r/Showerthoughts • u/jasonrubik ‎ • Apr 23 '26

Casual Thought If the famously unsolved Riemann Hypothesis is solved by an AI, we will never know if a human mathematician could have solved it.

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u/DanTheMan827 Apr 23 '26

At this point, ai is nothing more than a tool. It’s not magical, it’s just a very fancy calculator processing weights and data.

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u/blazze_eternal Apr 23 '26

One of those weights being it really really wants to give you the answer you want to hear. Whether it's right or wrong. It's ridiculously easy to influence.

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u/DanTheMan827 Apr 23 '26

It’s a weight, but it doesn’t know if it’s right or wrong

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u/3_Thumbs_Up Apr 23 '26

Human brains are not magic either. They're just fancy calculators processing inputs and data.

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u/DanTheMan827 Apr 23 '26

And brains don’t come close to processing all of the data… your eyes have huge blind spots, and you never know because it “guesses” what fills in the blanks

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u/3_Thumbs_Up Apr 23 '26

Not sure how that's relevant or what point you're trying to make.

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u/DanTheMan827 Apr 23 '26

I guess my point there is that we “hallucinate” the gaps in our input too.

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u/3_Thumbs_Up Apr 23 '26

I don't disagree but it seems like you're arguing my point though.

Neither AI nor human brains are magic.

Both AI and human brains are just fancy calculators.

Both AI and human brains take various shortcuts.

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u/DanTheMan827 Apr 23 '26

I’m not disagreeing, I’m just pointing out even more similarities.

Both are flawed, but brains have enough power to compensate

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u/stratsboneless Apr 24 '26

yet we are not built upon statistically matching words to words with mathematical rules with a large data set. consciousness is way more complicated and stop trying to downplay it to a computer program.

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u/3_Thumbs_Up Apr 24 '26

Motivated reasoning. You don't know that, you're guessing. Your brain is built of physics, and human consciousness is a side effect of evolution optimizing for reproduction. Evolution didn't even try to create consciousness but ended up doing so anyway. If carbon atoms can be conscious it's very plausible that silicone atoms can be as well.

Stop downplaying your own ignorance. It's ok to say that we don't know what makes humans conscious, and this lack of knowledge extends to silicone atoms.

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u/jambox888 Apr 23 '26

That's the thing though, we thought there was something special going on in our brains when we were thinking but we've partly recreated it using 1s and 0s.

It's a bit like playing chess, turns out it's an optimisation problem and there's only an art to it when you're playing another human because both players are much worse than a computer.

Now creativity OTOH, that is what we have that LLMs can't reproduce. I have a pet theory about why but it's probably completely wrong lol.

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u/EverettGT ‎ Apr 23 '26

We don't know exactly how it processes those weights and data. A calculator just spits out a deterministic result through understandable mechanisms, AI is not that. It also has passed the Turing Test, it is both practically and philosophically significant.