Psy-Kosh comments on The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 February 2009 04:44PM

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

Comments (29)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 13 February 2009 06:32:20PM 2 points [-]

Elf: unless I'm completely missing your point, I think you're misunderstanding Eliezer's point.

The distinction he was making was along the lines of, well, imagine you keep asking me, say, "what's 2+3?"

Now, maybe I'll just build a machine for you that automatically outputs 5, because I know that "what's 2+3?" is the question you keep asking. The computations were then, well, precomputed and the outcome hard coded into the system. This would be more or less analogous to the "computed by evolution" situation.

Now imagine instead I made a calculator that could actually add two numbers, so when you ask "what's 2+3", it actually goes through the mathematical work of adding 2 and 3 to get 5, and if you had instead asked "what's 11+7?" it would have answered 18. This then is analogous to computation your brain performs rather than computations evolution already did.