To be clear: when I say "knowing things", I mean "concepts". Think of "dogs", and writing down everything you know about dogs. I suppose that could fill at least 2 pages, maybe 10 pages of writing, and then you've exhausted everything you know about dogs. That would count as "knowing one thing" or "knowing one concept". How many times could you repeat that? Well, what do you know about cows? That they eat grass instead of meat, have multiple stomachs, chew cud, and that's about it. Once you know about dogs, cows are more or less the same thing, with minor variations. That really doesn't count as "knowing more". Maybe 10% on top of what you already know about dogs.
Now repeat this process. How many things in life could you exhaustively write about? Do you really think you can write more than a few thousand 10-page essays? Simply writing down that much requires 10 pages x 1000 things = 10K pages. A typical book is 200 to 300 pages long (War and Peace is 600 pages? Maybe 800?). Writing down that much would require writing 10K/300 = 30 books. How long would it take you to write 30 books? Without repeating something that wasn't written down earlier? How many books has the most prolific author written? Of those books that this prolofic author wrote, how many weren't variations on the same theme, or invented fiction? The limit of human knowledge is somewhere near there. Most humans do not contain more than 10 or 20 books of knowledge; geniuses might get up to 100 or maybe more. But that's the limit. Figure maybe ten pages per topic or concept, and that is the limit of how much one person can know (over a 50-year timespan...) --linas p.s. don't confuse "writing" with "knowing". I've written maybe 1K pages of math research (or much more??), and honestly, I remember maybe only 10% of what I wrote. The rest I forgot - the formulas, the details. I remember the general plotline, not the details of the plot, of what I've written. Simply because I wrote a lot is not the same thing as "knowing" -- I can't effortlessly repeat that work. It would require lots of new, hard work. On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 10:30 PM, Linas Vepstas <linasveps...@gmail.com> wrote: > ?? > > I'm pretty sure I know a lot more than 10000 words. That is not at all > comparable to knowing 10000 things. Knowing 20000 words is comparable to > knowing maybe 500 things. How, exactly, are you measuring knowledge? > > --linas > > On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 3:47 PM, Alexey Potapov <pota...@aideus.com> > wrote: > >> >>> No human can remember 10000 of anything whatsoever. The human brain is >>> just simply not that big. >>> >> >> Please, stop making such stupid claims. This is so obviously wrong that >> I'm not sure if there is any sense to argue. "No human", "10000 of >> anything", "not that big"??? I will not refer to eidetic memory possessed >> also by some chess players... Just consider words. Normally, people use few >> thousands words, but writers use several tens thousands. Chinese writers >> can use more than 10000. Polyglots can speak more than 10 languages up to >> (or more than) 1000 in which. Not sure how exactly much foreign words they >> can remember, but even if it is just several thousands, it doesn't make a >> principal difference. So, can't humans remember 10000 words?.. >> > > > > -- > cassette tapes - analog TV - film cameras - you > -- cassette tapes - analog TV - film cameras - you -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "opencog" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to opencog+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to opencog@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/opencog. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencog/CAHrUA358egO2X1-3fqU77BtBJCa5ZHUhiix3eOiLJ2NcgZ2WQg%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
