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Human intelligence seems capable of anything to me

Published 10 May 2023

From Peter Cundall,Minneapolis, Minnesota, US

David Wolpert seems to think that there are limits to human cognition, and that such limits are related to language. I live opposite a park and watch dogs on leads get caught around trees. The dogs have no idea how to disentangle themselves, but the owners can do it easily because they have the intelligence to visualise the solution. To me, this has nothing to do with language(15 April, p 43).

Could we be stumped by a puzzle that a higher intelligence could solve easily? I suspect that when intelligence has reached a certain threshold, there is no puzzle that can’t be solved, even if it may take longer than for a higher intelligence. Human-level intelligence may even have to devise a computer code to do the work, but it is still our cognition that leads to a solution.

Issue no. 3438 published 13 May 2023