I have a mysterious feeling that it would have been much, much easier for me to have a smart conversation about the intelligence explosion with Douglas Hofstadter if I’d talked to him before Godel, Escher, Bach was published. People here have been questioning what we think we know and how we think we know it, which is right and proper; but does anyone really think this is not true?
I have a mysterious feeling that it would have been much, much easier for me to have a smart conversation about the intelligence explosion with Douglas Hofstadter if I’d talked to him before Godel, Escher, Bach was published. People here have been questioning what we think we know and how we think we know it, which is right and proper; but does anyone really think this is not true?
It seems surprising to me that Hofstadter would have difficulty having such a conversation today (even with a grad student), but maybe you’ve tried.
(And, of course, I was surprised when you recounted that he thought Einstein belonged in the transhuman end of the intelligence spectrum.)
Did he think that? Or was it that Einstein was close to an upper bound on intelligence for any mind, artificial or otherwise?
ETA: Someone here once linked to a Usenet conversation in which Greg Egan expressed a similar view.
Well, either way, it’s surprising.