I’ve seen this quote before and always find it funny because when I read Greg Egan, I constantly find myself thinking there’s no way I could’ve come up with the ideas he has even if you gave me months or years of thinking time.
Yes, there’s something to that, but you have to be careful if you want to use that as an objection. Maybe you wouldn’t easily think of it, but that doesn’t exclude the possibility of you doing it: you can come up with algorithms you can execute which would spit out Egan-like ideas, like ‘emulate Egan’s brain neuron by neuron’. (If nothing else, there’s always the ol’ dovetail-every-possible-Turing-machine hammer.) Most of these run into computational complexity problems, but that’s the escape hatch Egan (and Scott Aaronson has made a similar argument) leaves himself by caveats like ‘given enough patience, and a very large notebook’. Said patience might require billions of years, and the notebook might be the size of the Milky Way galaxy, but those are all finite numbers, so technically Egan is correct as far as that goes.
Yeah good point—given generous enough interpretation of the notebook my rejection doesn’t hold. It’s still hard for me to imagine that response feeling meaningful in the context but maybe I’m just failing to model others well here.
I’ve seen this quote before and always find it funny because when I read Greg Egan, I constantly find myself thinking there’s no way I could’ve come up with the ideas he has even if you gave me months or years of thinking time.
Yes, there’s something to that, but you have to be careful if you want to use that as an objection. Maybe you wouldn’t easily think of it, but that doesn’t exclude the possibility of you doing it: you can come up with algorithms you can execute which would spit out Egan-like ideas, like ‘emulate Egan’s brain neuron by neuron’. (If nothing else, there’s always the ol’ dovetail-every-possible-Turing-machine hammer.) Most of these run into computational complexity problems, but that’s the escape hatch Egan (and Scott Aaronson has made a similar argument) leaves himself by caveats like ‘given enough patience, and a very large notebook’. Said patience might require billions of years, and the notebook might be the size of the Milky Way galaxy, but those are all finite numbers, so technically Egan is correct as far as that goes.
Yeah good point—given generous enough interpretation of the notebook my rejection doesn’t hold. It’s still hard for me to imagine that response feeling meaningful in the context but maybe I’m just failing to model others well here.