John Randolph Lucas FBA (18 June 1929 – 5 April 2020) was a British philosopher.
John Lucas | |
---|---|
Born | Guildford, England | 18 June 1929
Died | 5 April 2020 Somerset, England | (aged 90)
Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
Notable work | "Minds, Machines and Gödel" |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Analytic philosophy |
Institutions | Merton College, Oxford |
Academic advisors | R. M. Hare |
Main interests | Logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind |
Notable ideas | Gödelian argument Penrose–Lucas argument4 |
Website | users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/ |
Lucas was educated at Winchester College and then, as a pupil of R.M. Hare, among others, at Balliol College, Oxford. He studied first mathematics, then Greats (Greek, Latin, Philosophy and Ancient History), obtaining first class honours in both. He sat for Finals in 1951, and took his MA in 1954. He spent the 1957–58 academic year at Princeton University, studying mathematics and logic. For 36 years, until his 1996 retirement, he was a Fellow and Tutor of Merton College, Oxford, and he remained an emeritus member of the University Faculty of Philosophy. He was a Fellow of the British Academy.
Lucas is perhaps best known for his paper "Minds, Machines and Gödel," arguing that an automaton cannot represent a human mathematician, attempting to refute computationalism.
An author with diverse teaching and research interests, Lucas wrote on the philosophy of mathematics, especially the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the philosophy of mind, free will and determinism, the philosophy of science including one book on physics co-authored with Peter E. Hodgson, causality, political philosophy, ethics and business ethics, and the philosophy of religion.
The son of a Church of England clergyman, and an Anglican himself, Lucas described himself as "a dyed-in-the-wool traditional Englishman." He had four children (Edward, Helen, Richard and Deborah) with Morar Portal, among them Edward Lucas, a former journalist at The Economist.
In addition to his philosophical career, Lucas had a practical interest in business ethics. He helped found the Oxford Consumers' Group, and was its first chairman in 1961–3, serving again in 1965.
Lucas (1961) began a lengthy and heated debate over the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems for the anthropic mechanism thesis, by arguing that:
His argument was strengthened by the discovery by Hava Siegelmann in the 1990s that sufficiently complex analogue recurrent neural networks are more powerful than Turing Machines.
Lucas wrote several books on the philosophy of science and space-time (see below). In A treatise on time and space he introduced a transcendental derivation of the Lorenz Transformations based on Red and Blue exchanging messages (in Russian and Greek respectively) from their respective frames of reference which demonstrates how these can be derived from a minimal set of philosophical assumptions.
In The Future Lucas gives a detailed analysis of tenses and time, arguing that "the Block universe gives a deeply inadequate view of time. It fails to account for the passage of time, the pre-eminence of the present, the directedness of time and the difference between the future and the past" and in favour of a tree structure in which there is only one past or present (at any given point in spacetime) but a large number of possible futures. "We are by our own decisions in the face of other men's actions and chance circumstances weaving the web of history on the loom of natural necessity"
This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. (August 2020) |
This article uses material from the Wikipedia English article John Lucas (philosopher), which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license ("CC BY-SA 3.0"); additional terms may apply (view authors). Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
®Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wiki Foundation, Inc. Wiki English (DUHOCTRUNGQUOC.VN) is an independent company and has no affiliation with Wiki Foundation.