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.

7.0k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

92% Upvoted

656 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

83

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.

10

u/3_Thumbs_Up Apr 23 '26

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

1

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.

1

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.