[FOM] The Lucas-Penrose Thesis

[Eray Ozkural]

On 10/9/06, Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropoulos at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Also, human programmers are in no way "oracles". Such machines
> > have been clearly depicted as "hypothetical" by Turing himself who
>
> And who say so? Copeland who has studied extensively Turing's writings
> would really disagree with such a statement. In addition, I did not say that
> humans are oracles, but that have the role of oracles in the debugging process.

I will reply to this part. I cannot know how Copeland has managed
to misread Turing's paper. However, it should also be fairly obvious
that humans do not have the role of oracles in the debugging process.
On the other hand, they do every non-trivial transformation in this process. At
any rate, if they had the role of oracles, they would _be_ oracles, but
most obviously they are not because the halting problem has infinite
information content, i.e. a finite brain cannot solve it. If, on the other
hand, you are one of the people who think they can solve the halting
problem, I challenge you to solve the twin primes conjecture with the
magical one second look.

Regards,

-- 
Eray Ozkural, PhD candidate.  Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo  Malfunct: http://myspace.com/malfunct
ai-philosophy: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ai-philosophy