Soul, Freedom and Truth: Their Relationships with Noetical Algorithmic Incompleteness

Abstract

Since the act of free will must affect synaptic events, where does the energy necessary to induce action potentials of cerebral neurons and synaptic webs come from? The exercise of free will requires the cerebral hardware to be flexible, i.e. it must have an indeterministic character in order to allow a free act to orient this instability in making a choice, thereby reducing the entropy of the system, but a preliminary free act which wants to expend a certain amount of energy is needed, that is, another free act should be involved anterior to, and different from, the orientation of the instability itself, and this also needs a related expenditure of energy, this in turn requiring its own free act to take place… One cannot escape the resort to the infinite. A thermodynamic machine has to dissipate the energetic equivalent of one bit of information to make a choice between two equiprobable events, whereas an immaterial agent does not, nor does it violate any physical law if it is capable of acting on a substrate within the limit of its quantum mechanical indeterminacy. A second parallel aspect in the present discussion has to do with the consequences of Gödel's theorems of incompleteness concerning mathematics and everything which is subject to logical laws. Gödel has definitively proved that for any logical system there are infinite truths which are not provable, but which the human intellect sees them just as truths. Noetical algorithmic incompleteness together with the necessary separation of the notions of demonstrableness (object language) and truth (metalanguage) speaks of a dualism supporting creativity and truth and freedom. In fact, if human actions, in the absence of any involuntary impulse, should always be connected to logico-mathematical inferences, they should be always completely predictable.