From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri Oct 04 2002 - 01:55:51 MDT
People seem smart enough that most adults lie on the
positive side of an interesting watershed: I think
it likely that most adults and some children have
reached the threshold of universal intelligence.
I will call an entity universally intelligent if it
is possible for that entity to understand *anything*
if provided enough time.
We are aware that a million-fold increase in the
thinking rate of a human would produce an entity
significantly more intelligent than any people
alive today. So consider some theoretical result
that aliens comprehend because of their vast super-
human intelligence, and the question, possibly
debated among said intelligences, of whether any
human beings are smart enough to *eventually*
understand the result.
I believe that most people, perhaps around age 14
or 16, acquire the intelligence necessary. At that
point they learn to abstract the consequences of
previous rumination, and to condense that thinking
into verbal shorthand---sentences that capture to
a significant degree the output of their thinking
to that point.
This conjecture reminds me of the Church-Turing
thesis that anything computable in any sort of
general sense is effectively computable (i.e.,
by a Turing Machine or general purpose computer).
In that case also one looks in vain for systems
or procedures that can compute something which
cannot be computed by Turing machines.
Lee
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