Paul P. Budnik Jr. wrote:
> The brain and nervous system evolved so an organism could control its
> actions and predict their consequences. Evolutionary theory implies that the
> organism will attempt to choose actions most beneficial to itself, its
> offspring and other closely related individuals.
> 
> In the 1930's, Goedel proved that no consistent nontrivial mathematical
> system could be complete. One consequence is that, even in an ideal
> deterministic universe where all the laws and initial conditions are known,
> it is not possible to always predict the consequences of ones choices. 

I'm unaware of this implication and would appreciate a reference or two
if you have some in mind.  My understanding of Godel is that, strictly
speaking, it demonstrates that mathematical reasoning can not be
formalized, i.e., reduced to rules, principles, computations, etc.
More generally, it suggests that reasoning itself is not a formal,
rule driven, algorithmic process, that its NOT a matter of logic,
or certainly not a matter of logic alone.  Surprisingly enough, this
is more or less implicit in David Hume's (1739) contention that "all
forms of reason are nothing but comparing", suggesting a notion of
reasoning that might be considered more ANAlogical than logical in
nature.  In terms of the famous syllogism, 'All men are mortal..
blah blah blah, the heart of reasoning, or at least of what philosophers
might refer to as ampliative inference, lies in THE DISCOVERY of the
category "man" (Pierce's abductive reasoning), with the identification
of Socrates as a member of said category with attendant properties
a trivial matter more akin to remembering than reasoning in the full
blown ampliative inference sense of the term.

PR
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