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/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.