PEDRO NAVARRO ARTONI

Kurt Gödel, in his famous Gibbs Lecture, will teach one of his most philosophical classes, in which he will present for the first time the argument that became known as “Gödel's disjunction”. This disjunction that states that “either the human mind infinitely surpasses the power of a machine, or there are absolutely undecidable mathematical propositions” is the net result of Gödel’s analysis of his own incompleteness theorems, from the emergent concept of Turing machine and the Church-Turing thesis. What is special about this disjunction is its inevitably Platonist and/or anti-materialist character. This is due to the presence of a purely ideal element in both members of the disjunction, which means that we don’t even need to know which of the members is in fact the case so that we can conclude anti-materialism from it. Our objective is, therefore, to investigate the bases and assumptions that support Gödel's disjunction, so that we can conclude how legitimate the anti-materialist thesis arising from the disjunction is.