It’s easy to imagine minds with superior working memory able to handle much more complicated models and tasks. [..] In particular, your later arguments on serial causal depth seem like they would benefit from explicitly considering working memory
Strong, albeit anecdotal, agreement.
Working memory capacity was a large part of what my stroke damaged, and in colloquial terms I was just stupid, relatively speaking, until that healed/retrained. I was fine when dealing with simple problems, but add even a second level of indirection and I just wasn’t able to track. The effect is at least subjectively highly nonlinear.
Incidentally, I think this is the strongest argument against Egan’s General Intelligence Theorem (or, alternatively, Deutsch’s “Universal Explainer” argument from The Beginning of Infinity). Yes, humans could in theory come up with arbitrarily complex causal models, and that’s sufficient to understand an arbitrarily complex causal system, but in practice, unaided humans are limited to rather simple models. Yes, we’re very good at making use of aids (I’m reminded of how much writing helps thinking whenever I try to do a complicated calculation in my head), but those limitations represent a plausible way for meaningful superhuman intelligence to be possible.
I hope never to forget the glorious experience of re-inventing the concept of lists, about two weeks into my recovery. I suddenly became indescribably smarter.
In the same vein, I have been patiently awaiting the development of artificial working-memory cognitive buffers. As you say, for practical purposes this is superhuman intelligence.
Strong, albeit anecdotal, agreement.
Working memory capacity was a large part of what my stroke damaged, and in colloquial terms I was just stupid, relatively speaking, until that healed/retrained. I was fine when dealing with simple problems, but add even a second level of indirection and I just wasn’t able to track. The effect is at least subjectively highly nonlinear.
Incidentally, I think this is the strongest argument against Egan’s General Intelligence Theorem (or, alternatively, Deutsch’s “Universal Explainer” argument from The Beginning of Infinity). Yes, humans could in theory come up with arbitrarily complex causal models, and that’s sufficient to understand an arbitrarily complex causal system, but in practice, unaided humans are limited to rather simple models. Yes, we’re very good at making use of aids (I’m reminded of how much writing helps thinking whenever I try to do a complicated calculation in my head), but those limitations represent a plausible way for meaningful superhuman intelligence to be possible.
I hope never to forget the glorious experience of re-inventing the concept of lists, about two weeks into my recovery. I suddenly became indescribably smarter.
In the same vein, I have been patiently awaiting the development of artificial working-memory cognitive buffers. As you say, for practical purposes this is superhuman intelligence.
Gaaah. I hate brain damage.
Congratulations on your discovery, anyway.
Yeah, you and me both, brother.