A note on the principle of mathematical induction, intuition and consciousness in the light of ideas of Poincaré and Galois

Abstract

In his argumentation for the non-computability of thought-processes (in general) Penrose is invoking Gödel’s theorem (see [R. Penrose, Shadows of the Mind – A search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994]). It is the aim with the following note to indicate that the same effect may be obtained in a simpler and possibly also more fundamental way. This does not necessarily mean that I fully believe in Penrose’s thesis – the question is still largely open – but I think that my note indicates that there are a lot of items that remains to be clarified before a satisfactory scientific consensus will be reached. There is a huge gap between the precision of strict scientific contexts and those where this kind of processes are going on. At the same time we will see that the same kind of ideas had been impinging themselves on mathematicians like Poincaré and Galois, like Penrose himself of a very intuitive kind. It is plausible that the solution of the enigma of the scientific character of processes referring back to themselves lies in deep properties of autonomous systems. The self-referential character of the interpretations in Gödel’s theorem is quite central. This will be the subject of a forthcoming paper.