Appeals to intuition are suspect. Intuitions vary from person to person, and even those that seem least assailable sometimes lead us astray.

In an SFI Community Lecture on April 9 in Santa Fe, author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein considered intuition as an essential part of our moral and philosophical thinking, described how mathematicians of the last century tried to eliminate all appeals to intuitions, and showed how Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems can be viewed as proof that we can't get along without them.

Watch this lecture (82 minutes)

Read the article in the Santa Fe New Mexican (April 8, 2012)

Goldstein is a recent 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.

This lecture was generously underwritten by Dr. Penelope Penland. Support for SFI's 2012 lecture series is provided by Los Alamos National Bank.

SFI’s community lectures offer a window into the Institute’s research to understand the common patterns in physical, computational, biological, and social complex systems that underlie the most profound issues facing science and society today. This year’s lecture series focuses on human individual and social behavior. 

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