A thought occurred to me the other day when reading a book on (among other things) superstring theory and particle physics.
The sentence that sparked the thought was “But fortunately it doesn’t look like we are anywhere near the limit of our mental ressources”. It was said in reference to humans trying to understand the fundamental rules of the universe.
1) Humans figure it out eventually. We are so clever.
2) There is an ultimate explanation, but it’s beyond human comprehension.
3) There is no ultimate explanation. Only a never ending recursion of more and more fundamental rules. I believe in 1 or 2. For reasons no better than why people believe in god, I guess. I don’t have very strong feelings about it, but I think there are some very simple rules at the bottom of it all. My thought was this:
In case theory 2 is right, I am wondering whether people might pull off the same stunt they have done when coming to the limits of their other ressources. When humans came to the limit of their physical strength, they built machines to do tasks they could not. Such as cranes for lifting.
When using a crane for lifting something, you command it to do your bidding, which you are not physically fit to do. The crane does what you want (if you are good at controlling it) and you end up with the result; Heavy object moved from point A to point B.
You are not actually doing the lifting yourself. You just pose the problem to your aid (the crane) and get the result in return (the moving). I wonder if it would be possible to map this onto the problem of (hypothetically) coming to the limits of human comprehension.
If humans where to come to the limits of their mental abilities, could they create something which would work like the mental equivalent of a crane?
Humans might not be able to spot some relations between things, simply because of not being able to grasp things that are happening in 26 dimensions or 10 dimensions.
Could they maybe build machines that could help them “think” about problems and infer relations that a human mind simply could not make, but which might be apparent to something that sees no difference between thinking about 3 dimensional space or 26 dimensional “space”.
It wouldn’t give a human understanding of the fundamental rules of the universe, but it would allow them to have the mental leverage of a tool which might be able to use these rules to provide an answer that is usable to the human mind. Even if we don’t know what’s behind the answer – that’s kind of what our subconscious does (if you believe in the parabrain theory). I don’t have the answers to the questions “does a machine need to be intelligent to compute relations between phenomenons happening in complex mathematical models that humans can’t fully comprehend?”. I just don’t think the answer is “of course!”.
Update: After writing the entry, I started thinking of things I had forgotten to put in it. Another question is “can humans build a machine that can “understand” more than they do. I.e. draw conclusions and make calculations on things that humans can’t wrap their mind around. It seems unlikely, but in a way we are already doing it. A computer, when simulating chaotic systems, is keeping track of a number of details and states that the human mind isn’t focused and stable enough to do. True, humans built the computers that are running the simulation, but there’s no engineer that has a total overview of what is going on everywhere in a computer. So, in a sense, the first step of machines are already here. They actually allow humans (when used correctly) to extend and support their mental powers. In some cases (like simulations) even supercede the human mind. Though still only in the number of details it can keep track of.
But as with the cranes that lift the pillars of large bridges into place, sometimes we have to build the tools that will build the tools first.