Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Greg Egan and the Incomprehensible - Less Wrong

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (23)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 May 2011 05:36:39AM 24 points [-]

You know how there are people who, even though you could train them to carry out the steps of a Universal Turing Machine, you can't manage to teach them linear algebra, so there are problems they can't even represent compared to people who know linear algebra? I can't exhibit to you specifically what it is for obvious reasons, but there's going to be lots of stuff like that where a human brain just can't grok it, even though - like a sufficiently well-trained dog - we could be trained to carry out the operations of a UTM that did grok it, given infinite time and paper. You could train a chimp to simulate a human brain given infinite time and paper, I've little doubt. So what? There was still a huge jump in qualitative ability.