From: Vladimir Nesov (robotact@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Oct 09 2009 - 10:50:32 MDT
On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 8:44 PM, John K Clark <johnkclark@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Oct 2009 "Vladimir Nesov" <robotact@gmail.com> said:
>
>> How to interface incompleteness with "goals" and "infinite loops" and
>> "mind" and goals being "fixed" is far from being obvious
>
> Godel proved that there are some things that are true but have no proof,
> that means you will never find a counterexample to show it to be wrong
> and never find a finite proof to prove it right. This wouldn't be so bad
> if you could determine that some things are false or true but
> unprovable, then you could just ignore them and move on to other things;
> but in 1936 Turing showed that you can't even do that. That means that
> in general you can't determine if you are in a infinite loop or not;
> perhaps you will get your answer in 2 more seconds, perhaps 3, perhaps
> 10 billion years, perhaps never. Real minds get around this problem by
> getting bored, after tackling a task for a long time and making no
> progress they get bored and move on to other problems that look more
> productive. A fixed goal mind could never do this, a fixed goal mind
> never gets bored so it's stuck forever. That's why evolution never made
> a fixed goal mind.
>
Oh my. I actually tried to listen to you, in the olden days.
-- Vladimir Nesov
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