What was Gödel's position regarding "thinking machines?" Did he think it possible for machines to eventually have thought?
By: Christina at: 7th December, 2009
Status:
Answered
Answer:
I don't think so.
Possible impact of Gödel’s results on the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and
on Platonism might be a matter of dispute. Gödel himself suggested that the human mind
cannot be a machine and that Platonism is correct. He said somewhere that "Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine".
Most recently Roger Penrose has argued that "the Gödel’s results show that the whole programme of artificial intelligence is not realizable, that creative mathematicians do not think in a mechanic way, but that they often have a kind of insight into the Platonic realm which exists independently from us". (Gödel society conference in Brno, Czech Republic, 2006.)
Gödel’s doubts about the limits of formalism were certainly influenced by Brouwer who criticized formalism in the lecture presented at the University of Vienna in 1928. Gödel however did not share Brouwer’s intuitionism based on the assumption that mathematical objects are created by our activities. For Gödel as a Platonic realist mathematical objects exist independently and we discover them. On the other hand he claims that our intuition cannot be reduced to Hilbert’s concrete intuition on finitary symbols, but we have to accept abstract concepts like well defined mathematical procedures that have a clear meaning without further explication. His proofs are constructive and therefore acceptable from the intuitionist point of view.
For Goedel, these mathematical procedures are neither mental nor syntactic objects, and machines can operate only with syntactic objects, symbols. Moreover, machines lack some qualia needed to understand procedures.