A fellow Honors college student of mine is working on this sort of neural extension of Godels Theorem which basically states that there are true statements about the human brain which the human brain cannot think.Discus if you dare. I find this to be highly disturbing.
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Thoughts you cannot think
- Thread starter eigen
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what is disturbing is that this implies that there are facts about ourselves that are true but that we will never be able able to think about.This relates to godel numbers...here is a link for those that are interested... http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GoedelNumber.html
TuxDave
Lifer
I guess this could be used in many things? There could exist things that cannot be seen? I remember discussing stuff about this in my Philosophy of Physics class. We covered a form of empirical philosophy where if you can't observe it, it doesn't exist. I guess if you had to apply that to Godel's Theorem on the brain, they would say that if we can't think it, then those truths do not exist.
uhh.. maybe my english just sucks, but that sentence seems a bit ambiguous.. your friend's trying to prove that there are certain characterstics or facts about the human brain that we can't fathom? or is your friend trying to prove that there are certain things that our brain is incapable of conceiving?
if that's what he's trying to prove.. then he's gonna have one hell of a time. can't comment on this since i don't know sht about godel's theorem.. i try and steer clear of any math class that has the word "theory" or "theorem" in it.
BespinReactorShaft
Diamond Member
Well, I can only imagine this could lead to the possibility of parallel universes. As for understanding the theorem itself, I give up lest my nose starts to bleed.
imported_jb
Member
garbage.
what's he going to do? produce a true statement about the human brain that we cannot think about?
a human can think about anything.
a computer can think about anything that a human could think.
the only truth i can see in this theory of your friend is the fact that our brains must operate on string theory. and since they can't prove what strings are made of, (their endpoints and whatnot), it seems to be a fact of our brains that we cannot think about.
can this thread even continue?! is it theoretically possible??
what's he going to do? produce a true statement about the human brain that we cannot think about?
a human can think about anything.
a computer can think about anything that a human could think.
the only truth i can see in this theory of your friend is the fact that our brains must operate on string theory. and since they can't prove what strings are made of, (their endpoints and whatnot), it seems to be a fact of our brains that we cannot think about.
can this thread even continue?! is it theoretically possible??
No one in the world can comprehend what nothing looks like. No matter what you think it has to be some color, black white ect, and no one can have a thought in there head of 100% nothing.
Try to clear your head of all thoughts, and you see all white or all black, but it is there, therefore you cant think of nothing.
Try to clear your head of all thoughts, and you see all white or all black, but it is there, therefore you cant think of nothing.
KoolAidKid
Golden Member
I create models of brain function for a living, and one of the tenets of modeling in psychology is that useful and understandable models of the brain (or parts of it) will always be less complicated than the real thing. One of the reasons for this is the idea that humans can only use their brain to understand something that is less complex than the brain itself, usually FAR less complicated. In other words, a complete understanding of the brain will actually require more resources (neurons, if you like) than actually exist in the brain. I would argue that our limit of understanding is actually much lower than that.
imported_jb
Member
not that i think one should be able to understand every function of every neuron, but are you suggesting that there is a rough numerical limit to what a human can understand?
KoolAidKid
Golden Member
<opinion>
In a word, yes. I would say that there is a limit to the complexity of the thoughts that the brain can produce. I would also say that the number of thoughts that can be produced is less likely to be limited. To use the piano analogy that I've used before in other threads, since a piano has 88 keys it cannot be used to produce a melody with more than 88 different tones. It can, however, be used to produce an unlimited variety of music with the keys that are available.
In other words, the structure sets limits on the complexity of the ouptut.
</opinion>
No in the same way that you do not have to come up with statements that are true but not provable...you can merely show existence.
and of course you have no proof that our brains operate on string theory.so I dont feel the need to respond.
The model that you take of the brain has no bearing on his work.
Understainding his ideas really come back to understaniding godels theorem.
"a human can think about anything"
This was written earlier.Can you think about a 1000 dimensional object, I know how to mathematical describe an object but can you visualize it.No.
His project has nothing to do with models of the brain and everything to do with the the Church-Turing thesis in other words if we accept that the brain is reducible to a turing machine, then you must also accept his premise.Vaguely it goes...since there are function which are not computable by turing machines and the operation of the brain, its thought s, are it functions, then there must be thoughts aka function which exist, which are not thinkable aka computable.
This was written earlier.Can you think about a 1000 dimensional object, I know how to mathematical describe an object but can you visualize it.No.
His project has nothing to do with models of the brain and everything to do with the the Church-Turing thesis in other words if we accept that the brain is reducible to a turing machine, then you must also accept his premise.Vaguely it goes...since there are function which are not computable by turing machines and the operation of the brain, its thought s, are it functions, then there must be thoughts aka function which exist, which are not thinkable aka computable.
KoolAidKid
Golden Member
My point was not about models of the brain specifically. I was trying to suggest something that the brain IMO is not equipped to understand completely: itself. This is not to say that we couldn't someday build computer models to provide a perfect representation of the brain. There are several arguments against the brain being described by a Turing machine, however, the chief of these being that the brain cannot be accurately (or even somewhat accurately) described mathematically. The brain has an effectively infinite number of states, inputs, and outputs. I would prefer that his premise were true, as it means that the math models that I work with have some chance of being correct.
Perhaps a better way to put your friend's hypothesis is that if the brain can be described by a Turing machine then there will be some outputs that it cannot produce. I guess that I don't find this all that ground-breaking. I can't think of a physical machine whose structure or function does not limit its output.
EDIT:
If we accept that the brain can be completely described by a Turing machine, then we need to provide clear definitions before we can proceed. "Input" in this case is defined as any information that is made available to the brain, including sensory information, knowledge retreived from memory, etc. "Output" is defined as any observable behavior produced by the brain as a result of the presentation of input. This could include patterns of neural activity or any more high-level behavior.
Turing proved in 1936 that functions exist which are not computable by a Turing machine. I take this to mean that there exist inputs and outputs which are impossible to link using a Turing machine. Applying this to the Turing machine brain, for some set of inputs, no Turing algorithm exists to produce the appropriate output. When discussing a simple Turing machine it is easy to produce appropriate input/output pairs: 1+1 and 2, for example. In the case of the brain, though, how would you even begin to identify the "appropriate" output for a given input? And how does this relate to "thoughts that you can't think"?
DrPizza: fair enough. Philosophy of mind is fun that way.
One thing your mind can't think of is doing ESP. Telepathy and telekinese requires your mind to think and magic happens. Some people may be capable of ESP but I'm not sure whether this is a myth or reality.
A common example is yoga. It is another way of doing things with minds. Yoga master are capable of lowering heartbeat and breathing rate through mediation. You might have seen this on the Guiness show.
I'm don't know whether you define mediation as thinking because the lines gets blurry here (cos i don't practise yoga or do mediation).
A common example is yoga. It is another way of doing things with minds. Yoga master are capable of lowering heartbeat and breathing rate through mediation. You might have seen this on the Guiness show.
I'm don't know whether you define mediation as thinking because the lines gets blurry here (cos i don't practise yoga or do mediation).
an extension of Godel's theorem to the brain is interesting... however, if i'm not mistaken Godel's incompleteness theorem deal's with being unable to prove or disprove, and i think that's very different from conceiving things. Godel's theorem might apply in that there are statements about the brain that we cannot prove. but to think of them? i think we can.
the topic of conceiving ideas about our brain seems more along the lines of bootstrapping than incompleteness?
the topic of conceiving ideas about our brain seems more along the lines of bootstrapping than incompleteness?
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