Re: answers I'd like, part 2

From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Wed Nov 14 2007 - 13:03:06 MST


Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> Would the neurological processes generating intuition necessarily be
> any more difficult to copy than the ones generating, say, mental
> arithmetic or visual perception?

Yes, I think that is very likely. Mental arithmetic and visual perception
are both processes that solve well defined problems and are probably
isolated to one or two brain modules. In contrast, our ability to generate
intuitions and especially our ability to reason about these questions
probably involve many more brain modules, and we don't even know how to
clearly define the problems being solved.

Also, for visual perception, you can do animal experiments. How do you even
begin to reverse engineer human-specific neurological processes before we
have nanotechnology and/or uploading?

Or, to mention another problem, for mental arithmetic and visual perception,
you can have someone do mental arithmetic or look at something while you
watch his neurons fire. But telling someone "now come up with a new insight
into the nature of induction" isn't likely to get you anywhere.
 



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