jimrandomh comments on Greg Egan and the Incomprehensible - Less Wrong

16 Post author: XiXiDu 19 May 2011 10:38AM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 19 May 2011 12:13:34PM 17 points [-]

A singularity may be "comprehensible" in the sense that if I spent 10^100 times the lifetime of the universe writing in an unlimited supply of notebooks, I would eventually produce a pile of 10^10 notebooks containing something that might be called an understanding. But I can't do that, and saying that I could do it "in principle" seems awfully disingenuous.

The real observation here seems to be that intelligence falls on a continuous spectrum with computing and storage. But that doesn't mean there aren't tools to use computation and storage more efficiently which require much greater intelligence to discover. Nor does it imply that there are no phase transitions on that spectrum. There could even be interesting things which require more computation and storage to understand than exists in the entire universe.

Comment author: atucker 21 May 2011 01:27:40AM -1 points [-]

A singularity may be "comprehensible" in the sense that if I spent 10^100 times the lifetime of the universe writing in an unlimited supply of notebooks, I would eventually produce a pile of 10^10 notebooks containing something that might be called an understanding.

I think Hutter's work is about how "compression is intelligence". I can somewhat follow this post, but not on a deep technical level.