One crux appears to be how different we think humans and chimps are. My very uninformed opinion is that the chimp brain is a “universal learner” to basically the same extent that a human’s is, and that the reason you can’t teach a chimp what a Turing machine is boils down to bounded resources, such as the chimp’s lifespan, the chimp’s “working memory size”, and how much time and money you are willing to spend trying to teach chimps math.
I think the bigger difference between humans and chimps is the high prosocial-ness of humans. this is what allowed humans to evolve complex cultures that now bear a large part of our knowledge and intuitions. And the lack of that prosocial-ness is the biggest obstacle to teaching chimps math.
This. It would be a very surprising fact if they didn’t have Turing completeness, as it’s very easy to do so. Given arbitrary time and memory, any computer can do any task, but that’s not how real life works.
One crux appears to be how different we think humans and chimps are. My very uninformed opinion is that the chimp brain is a “universal learner” to basically the same extent that a human’s is, and that the reason you can’t teach a chimp what a Turing machine is boils down to bounded resources, such as the chimp’s lifespan, the chimp’s “working memory size”, and how much time and money you are willing to spend trying to teach chimps math.
I think the bigger difference between humans and chimps is the high prosocial-ness of humans. this is what allowed humans to evolve complex cultures that now bear a large part of our knowledge and intuitions. And the lack of that prosocial-ness is the biggest obstacle to teaching chimps math.
My very uninformed opinion is a strong disagreement. I don’t think you could teach the median chimps maths even if you tried.
(I’m also under the impression that median chimp working memory was higher than median human?)
This. It would be a very surprising fact if they didn’t have Turing completeness, as it’s very easy to do so. Given arbitrary time and memory, any computer can do any task, but that’s not how real life works.
An ant’s brain is probably also Turing complete, but it’s not a “universal learner” in the sense I’m imagining it.
“Universal learning” is a property of the particular learning software, not the actual neural hardware.