Because there’s a long chain of undiscovered abstractions between the abstractions we have now and the abstractions needed to solve such problems
If there’s a guaranteed sequential , non acyclic, stack of abstractions, with just a few missing, you’re playing on easy mode.
Philosophical problems are hard because of circularities...we don’t know which of logic, epistemology, ontology, etc, is for fundamental....and can’t figure it out without establishing a starting point.
Well, yes, if you can’t conceptualize the solution because it’s too large, you don’t know what building blocks go into it, and you don’t even necessarily know in which direction to build the bridge/what frameworks to develop/what sub-problems to solve. Indeed, that’s probably where most of the difficulty lies, especially in pre-paradigmic fields.
It’s even more stark if we view it in terms of individual researchers, and not the entire civilization. Any given human has access to only a subset of the conceptual toolbox of the civilization, and if some problem in Domain A can be solved by a tool from a distinct Domain B, it might be a long time before a specialist with knowledge of both comes around; or alternatively, before Domain A people re-invent the relevant tool already present in Domain B.
Still, this sort of cross-domain bleed-through is more of a “low-hanging fruit”, in the sense that if a problem is very famous, most of our civilization’s tools have already been tried on it, in every combination that makes sense. The bottleneck then is genuine conceptual engineering.
Well, yes, if you can’t conceptualize the solution because it’s too large,
It might be to big for a brain, but it also might be inherently circular. (A closed loop can be small) How would you know which? What guarantee do you have that it’s a stack of abstractions?
Remember, all forms of engineering are easy mode compare to science, which is easy compared to philosophy.
The bottleneck then is genuine conceptual engineering.
If there’s a guaranteed sequential , non acyclic, stack of abstractions, with just a few missing, you’re playing on easy mode.
Philosophical problems are hard because of circularities...we don’t know which of logic, epistemology, ontology, etc, is for fundamental....and can’t figure it out without establishing a starting point.
Well, yes, if you can’t conceptualize the solution because it’s too large, you don’t know what building blocks go into it, and you don’t even necessarily know in which direction to build the bridge/what frameworks to develop/what sub-problems to solve. Indeed, that’s probably where most of the difficulty lies, especially in pre-paradigmic fields.
It’s even more stark if we view it in terms of individual researchers, and not the entire civilization. Any given human has access to only a subset of the conceptual toolbox of the civilization, and if some problem in Domain A can be solved by a tool from a distinct Domain B, it might be a long time before a specialist with knowledge of both comes around; or alternatively, before Domain A people re-invent the relevant tool already present in Domain B.
Still, this sort of cross-domain bleed-through is more of a “low-hanging fruit”, in the sense that if a problem is very famous, most of our civilization’s tools have already been tried on it, in every combination that makes sense. The bottleneck then is genuine conceptual engineering.
It might be to big for a brain, but it also might be inherently circular. (A closed loop can be small) How would you know which? What guarantee do you have that it’s a stack of abstractions?
Remember, all forms of engineering are easy mode compare to science, which is easy compared to philosophy.
Unless it’s circularity.