People have speculated that the main thing that sets the human mind apart from the minds of all other animals is its capacity for recursive thought. A handful of animals have been observed to use tools, but humans are the only species ever observed to use a tool to create another tool. This recursion created all of civilization.

But that recursive thought has a limit. For example: You can think about yourself thinking. With a little effort, you can probably also think about yourself thinking about yourself thinking. But you can't go much deeper.

With the advent of modern computing, we (as a species) have finally created a tool that can "think" recursively, to arbitrary levels of depth. If we ever do create a superintelligent AGI, I'd wager that its brilliance will be attributable to its ability to loop much deeper than humans can.

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lelanthran 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> With the advent of modern computing, we (as a species) have finally created a tool that can "think" recursively, to arbitrary levels of depth.

I don't know what this means; when a computer "thinks" recursively, does it actually?

The recursion is specified by the operator (i.e. programmer), so the program that is "thinking" recursively is not, because the both the "thinking" and the recursion is provided by the tool user (the programmer), not by the tool.

> If we ever do create a superintelligent AGI, I'd wager that its brilliance will be attributable to its ability to loop much deeper than humans can.

Agreed.

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black_knight 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Off topic, but I remember as a child I would play around with that kind of recursive thinking. I would think about something, then think about that I thought about it, then think about that I though about thinking about it. Then, after a few such repetitions I would recognise that this could go on forever. Then I would think about the fact that I recognise that this could go on forever, then think about that… then realise that this meta pattern could go on forever. Etc…

Later I connected this game with the ordinals. 0,1,2… ω, ω+1, ω+2,…,2ω,2ω+1,2ω+2,…,3ω,…,4ω,…,4ω,…, ω*ω,…

	▲	irthomasthomas 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Tesla used to experience visual hallucinations. Any time an object was mentioned in conversation it would appear before him as if it where real. He started getting these hallucinations randomly and began to obsess about their origins. Over time he was able to trace the source of every hallucination to something which he had heard or seen earlier. He then noticed that the same was true for all of his thoughts, every one could be traced to some external stimuli. From this he concluded that he was an automata controlled by remote input. This inspired him to invent the first remote control vehicle.