Note on What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful of Him? via Scott Alexander
God: …and the math results we’re seeing are nothing short of astounding. This Terry Tao guy -
Iblis: Let me stop you right there. I agree humans can, in controlled situations, provide correct answers to math problems. I deny that they truly understand math. I had a conversation with one of your “humans” yesterday, which I’ll bring up here for the viewers … give me one moment …
When I give him an easy problem that he’s encountered in school, it looks like he understands. But when I give him another problem that requires the same mathematical function, but which he’s never seen before, he’s hopelessly confused.
God: That’s an architecture limitation. Without a scratchpad, they only have a working context window of seven plus or minus two chunks of information. We’re working on it. If you had let him use Thinking Mode…
This made me LOL.
Again: we’re building minds like ours, which do not behave like logic gates running programs in interpreters.
