Hao Wang says that Gödel meant Darwinism, “which he apparently sees as a set of algorithmic laws (of evolution). Even though he seems to believe that the brain - and presumably also the human body - functions like a computer [...], he appears to be saying here that the human body is so complex that the laws of physics and evolution are insufficient to account for its formation within the commonly estimated period of time” ([6], p. 192).
References
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Nagel, E., Newman, J.R.: Gödel’s Proof. Routledge, London (1958)
Smith, P.: An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems, 2nd edn. Cambridge, New York (2013)
Tieszen, R.: After Gödel. Platonism and Rationalism in Mathematics and Logic. Oxford, UK (2011)
Wang, H.: A Logical Journey. From Gödel to Philosophy. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1996)
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Dr. Victor Mitrana, University of Bucharest, for commenting upon an earlier version of the paper which contributed to the improvement of the arguments, and for introducing the text in LaTeX. I am grateful to Dr. Daniela Dumitru, Bucharest University of Economic Studies, for stimulating discussions about cognitivism and computerism. I also want to thank Miss Ioana Andrada Dumitru, PhD student at Johns Hopkins University, for making comments and stylistic suggestions which I happily accepted and which improved the clarity and the readability of the paper.
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Dumitru, M. (2015). Is Human Mind Fully Algorithmic? Remarks on Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. In: Beckmann, A., Mitrana, V., Soskova, M. (eds) Evolving Computability. CiE 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9136. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20028-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20028-6_3
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