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From: Santa Fe Institute <de...@santafe.edu>
Date: April 9, 2012 8:39:47 AM MDT
To: inho...@santafe.edu, activities-annou...@santafe.edu, lectu...@santafe.edu
Subject: [Lectures] SFI Community Lecture — Tonight, April 9, 2012 •
7:30 p.m. • James A. Little Theater
*** SFI Community Lecture ***
Monday, April 9, 2012 • 7:30 p.m. • James A. Little Theater
Appealing to Intuitions:
Why We Can't Get Along Without Them
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
former SFI Miller Scholar, a research associate at Harvard
University, and author of both fiction and nonfiction works,
including The Mind-Body Problem; Incompleteness: The Proof and
Paradox of Kurt Gödel, and Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of
God: A Work of Fiction
Abstract: Appeals to intuitions have something suspect about them.
Intuitions can vary from person to person, and even those that seem
least assailable sometimes lead us astray, as the paradoxes of set
theory demonstrated. Mathematicians of the last century, in their
attempts to formalize mathematics, tried to eliminate all appeals to
intuitions, but Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems can be viewed as a
proof that we can’t get along without appealing to them. But the
entrenched practice of appealing to intuitions goes beyond
mathematics. Intuitions are an essential part of our moral and
philosophical thinking. But where do intuitions come from, and why
should we trust them? Does their fixed presence in our intellectual
and moral lives indicate the limits of rationality? Goldstein
explores these questions and others in her talk.
Generous support is provided by Los Alamos National Bank and Dr.
Penelope Penland
SFI Host: Ginger Richardson
http://www.santafe.edu/gevent/detail/public/783/
The Santa Fe Institute's mission is to foster a transdisciplinary
research community that endeavors to expand the boundaries of
scientific understanding. Its aim is to discover and comprehend the
common fundamental principles in physical, computational,
biological, and social systems that underlie many of the most
profound problems facing science and society today.
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