What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?
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Abstract (arXiv)
In this essay I will consider a sequence of questions. The first questions concern the biological function of intelligence in general, and cognitive prostheses of human intelligence in particular. These will lead into questions concerning human language, perhaps the most important cognitive prosthesis humanity has ever developed. While it is traditional to rhapsodize about the cognitive power encapsulated in human language, I will emphasize how horribly limited human language is - and therefore how limited our cognitive abilities are, despite their being augmented with language. This will lead to questions of whether human mathematics, being ultimately formulated in terms of human language, is also deeply limited. I will then combine these questions to pose a partial, sort-of, sideways answer to the guiding concern of this essay: what we can ever discern about that we cannot even conceive?
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 10 of its 146 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2022.
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References · 10
- 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
- 2017Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithmcited by 734
- 2021Why AI is Harder Than We Thinkcited by 41
- 2020What is important about the No Free Lunch theorems?cited by 9
- 2021The Implications of the No-Free-Lunch Theorems for Meta-inductioncited by 6
- 2019Magic: The Gathering is Turing Completecited by 5
- 2020Magic: the Gathering is as Hard as Arithmeticcited by 3
- 2021Cetacean Translation Initiative: a roadmap to deciphering the communication of sperm whalescited by 3
- 2017Constraints on physical reality arising from a formalization of knowledgecited by 2
- 2020Noisy Deductive Reasoning: How Humans Construct Math, and How Math Constructs Universescited by 1
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