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streetfighter64yesterday at 7:41 PM3 repliesview on HN

> if humans (or any intelligent physical entity) are at most Turing-complete

This is a bit of a strange assumption to make. I do agree that a human, if it had infinite memory, would be an universal machine, i.e. capable of computing any given Turing machine [0]. But would that be the limits of its capabilities? It's far from certain.

You'll get into the philosophy of free will (funnily enough, a sort of inverted Turing test), i.e. for a given human with infinite memory, is there a Turing machine that exactly replicates the behavior of that human? Is our behavior governed entirely by rules? Would that imply that a human themselves is a kind of Chinese room [1]?

> any non-constructive math "steps" or thoughts must also be at most computable.

What does it mean for a "thought" to be computable? Compare to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Clearly the act of stating the thought, or writing down the theorem, is computable. But proving it to be true or false may very well be impossible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room


Replies

gf000yesterday at 7:56 PM

> What does it mean for a "thought" to be computable?

Well, given our scientific knowledge it's a molecule-level (only important to disregard quantum physics to make the case easier) physical/chemical process, that we should in principle be able to simulate on any other medium, including a Turing machine.

Nonetheless, I can accept the definition of math where it's about "truths" and truths can obviously exist without being computable.

qarlyesterday at 7:49 PM

> But would that be the limits of its capabilities? It's far from certain.

Do you agree that humans are physical systems?

My understanding is that any physical system can be evaluated to any degree of accuracy by a computer, no?

show 2 replies
throw310822yesterday at 8:28 PM

Does that mean that humans could produce mathematical proofs that are entirely logical and verifiable by other humans, but that cannot be formalised in any automatically verifiable language such as lean?