First Post

Hello everyone. The name of my blog is supposed to sort-of rhyme, if you use the correct pronunciation for Gödel. "Turtles" refers to the "turtles all the way down" line from Stephen Hawking's book and elsewhere. The line occurs in the description of an idea for a cosmology in which the world rests on an infinite stack of turtles. While this idea is ostensibly ridiculous, Gödel's incompleteness theorems indicate to us that it might be unwise to expect resolution and closure in a quest for mathematical understanding of the fundamental nature of reality. Here are some related topics:

• Artificial Intelligence - I don't think a computer will ever pass the Turing test. Furthermore, I don't think we will ever completely understand human/animal thought in terms of any predictive scientific theory.
• Mystery of Life - My above statement on human/animal thought implies that life will also never be completely understood. This makes me think that the theory of Intelligent Design has some validity in a general sense.
• Theory of Everything - I don't think a physical theory of everything that can be finitely stated is possible.

All three of my above listed beliefs are motivated in part by Gödel's theorems and computability theory.

I am probably going to stick to responding to other bloggers for the time being, so don't expect a lot of new posts, but I welcome responses to this one.

-Hal