"A common misunderstanding is to interpret Gödel's first theorem as showing that there are truths that cannot be proved."
I've heard it stated that confusing way so many times in popular media. And then often follows quantum mechanics, and geniuses going mad, and the world is just your imagination... forever.
Agreed it has been abused. On the other hand, if you adhere to a computational theory of mind and see the mind as computation over a formal system, then it is saying something about the mind and the fact that some (true) sentences cannot be proven in that system, isn't it? It is a big if though.
(though maybe in a completely irrelevant sense of truth).
Just poking fun at the way these things are presented in pop.sci. media.
Anyway, talking over my head, I'm not shure formal systems are a good way of modelling the mind itself. Formal systems are (usually) considered consistent. The mind is not. Neither are neural nets. And it's interesting how neural nets, and other statistical models/algorithms that drop the requirement of always beeing right, seems more much more capable in certain practical matters.
Wow, is that what people actually think a "computational theory of mind" is? Look, just because every program can be trivially rewritten as some kind of formal proof system, doesn't mean that any given program meaningfully has the semantics of a formal proof system, let alone the mind.
