Brilliant! In other words, everything we know about the brain (or any physical system, for that matter) can be simulated with a Turing machine, because "knowing" in the scientific sense implies being able to produce a theory that can predict a behavior in a computable manner. But we may never understand enough of the brain to have such a theory in a sufficiently complete state that we may say "we understand how the brain works"?
Yes this is the basic idea : science requires consistency. At least when you say something about nature it has to be correct (hence validation by experiments). But there is no way you can be sure that you are complete (maybe your theory can't explain some phenomena because they can't be described using formalism).
Believing that nature has to be able to be completely formalized is, at best, a leap of faith like saying God exists (or not exists). It appears suspicious because it would imply that the whole universe could be condensed in a very small subpart of itself : the book in which you have written the formal system describing *everything*.
Brilliant! In other words, everything we know about the brain (or any physical system, for that matter) can be simulated with a Turing machine, because "knowing" in the scientific sense implies being able to produce a theory that can predict a behavior in a computable manner. But we may never understand enough of the brain to have such a theory in a sufficiently complete state that we may say "we understand how the brain works"?
Yes this is the basic idea : science requires consistency. At least when you say something about nature it has to be correct (hence validation by experiments). But there is no way you can be sure that you are complete (maybe your theory can't explain some phenomena because they can't be described using formalism).
Believing that nature has to be able to be completely formalized is, at best, a leap of faith like saying God exists (or not exists). It appears suspicious because it would imply that the whole universe could be condensed in a very small subpart of itself : the book in which you have written the formal system describing *everything*.
Kinda like we know the set of all languages is uncountable but all we can't come up with is recursive languages...