Yeah, thanks as well, engaging discussion.

What Godel proved is that there are some questions that can never be answered

I think that’s a fairly common misconception. What Gödel proved was that there isn’t one single formal system in which we can derive everything. It doesn’t really lead to the conclusion that questions can’t be answered. There is an infinite amount of formal systems, and Gödel doesn’t rule out the possibility of proving something with one of the countless other, different systems, starting out with different axioms. And as I said, this is a limitation to formal logic systems and not to reality.

uncomputability

Yes, that’s another distinct form of undecidability. There are decision problems we can’t answer in finite time with computers.

I think it is a bit of a moot point, as there are lots of impossible things. We have limited resources available, so we can only ever do things with what we have available. Then we have things like locality and I don’t even know what happens 15km away from me because I can’t see that far. Physics also sets boundaries. For example we can’t measure things to perfection and can’t even do enough measurments for complex systems. And then I’m too heavy to fly on my own and can’t escape gravity. So no matter how we twist it, we’re pretty limited in what we can do. And we don’t really have to resort to logic problems for that.

To me, it’s far more interesting to look at what that means for a certain given problem. We human can’t do everything. Same applies to knowledge, physics calculations and AI. At the point we build it, it’s part of the real world and subject to the same limitations which apply to us as well. And that’s inescapable. You’re definitely right, there are all these limitations. I just don’t think it’s specific to anything in particular. But it certainly means we won’t ever build any AI which knows everything and can do everything. We also can’t ever simulate the entire universe. That’s impossible on all levels we discussed.

Its now proven that some enzymes use quantum tunneling to accelerate chemical reactions crucial for life.

I mean if quantum physics is the underlying mechanism of the universe, then everything “uses” quantum effects. It boils down to the question if that model is useful to describe some process. For example if I drop a spoon in the kitchen, it always falls down towards the floor. There are quantum effects happening in all the involved objects. It’s just not useful to describe that with quantum physics, regular Newtonian gravity is better suited to tell me something about the spoon and my kitchen… Same is with the enzymes and the human brain. They exist and are part of physics, and they do their thing. Only question is which model do we use to describe them or predict something about them. That might be quantum physics in some cases and other physics models in other cases.

I acknowledge there’s currently no direct experimental evidence for quantum effects in neural computation, and testing these hypotheses presents extraordinary challenges. But this isn’t “hiding God in the gaps.” It’s a hypothesis grounded in the demonstrated principles of quantum biology and chaos theory.

It certainly sounds like the God of the gaps to me. Look at the enzyme example. We found out there’s something going on with temperature we can’t correctly describe with our formulas. Then scientists proposed this is due to quantum tunneling and that has to be factored in… That’s science… On the other hand no such thing happened for the human brain. It seems to be perfectly fine to describe it with regular physics, it’s just too big/complex and involved to bridge the gap from what the neurons do to how the brain processes information. And then people claimed there’s God or chaos theory or quantum effects hidden inside. But that’s wild unfounded claims and opinion, not science. We’d need to see something which doesn’t add up, like how it happened with the enzymes. Everything else is religious belief. (And turns out we already simulated the brain of a roundworm and a fruit fly, and at least Wikipedia tells me the simulation is consistent with biology… Leading me to believe there’s nothing funny going on and it’s just a scalability problem.)