G÷del's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse

"G?del's Theorem has been used to argue that a computer can never be as smart as a human being because the extent of its knowledge is limited by a fixed set of axioms, whereas people can discover unexpected truths ... It plays a part in modern linguistic theories, which emphasize the power of language to come up with new ways to express ideas. And it has been taken to imply that you'll never entirely understand yourself, since your mind, like any other closed system, can only be sure of what it knows about itself by relying on what it knows about itself"- An Incomplete Education, by Judy Jones and William Wilson. A philosopher by training (PhD, University of Stockholm), Torkel Franz?n has for the past twenty years been active working in computer science (at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science) and teaching programming (at Lule? University of Technology). He is the author of a number of books, among them Inexhaustibility: