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xamdam comments on The Curve of Capability - Less Wrong
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Interesting. Can you elaborate or link to something?
I'm not Eliezer, but will try to guess what he'd have answered. The awesome powers of your mind only feel like they're about "symbols", because symbols are available to the surface layer of your mind, while most of the real (difficult) processing is hidden. Relevant posts: Detached Lever Fallacy, Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles.
Thanks.
The posts (at least the second one) seem to point that symbolic reasoning is overstated and at least some reasoning is clearly non-symbolic (e.g. visual).
In this context the question is whether the symbolic processing (there is definitely some - math, for example) gave pre-humans the boost that allowed the huge increase in computing power, so I am not seeing the contradiction.
Speech is a kind of symbolic processing, and is probably an important capability in mankind's intellectual evolution, even if symbolic processing for the purpose of reasoning (as in syllogisms and such) is an ineffectual modern invention.
Susan Blackmore argues that what originally caused the "huge increase in optimization power" was memes - not symbolic processing - which probably started up a bit later than the human cranium's expansion did.