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Comment by danielbln | Hacker News Reader

It might be a pink elefant that lives in the 7th dimension and contains every person's consciousness in the shape of a magic peanut. Or it may not.

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Legitimately made me lol. Thank you for being the rational one. When topics of the mind come up even people who are normally smart and rational can turn into quacks.

Topics of the mind are self-referential and so make most people self-select into three groups, in order of decreasing religious fanaticism:

1. Monistic physicalists. Here because of the school. We studied physics so everything looks like a nail: reality is made out of atoms, consciousness is an illusion, etc. The most vocal and fanatic crowd in tech.

2. Cartesian dualists. Soul vs. body, etc. Here because of the church. Surprisingly, there can be some degrees of rigour here. In tech circles, members are on average a bit less reluctant to switch to another group.

3. Monistic idealists. Here via critical reasoning, so could switch to another group if there was a good reason. See not only topics of the mind as self-referential, but every other topic as implicitly mind-referential.

There is nothing religiously fanatical about seeing that everything in science appears to be explained by our laws of physics, and concluding that human consciousness probably is, too. In our history we've seen time and time again that humans will believe in magic and higher powers and every single time it's turned out to be just physics, just biology, just chemistry...

And here we have something mysterious and poorly understood (and poorly defined...): consciousness. And again as always the quacks line up with their magic to explain it all. Higher dimensions! Quantum effects! We're all in the matrix and only our minds are real! Even though we can clearly see that so many mental processes can be influenced with drugs, with hormones, with magnetic fields, or with a scalpel. Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon.

> In our history we've seen time and time again that humans will believe in magic and higher powers

Indeed; and these days in tech circles it is the magic of atoms (or strings, or whatever entities you like). The fact that physics by design makes no claims about objective existence of anything does not stop them from thinking that somehow all those entities (which are merely metaphors, ways to create models that are legible to our minds) must exist in some fundamentally objective sense; neither does the fact that we cannot directly access them other than via consciousness, or that the entire idea of empirical observation hinges on the existence of the observer.

> Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon.

It had been explained [away] already—since you appear to hold physicalism, you may also like illusionist theories of consciousness.

Soul fracture theory?

I saw that pink elefant once after a lewd night of heavy drinking and potential hallucinogenics. His name is Frank, and he says hello!

It's no coincidence that Frank has his own beer brand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huyghe_Brewery, so that we may commune with him.

Once I asked a KI and this was the answer:

> In a parallel universe where pineapples are the dominant species, intergalactic pizza deliveries are made by flying spaghetti monsters riding unicycles made of marshmallows. Meanwhile, sentient clouds debate the meaning of life with philosophical penguins on top of rainbow-colored mountains made of bubblegum.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says that pink elephants may indeed well exist.

no it doesn't.

This is only true if you reject the pink elephant argument as straw man in the first place.

As long as you consider it a figure of speech (a charitable interpretation indeed), then existence of pink elephants (or ghosts, or what have you) is exactly the implication of the theory in context of scientific method.

Gödel's theorem deals with the axioms of mathematics. the scientific method deals with the physical universe. a small part of mathematics is useful in describing the universe, but most of it isn't.

The theorem is about formal systems in general. You may want to take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#Science_of_c..., though I recommend to read, for example, GEB to inderstand the implications of the theorem.

That's really not what it says. Godel's incompleteness theorem applied to AI would say something like 'There are statements about the model's behavior we cannot prove without relying on statements that cannot to be proven' (this is because obviously the AI algorithms are based on elementary arithmetic).

The theorem applies beyond elementary arithmetic to any formal system. If we try to be rigorous in that way with our models of the universe, the theorem would say that no matter how formally sound our models are they will have to be incomplete, incorrect, or non-provable; that is, we would not be able to rule out the existence of consciousness or figurative pink elephants.

(And if they are not formally sound in that way, our models can be safely considered to be incorrect/incomplete simply because they are not formally sound in that way.)

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