Talk:Mechanism (philosophy)

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this article needs help. everything written is uncited and not trustworthy.

[edit] "Godelian argument" is not clear

The argument says:

Some scholars have debated over what, if anything, Gödel's incompleteness theorems imply about anthropic mechanism. Much of the debate centers on whether the human mind is equivalent to a Turing machine, or by the Church-Turing thesis, any finite machine at all. If it is, and if the machine is consistent, then Gödel's incompleteness theorems would apply to it.

Now it is not clear what does it mean for a machine to be "consistent" (consistency is a property about first order theories not machines). I think this point should be expained better.--Pokipsy76 14:51, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Well, the idea is that a theory can be represented by a machine that given a first order sentence as an input returns true/false iff that sentence is in the theory (or does not halt if it is undecidable). This perhaps can be explained better... -SpuriousQ (talk) 08:35, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Ok, a theory can be represented by a machine but not every machine do represent a theory so what does it mean for a generic machine to be consistent?--Pokipsy76 08:51, 18 April 2007 (UTC)