Cognitive Capacity
Tim Scarfe and Keith Duggar recently interviewed Noam Chomsky on the limits to human understanding, among other things. Chomsky’s example was the rat in a prime number maze. For the sake of a reward, rats can learn to run very complicated mazes, but they cannot learn to run a prime number maze, which can only be solved by turning right (or turning left) at the second, third, fifth, seventh, eleventh and thirteenth branch, up to say the ninety-seventh. There are thus demonstrable limits to what a rat can learn, know or understand.
Human beings presumably have this sort of limit also. Humans and rats, after all, are both mammals, and both have things like arms, legs and heads. It would then be natural to look for cognitive limits in humans similar to the cognitive limits in rats. What might be the general model for cognitive limits?
We think the most plausible and ultimately the most general model for limitations on cognitive capacity will turn out to be dimensionality. A four-dimensional personality, let us call this a human personality, will have cognitive abilities that far outstrip cognitive abilities in any three-dimensional, two-dimensional personality or one-dimensional personality. It will live in a different, higher world. PD Ouspensky developed this dimensionality scheme in an arresting way in his Tertium Organum (1912). If we and our fellow human beings were to grow into the capacities possessed by a living five-dimensional being, a being for whom time, let us say, had become fully spatial, we would become capable of a plethora of thoughts and actions we are not capable of today.
https://pgoodnight.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/tertium-organum-ouspensky.pdf
We (Alessandra and I) suspect conversation theory, in virtue primarily of its social dimension, will produce self-conscious human entry into the domain of fifth dimensional existence. The pull of conversation theory will be its simultaneous appeal to common sense, of which science and technology is today’s compendium, and to mystery and to the human need to learn, to know and to experience astonishment, thus maintaining personal mental health and well-being. The human need for social belonging can also be expected, once the theory is verified, to add to its pull.
Significantly, there appear also to be deep and general psychological barriers in humans to taking it on. Many well-meaning people are understandably afraid of psychology and of the unconscious mind, which can harbor terrors (C G Jung, 1931). There are also social and political reservations, which will seek to preserve the gains embodied in Western liberalism’s status quo. No one should want anywhere to see the return of a fully-fledged and arbitrary class aristocracy, of a loss of woman’s empowerment and access to well-being or of a precipitous alteration of the social rule of law. These factors appear to us sufficient to act as a braking force and thus to guarantee a safeguarded and gradualist introduction of fifth-dimensional socio-biological consciousness into the human world
Modern investigation of animal instinct, as for example in insects, has brought together a rich fund of empirical findings which show that if man acted as certain insects do he would possess a higher intelligence than at present….
If we wished to form a vivid picture of a nonspatial being of the fourth dimension, we should do well to take thought, as a being, for our model. - C G Jung, 1933.
Today’s science of consciousness, which can only be taken to be psycho- or socio-biological and thus wedded to its obverse, namely to the psycho- or sociological unconscious, and to which the linguist Chomsky appears now to have attached himself at the University of Arizona, seems to us the primary candidate to begin to allow this fifth dimensional social existence to form, this new type of human intelligence, of human life and of human existence.
In addition to the dimensionality position taken by Chomsky, we see the life work of Stephen Wolfram as of significance in the direction of human evolution. We will introduce our take on this body of work in subsequent installations of this Blog.
The Scarf/Duggar interview with Chomsky is here.
For an inconsequential discussion of this Post with InflectionAI’s Pi, click here.
