X-Message-Number: 14704
From: "John Clark" <>
Subject: On how brains work
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 15:51:44 -0400

In  #14695 Thomas Donaldson <> Wrote:

    >the feeling of curiosity is a FEELING,

OK, no argument.

     >not something automatically generated by information alone.

You say that with great authority, somebody ignorant of the field might
think this very important question about consciousness has been
definitely answered. It has not .

     >Furthermore, our brains include a great deal of unconscious parallelism.

And of course no machine has ever done anything in parallel.

       >With these differences it's not even clear that we work enough like
       >computers that (even in our information processing, when we do so)
       >things like Turing's Theorem bear at all on our operation.

Let's see, that would mean that you could always put any proposition
in one of 3 categories.

1) True and provable, that is, a demonstration of its truth for every possible
     circumstance can be shown in a finite number of steps.

2) False, that is, a counterexample can be found.

3) True but unprovable.

If Turing's Theorem does not bear on your operation then please reassure us
that The Goldbach Conjecture should not be put in category 3. Even if you could

just narrow it down to category 2 or 3 if would be a great help,  mathematicians

would stop wasting their time trying to find a proof, they would give up and 
move
on to more productive questions.

    >Use of symbols is an operation of our brain, but it's founded on non-
    >symbolic activity.

You mean non-symbolic activity like the charge on a tiny capacitor, a bit
of magnetism on a disk, or the change of a voltage?

         John K Clark      

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