the possibility that a necessary ingredient in solving really hard problems is spending a bunch of time simply not doing any explicit reasoning
I have a pet theory that there are literally physiological events that take minutes, hours, or maybe even days or longer, to happen, which are basically required for some kinds of insight. This would look something like:
First you do a bunch of explicit work trying to solve the problem. This makes a bunch of progress, and also starts to trace out the boundaries of where you’re confused / missing info / missing ideas.
You bash your head against that boundary even more.
You make much less explicit progress.
But, you also leave some sort of “physiological questions”. I don’t know the neuroscience at all, but to make up a story to illustrate what sort of thing I mean: One piece of your brain says “do I know how to do X?”. Some other pieces say “maybe I can help”. The seeker talks to the volunteers, and picks the best one or two. The seeker says “nah, that’s not really what I’m looking for, you didn’t address Y”. And this plays out as some pattern of electrical signals which mean “this and this and this neuron shouldn’t have been firing so much” (like a backprop gradient, kinda), or something, and that sets up some cell signaling state, which will take a few hours to resolve (e.g. downregulating some protein production, which will eventually make the neuron a bit less excitable by changing the number of ion pumps, or decreasing the number of synaptic vesicles, or something).
Then you chill, and the physiological questions mostly don’t do anything, but some of them answer themselves in the background; neurons in some small circuit can locally train themselves to satisfy the question left there exogenously.
I have a pet theory that there are literally physiological events that take minutes, hours, or maybe even days or longer, to happen, which are basically required for some kinds of insight. This would look something like:
First you do a bunch of explicit work trying to solve the problem. This makes a bunch of progress, and also starts to trace out the boundaries of where you’re confused / missing info / missing ideas.
You bash your head against that boundary even more.
You make much less explicit progress.
But, you also leave some sort of “physiological questions”. I don’t know the neuroscience at all, but to make up a story to illustrate what sort of thing I mean: One piece of your brain says “do I know how to do X?”. Some other pieces say “maybe I can help”. The seeker talks to the volunteers, and picks the best one or two. The seeker says “nah, that’s not really what I’m looking for, you didn’t address Y”. And this plays out as some pattern of electrical signals which mean “this and this and this neuron shouldn’t have been firing so much” (like a backprop gradient, kinda), or something, and that sets up some cell signaling state, which will take a few hours to resolve (e.g. downregulating some protein production, which will eventually make the neuron a bit less excitable by changing the number of ion pumps, or decreasing the number of synaptic vesicles, or something).
Then you chill, and the physiological questions mostly don’t do anything, but some of them answer themselves in the background; neurons in some small circuit can locally train themselves to satisfy the question left there exogenously.
See also “Planting questions”.