Epstein Secrets

sense of free will and creativity is an illusion. In Dennett’s worldview, Andrew Wiles is a special purpose machine that was always destined to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. I believe this model is flawed. It is my aim in this book to show you why. Indeed I am going to go further and argue all human creati

s. Some things are simply not computable. Computers can do many useful things, but they cannot discover new mathematical theorems, such as a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. In 1996, Andrew Wiles succeeded in finding a solution to this problem. This presents a paradox, solved only if we conclude Andrew Wil

abbage — but he was the first to fully understand its power. When we talk about computers today we mean machines, but it is worth noting computers in Turing’s time were more often humans using pencil and paper. The mechanical computers before Turing were elementary at best. Rudimentary calculating machi

not Turing complete and his Analytical Engine has never been built. 19" Century Calculators HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015706 Mind over Computer 17 In 1935, Turing was made a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and became interested in whether mathematical proofs could be found automatically. He wanted to know

could be used as an oracle, capable of answering almost any question imaginable. I could, for example, write a program that says: for every index in Fermat’s puzzle try every number and halt if you find a solution greater than 2. Now if I run my halt program on this program and it states ‘will crash; I w

ery number and halt if you find a solution greater than 2. Now if I run my halt program on this program and it states ‘will crash; I will have solved Fermat’s Last Theorem! Do you see why? If we give ‘Halt’ an input: a program we are interested in, along with some data, it will tell us if the program fin

more complex than they first appear. They are infinite, yet there are different infinities, and they have meaning. The smallpox example above and the Turing numbers we will discover shortly suggest numbers do have meaning independent of culture and language. The next two chapters will show us what happens

away their secrets. The Enigma machine was an elegant compromise between a truly unbreakable code and a simple cipher. Unfortunately for the Germans, Turing was on the side of the Allies. In the 1930s almost all mathematics, accounting, and code-breaking were performed by humans using pencil and paper. I

e in a Universe where information comes into existence through the creative endeavors of human beings. When Andrew Wiles discovered his solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem, he did something a computer cannot do and demonstrated non-computational thought. But there is an alternative explanation put forward

se could be preprogrammed with every theory we could ever discover within it. (There would be no arbitrary problems.) This argument neatly sidesteps Turing’s theorem by specifying there is no such thing as an arbitrary problem - a random problem picked from the infinite set of problems. At the same time,