On: Problems With Life Extension: The Brain

[dhs]

A Turing Machine is an idealized computer. But no computer/TM can find out which of the possible 61.519 4-state TMs can write the longest string of 1's on a blank tape before halting.

[xlnt → dhs]

A computer can try each TM one by one in the same way the humans did.

If you're talking about the halting problem now, humans also don't know whether the TM they are manually simulating will halt eventually.

And you still haven't said specifically what the thing is that the humans do and computers can't.

[dhs → xlnt]

No, a computer cannot do it, due to incompleteness (Once there was a man called Kurt Gödel...) Bringsjords experiment proves that humans can "hypercompute" uncomputable functions. The great majority of functions which exist are uncomputable.