Scott Aaronson eulogizes strange loops; davidad pushes back on his complexity-theory lens
burny_tech · x · 2026-09-04
Andrew Curran relayed Scott Aaronson's argument delivering a eulogy for the idea that strange loops and self-referentiality were the secret of intelligence. davidad responded with respect but argued Aaronson is trapped in a complexity-theory worldview — assuming a stack of self-attention layers obviously has nothing to do with self-referentiality just because it has a finite depth limit. The exchange touches the long-running debate over whether Transformers can host self-referential structure.
Related event: Scott Aaronson Explores Self-Referentiality in LLMs(3 posts)→
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