Professional software engineer, musician, gamer, stoic, democratic socialist

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I think you’re misunderstanding the incompleteness theorems.

    Gödel’s incompleteness theorems also apply to universe and consciousness

    Sure, if you assume the universe can be described by a computable formal system. Godel’s theorems apply only to computable formal systems.

    To briefly summarize Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, it states that a formal system cannot describe everything.

    That’s a gross oversimplification. It really says that (1) there are true statements about formal system S which cannot be proven within S and (2) S cannot prove its own consistency.

    This means that a Turing Machine will never be able to simulate our universe or replicate consciousness, and thus to replicate a human brain.

    You’ve previously assumed that the universe is a computable formal system. But all computable formal systems can be modeled as a Turing machine. This is a contradiction.

    However, it could be feasible with Quantum Computer that are not based on formal system.

    How would a quantum computer even work if it weren’t described by a formal system?








  • There should be some balanced path in the middle somewhere, but I haven’t stumbled across a formal version of it after all these decades.

    This is where experience is so valuable. It helps you know how much planning to do before you start building. Or sometimes if you need to build something before you can start planning (i.e. prototyping). You need to identify the most critical problems to solve for your given use case, and make sure you do just enough planning to solve those problems. Often that means anticipating future requirements and making sure your plan doesn’t put you on a path that’s incompatible with future requirements. But don’t completely solve the future problems yet; do just enough to convince yourself that you aren’t painting yourself into a corner.