Michael Nielsen: belief

Transcript context

…This is such an interesting take. I want to better understand it. One way to understand it is that there might be some things which are so fundamental and have such a wide collision area against reality that they’re inevitably going to discover, like general relativity. Numbers. Numbers. Of all the intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy… Maybe that number is one. Well, actually, arguably we’ve already increased the number. But of all of those, what fraction have the concept of counting? It does seem very natural. What fraction have discovered the idea of some kind of decimal place system? Interesting question. Maybe we’re missing something really simple and obvious that’s actually way better than that. What fraction got there immediately? What fraction had to go through some other intermediate state? What fraction uses linear representations versus a two-dimensional or a three-dimensional representation? I think the answers to these questions are just not at all obvious. It’s a lot of design freedom. On theoretical computer science, this is going to be extremely naive and arrogant, but I took Scott Aaronson’s class on complexity theory, and I was by far the worst student he’s ever had. What I remember is there was this period, in which you were one of the pioneers, where we figured out the class of problems that quantum computers can solve and how it relates to problems that classical computers can solve. It was groundbreaking. It’s crazy that this works. Since then… There’s literally this website called Complexity Zoo which lists out all the complexity classes. If you have this complexity class with this kind of oracle, it’s equivalent to this other class. It feels like we’re building out that taxonomy. There are a couple ways to understand what you’re saying. One, maybe you disagree with me that this is actually what’s happened with this field. Another is that while that might happen to any one field, who would’ve thought in 1880 that computer science, other than Babbage, was going to be a thing in the first place? We’re underestimating how many more fields there could be. Or maybe you think both, or maybe a third secret thing. I’d be curious.…

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