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RolfAndreassen comments on We won't be able to recognise the human Gödel sentence - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 05 October 2012 02:46PM

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Comment author: RolfAndreassen 05 October 2012 05:06:39PM 0 points [-]

Now suppose humanity does figure out that it's living in a simulation, and figures out the source code of P. Then it knows its own Gödel sentence.

Wait, why does that follow?

Comment author: Benja 05 October 2012 05:38:26PM 1 point [-]

I postulated that "given the output of program P, you can easily find in it the list of theorems found so far" -- by which I meant that it's easy to write a program that takes the output of P until step t, and returns everything written on the list up to time t (was the confusion that it wasn't clear that this was what I meant?). If you also know the source of P, you have a program that for every t returns the list up to time t, so it's easy to write down the predicate L(n) of PA that says "there is some time t such that the proposition with Gödel number n appears on the list at time t." By the diagonal lemma, there is a sentence G such that

PA |- G <-> not L(the Gödel number of G).

G is humanity's Gödel sentence, and there is no trouble in writing it down inside the simulation, if you know the source of P and the source of the program that reads the list from P's output.

(Well, technically, G is one Gödel sentence, and there could be other ways to write it that are harder to recognize, but one recognizable Gödel sentence should be enough for the "no AI" proof to go through if it were a well-formed argument at all, and I don't think Stuart's claim is just that there are some obfuscated ways to write a Gödel sentence that are unrecognizable.)