Croatian Journal of Philosophy

Volume 3, Issue 3, 2003

30 years of the Philosophy of Science Course in Dubrovnik

Yesterday’s Algorithm
Penrose and the Gödel Argument

Roger Penrose is infamous for defending aversion of John Lucas’s argument that Gödel’s incompleteness results show that the mind cannot be mechanistically (or, today, computationally) explained. Penrose’s argument has been subjected to a number of criticisms which, though correct as far as they go, leave open some peculiar and troubling features of the appeal to Gödel’s theorem. I try to reveal these peculiarities and develop a new criticism of the Penrose argument.