William Hahn
speaker
749 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Apr 2025
William Hahn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That we have this idea of universal machine, but um
You know, there's this idea of a Turing tar pit that just because everything's possible doesn't mean anything's practical with, say, like a Turing machine or some other abstract computer.
And so the idea is what computer languages would be sufficient, right?
So we could, as a as an analogy, we could say basic is not sufficient sufficiently powerful enough of a computer language to instantiate the internet or something like that.
Or it might be, but it would require orders of magnitude and more complexity in the in the coding.
Whereas something like C ended up being sufficient to kind of create the modern software stack.
And so I suspect now that English is not quite as universal as I previously thought it was.
Uh this is why I've been looking at things like musical languages and uh conlangs and uh esoteric languages to to get some ideas about where could we put these unthinkable thoughts.
Um
Because when you when you learn those new languages, you can suddenly think in new, maybe more compact ways.
You don't have to have a whole sentence.
You can have just sort of one one neuron.
But but like you said, I would argue that there are no untranslatable words.
And if there were, you couldn't talk about them, like at all.
You wouldn't even be able to mention that they were untranslatable in some sense.
And so that would be in the space of sort of maybe not unthinkable thoughts, but uncommunicatable thoughts.
And
One of the ideas I've been thinking about this year is
the set of ideas for which you can take it apart, like Legos, right?
They have the Lego lag lab upstairs.
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