Keltham pauses, at least partially to catch his own mental breath.  He should probably call a break sometime soon, but he was working around to a point, some time earlier before the whole digression into Validity and first-order arithmetic, and he feels like it would be only polite to actually finish the digression and work around to what he meant to say, before then.  There's still some distance left to go before he can pop the stack - he wasn't actually expecting, on some wordless level, that it would take this long to teach teenagers first-order logic and how to axiomatize arithmetic.

"In saying all this, I'm jumping ahead in a dath ilani education and skipping over a number of exercises required to actually understand everything and a dozen dozen precautions we were given against common mistakes, some of which now seem pretty silly and obvious to me, but which might turn out to be a lot more necessary to otherwise unprepared minds, I don't know.  For example, if somebody throws a ball and you need to catch it, trying to translate your thoughts into predicate logic about the ball having the property of flying and this implying an eventual fall given gravity, is going to utterly fail to help you.  You would be, first of all, better off thinking in your mind's native wordless language that tries to visualize the ball's fall and run to there, because your native language is faster and the ball will fall before you can think of anything logical.  You would, second of all, be engaging in a particularly naive kind of jumping ahead of your real capabilities, by trying to translate your thoughts about the ball directly into a logic with a falling predicate.  What you would actually need to predict the ball's fall using serious math is calculus, and not simple calculus either; it would include terms like how the resistance of the air to the ball's flight changed with the ball's speed.  If you try to summarize all that by saying that the 'falling' predicate on the ball was true, when that 'falling' statement would be equally true if gravity was pulling on the ball a different amount or if the air was more resistant, you're throwing away details that actually matter in order to try to squeeze down the issue into predicate logic.  You wouldn't be absolutely certain about the ball, and managing uncertainty inside of mathematics is a whole separate topic I haven't broached to you.  Actually solving this using a full written-on-paper account of how conclusions about what's probably true, follow necessarily from some unnecessary premises you already believe about what's probably true, would require setting up a complicated problem in calculus and probability that would describe how to infer the ball's trajectory from what your eyes had seen of the ball.  And then translating that calculus problem into the more universal language of logic.  It is a whole lot easier to just run and catch the ball by thinking about it in your native brain's native style."

"I mean, maybe if you were a god you could solve the whole problem using logic - or not, I'm not sure how mentally powerful your gods are, actually.  And if you could, then you could get tossed into another plane of existence where gravity works differently, and rapidly recalculate how to catch flying balls from scratch and do that successfully on the first try, instead of having to relearn the preprogrammed rules your brain uses for that, with a lot of trying and failing.  But I am not a god, yet, and you are not gods, also possibly yet, and I doubt that any intelligence headbands we can afford in the foreseeable future will let us do it either.  So don't get ahead of yourselves just because logic is absolute, timeless, and universal; if you can't think fast enough to solve a problem using explicit logic, or if it would require humanly unmanageable huge problem statements even in principle, or if you simply don't know how, then all that absolute and timeless stuff won't help you.  The fact there exists a better method that gods or super-gods could use to solve a problem doesn't mean that you can solve it that way, or that you can get closer to the super-god's solution by using bad, clownlike, and tiny imitations of the outer forms of the ideal methods they'd use."

"I don't know if any of you actually needed me to say that, to be clear.  But it's the sort of thing they tell you when you're 8 years old, and you get into your head the idea that if logic is so great, you should be able to use it to crush your opponents at sportsball by making only sharply logical muscle movements.  I mean, actually they just let me make the mistake and lose the sportsball game, but then afterwards, that was what they told me when I asked what I'd been doing wrong and how to do it correctly."

Keltham pauses, at least partially to catch his own mental breath.  He should probably call a break sometime soon, but he was working around to a point, some time earlier before the whole digression into Validity and first-order arithmetic, and he feels like it would be only polite to actually finish the digression and work around to what he meant to say, before then.  There's still some distance left to go before he can pop the stack - he wasn't actually expecting, on some wordless level, that it would take this long to teach teenagers first-order logic and how to axiomatize arithmetic.

