You can construct a system consisting of a planet’s worth of paper and pencils and an immortal version of yourself (or a vast dynasty of successors) that can understand it, if nothing else because it’s turing complete and can simulate the AGI. this is not the same as you understanding it while still remaining fully human. Even if you did somehow integrate the paper-system sufficiently that’d be just as big a change as uploading and intelligence-augmenting the normal way.
The approximation thing is why I specified digits mattering. It wont help one bit when talking about something like gödel numbering.
The approximation thing is why I specified digits mattering.
I understand, my point was simply that “understanding” and “holding in your head at one time” are not at all the same thing. “There are numbers you can’t remember if I tell them to you” is not at all the same claim that “there are ideas I can’t explain to you.”
Neither of your cases are unexplainable- give me the source code in a high level language, instead of binary and I can understand it. If you give me the binary code and the instruction set I can convert it to assembly and then a higher level language, via disassembly.
Of course, i can deliberately obfuscate an idea and make it harder to understand, either by encryption or by presenting the most obtuse possible form, that is not the same as an idea that fundamentally cannot be explained.
“There are numbers you can’t remember if I tell them to you” is not at all the same claim that “there are ideas I can’t explain to you.”
But they might be related. Perhaps there are interesting and useful concepts that would take, say, 100,000 pages of English text to write down, such that each page cannot be understood without holding most of the rest of the text in working memory, and such that no useful, shorter, higher-level version of the concept exists.
Humans can only think about things that can be taken one small piece at a time, because our working memories are pretty small. It’s plausible to me that there are atomic ideas that are simply too big to fit in a human’s working memory, and which do need to be held in your head at one time in order to be understood.
You can construct a system consisting of a planet’s worth of paper and pencils and an immortal version of yourself (or a vast dynasty of successors) that can understand it, if nothing else because it’s turing complete and can simulate the AGI. this is not the same as you understanding it while still remaining fully human. Even if you did somehow integrate the paper-system sufficiently that’d be just as big a change as uploading and intelligence-augmenting the normal way.
The approximation thing is why I specified digits mattering. It wont help one bit when talking about something like gödel numbering.
I understand, my point was simply that “understanding” and “holding in your head at one time” are not at all the same thing. “There are numbers you can’t remember if I tell them to you” is not at all the same claim that “there are ideas I can’t explain to you.”
Neither of your cases are unexplainable- give me the source code in a high level language, instead of binary and I can understand it. If you give me the binary code and the instruction set I can convert it to assembly and then a higher level language, via disassembly.
Of course, i can deliberately obfuscate an idea and make it harder to understand, either by encryption or by presenting the most obtuse possible form, that is not the same as an idea that fundamentally cannot be explained.
But they might be related. Perhaps there are interesting and useful concepts that would take, say, 100,000 pages of English text to write down, such that each page cannot be understood without holding most of the rest of the text in working memory, and such that no useful, shorter, higher-level version of the concept exists.
Humans can only think about things that can be taken one small piece at a time, because our working memories are pretty small. It’s plausible to me that there are atomic ideas that are simply too big to fit in a human’s working memory, and which do need to be held in your head at one time in order to be understood.