Viewed: 75 - Published at: 3 years ago

The reason that I have concentrated on non-computability, in my arguments, rather than on complexity, is simply that it is only with the former that I have been able to see how to make the necessary strong statements. It may well be that in the working lives of most mathematicians, non-computability issues play, if anything, only a very small part. But that is not the point at issue. I am trying to show that {mathematical} understanding is something that lies beyond computation, and the Godel {-Turing} argument is one of the few handles that we have on that issue. It is quite probable that our mathematical insights and understandings are often used to achieve things that could in principle also be achieved computationally-but where blind computation without much insight may turn out to be so inefficient that it is unworkable {cf. 3.26}. However, these matters are much more difficult to address than the non-computability issue.

( Roger Penrose )
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