I agree that the Riddle is the Godel Sentence, but I disagree that it was
those who were unable to see the truth of the Godel sentence who succumbed to
the trance. I think Cherniak hints that only those who do understand the
Riddle fall into a coma when he mentions those undergrads whose last word
was "aha!") Also, I think the same thing happened with the supervisor who
read Dizzard's files, found them to be unimportant, but upon further reading
fell into a coma.
Something must happen once the person understands the Riddle. Since the
computers don't suffer from the Riddle, then it can be said that they do not
understand it.
Does this show that humans are superior to computers?
Well, I'm not so sure of that. Paraphrasing Cherniak, if there exists a word
(the Riddle) that makes humans into machines--endlessly processing an endless
loop, to bring up an aforementioned idea--then there could be a word that
could make machines into thinking beings.
=Katherine Loo=
Quoting casmid@yorku.ca:
>
> Having read the "Riddle of the Universe" it would sem to me that the riddle
> is
> the Godel sentence. The individuals who lapsed into the irreversible
> trance/coma were somehow unable to see the truth of the Godel sentence. From
>
> Godel's theorem this would be indicative of a consistent, formal system ie
> (machine). Notably the computers them selves did not have the same reaction
> to
> the riddle. Does this in fact show that humans are a superior type of
> machine?
> ___________________________________________________________________
> This message was sent to the math3500 discussion list by casmid@yorku.ca .
>
___________________________________________________________________
This message was sent to the math3500 discussion list by Katherine Loo <in_limbo@yorku.ca> .
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