Topics Mind

Question This is a follow up on http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/question/51, whether the mind can understand how the mind works. In Alexander George's response, he said, "it 'follows' from Gödel's result that there is some basic fact about our minds that we cannot ever know, that we could not in principle access." But is that fact necessarily about the how the mind works, or could it be about some other aspect of mind? As a second question, if we were told what it was, we might not be able to prove it for ourselves, but what would keep us from understanding it in its stated form?

Accepted:
October 11, 2005

Comments

Very loosely and given all the assumptions of my original response, the "basic fact about our minds" in question is the fact that the rules that constitute our minds do not produce conflicting results. Is that a fact "about how the mind works" or "about some other aspect of mind"? That's too vague a question to answer, I think. The fact in question is (given all the assumptions, etc.) a basic property that our minds possess but one that we could not know that they possess. We could "understand" this property, in the sense that we could formulate the claim that says that our minds possess that property. But our minds would not have the means to establish that the claim is true.