While each mind might have a maximum abstraction height, I am not convinced that the inability of people to deal with increasingly complex topics is direct evidence of this.
Is it that this topic is impossible for their mind to comprehend, or is it that they’ve simple failed to learn it in the finite time period they were given?
That might be true but I’m not sure it matters. For an AI to learn an abstraction it will have a finite amount of training time, context length, search space width (if we’re doing parallel search like with o3) etc. and it’s not clear how the abstraction height will scale with those.
Empirically, I think lots of people feel the experience of “hitting a wall” where they can learn abstraction level n-1 easily from class; abstraction level n takes significant study/help; abstraction level n+1 is not achievable for them within reasonable time. So it seems like the time requirement may scale quite rapidly with abstraction level?
While each mind might have a maximum abstraction height, I am not convinced that the inability of people to deal with increasingly complex topics is direct evidence of this.
Is it that this topic is impossible for their mind to comprehend, or is it that they’ve simple failed to learn it in the finite time period they were given?
That might be true but I’m not sure it matters. For an AI to learn an abstraction it will have a finite amount of training time, context length, search space width (if we’re doing parallel search like with o3) etc. and it’s not clear how the abstraction height will scale with those.
Empirically, I think lots of people feel the experience of “hitting a wall” where they can learn abstraction level n-1 easily from class; abstraction level n takes significant study/help; abstraction level n+1 is not achievable for them within reasonable time. So it seems like the time requirement may scale quite rapidly with abstraction level?