John Lucas (philosopher)
John Randolph Lucas (18 June 1929 – 5 April 2020) was a British philosopher. Biography. 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 two books 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. Philosophical contributions. Free will. 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. Space, time and causality. 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"