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thomblake comments on Rationality Quotes - September 2009 - Less Wrong
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-H.P. Lovecraft
It could be true, but how would anyone know?
Well it may be technically false that the human mind has this inability, but on the other hand the human mind has a remarkable ability to avoid correlating many of its contents. "Belief is not closed under implication!"
Consistency checking is NP-complete... "Compartmentalization" may be a rationalist sin, but you can't learn anything efficiently if you have to keep checking every fact against every other fact.
That's a pretty strong claim. Is there a proof? Or did you just mean that consistency checking is in NP?
It's worse than that, consistency checking is undecidable. This is implied by Gödel's second incompleteness theorem.
Well, 3-SAT is NP-complete, anyway. If consistency checking in mere propositional logic is already NP-complete, then it can't be any easier to do consistency checking to real-world arguments that require predicate logic or other, even more complicated systems to express.
Godel Escher Bach has a section that talks about this.
One of my favorite quotes but it is definitely anti-rationalist in its orientation.