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.