Hi all,
today we'll hear from Johannes Fankhauser, who will report on his
semester project, which was jointly supervised by Prof. Sieroka from
the philosophy department. His abstract follows.
Best,
-joe
Gödel's incompleteness theorems and one version of the objective
collapse interpretation of the quantum wavefunction allegedly
challenge the notion that the human brain is computable. Penrose
(1989) claims that since we are capable of proving propositions that
are not provable within their underlying formal system, we have access
to higher levels of computation. Thus, the brain cannot be resembled
by an algorithm. Penrose believes the computational power of the brain
can be attributed to wave collapses. According to this view, a wave
collapses when the difference between spacetime curvatures of the
involved superposed quantum states reaches a certain threshold. I
argue that this claim arises out of a confusion of Gödel’s
incompleteness theorems, and therefore is untenable. Moreover,
universality of quantum computation suggests that the human brain can
be modeled by an algorithm.