"In saying all this, I'm jumping ahead in a dath ilani education and skipping over a number of exercises required to actually understand everything and a dozen dozen precautions we were given against common mistakes, some of which now seem pretty silly and obvious to me, but which might turn out to be a lot more necessary to otherwise unprepared minds, I don't know.  For example, if somebody throws a ball and you need to catch it, trying to translate your thoughts into predicate logic about the ball having the property of flying and this implying an eventual fall given gravity, is going to utterly fail to help you.  You would be, first of all, better off thinking in your mind's native wordless language that tries to visualize the ball's fall and run to there, because your native language is faster and the ball will fall before you can think of anything logical.  You would, second of all, be engaging in a particularly naive kind of jumping ahead of your real capabilities, by trying to translate your thoughts about the ball directly into a logic with a falling predicate.  What you would actually need to predict the ball's fall using serious math is calculus, and not simple calculus either; it would include terms like how the resistance of the air to the ball's flight changed with the ball's speed.  If you try to summarize all that by saying that the 'falling' predicate on the ball was true, when that 'falling' statement would be equally true if gravity was pulling on the ball a different amount or if the air was more resistant, you're throwing away details that actually matter in order to try to squeeze down the issue into predicate logic.  You wouldn't be absolutely certain about the ball, and managing uncertainty inside of mathematics is a whole separate topic I haven't broached to you.  Actually solving this using a full written-on-paper account of how conclusions about what's probably true, follow necessarily from some unnecessary premises you already believe about what's probably true, would require setting up a complicated problem in calculus and probability that would describe how to infer the ball's trajectory from what your eyes had seen of the ball.  And then translating that calculus problem into the more universal language of logic.  It is a whole lot easier to just run and catch the ball by thinking about it in your native brain's native style."

"I mean, maybe if you were a god you could solve the whole problem using explicitly valid reasoning - or not, I'm not sure how mentally powerful your gods are, exactly.  And if you were a god and you could do that, then you could get tossed into another plane of existence where gravity works differently, and rapidly recalculate how to catch flying balls from scratch and do that successfully on the first try, instead of having to relearn the preprogrammed rules your brain uses for that through a lot of trying and failing.  But I am not a god, yet, and you are not gods, also possibly yet, and I doubt that any intelligence headbands we can afford in the foreseeable future will let us do it either.  So don't get ahead of yourselves just because logic is absolute, timeless, and universal; if you can't think fast enough to solve a problem using explicit logic, or if it would require humanly unmanageable huge problem statements even in principle, or if you simply don't know how, then all that absolute and timeless stuff won't help you.  The fact there exists a better method that gods or super-gods could use to solve a problem doesn't mean that you can solve it that way, or that you can get closer to the super-god's solution by using bad, clownlike, and tiny imitations of the outer forms of the ideal methods they'd use."

"I don't know if any of you actually needed me to say that, to be clear.  But it's the sort of thing they tell you when you're 8 years old, and you get into your head the idea that if logic is so great, you should be able to use it to crush your opponents at sportsball by making only sharply logical muscle movements.  I mean, actually they just let me make the mistake and lose the sportsball game, but then afterwards, that was what they told me when I asked what I'd been doing wrong and how to do it correctly."

Keltham pauses, at least partially to catch his own mental breath.  He should probably call a break sometime soon, but he was working around to a point, some time earlier before the whole digression into Validity and first-order arithmetic, and he feels like it would be only polite to actually finish the digression and work around to what he meant to say, before then.  There's still some distance left to go before he can pop the stack - he wasn't actually expecting, on some wordless level, that it would take this long to teach teenagers first-order logic and how to axiomatize arithmetic.

"In saying all this, I'm jumping ahead in a dath ilani education and skipping over a number of exercises required to actually understand everything and a dozen dozen precautions we were given against common mistakes, some of which now seem pretty silly and obvious to me, but which might turn out to be a lot more necessary to otherwise unprepared minds, I don't know.  For example, if somebody throws a ball and you need to catch it, trying to translate your thoughts into predicate logic about the ball having the property of flying and this implying an eventual fall given gravity, is going to utterly fail to help you.  You would be, first of all, better off thinking in your mind's native wordless language that tries to visualize the ball's fall and run to there, because your native language is faster and the ball will fall before you can think of anything logical.  You would, second of all, be engaging in a particularly naive kind of jumping ahead of your real capabilities, by trying to translate your thoughts about the ball directly into a logic with a falling predicate.  What you would actually need to predict the ball's fall using serious math is calculus, and not simple calculus either; it would include terms like how the resistance of the air to the ball's flight changed with the ball's speed.  If you try to summarize all that by saying that the 'falling' predicate on the ball was true, when that 'falling' statement would be equally true if gravity was pulling on the ball a different amount or if the air was more resistant, you're throwing away details that actually matter in order to try to squeeze down the issue into predicate logic.  You wouldn't be absolutely certain about the ball, and managing uncertainty inside of mathematics is a whole separate topic I haven't broached to you.  Actually solving this using a full written-on-paper account of how conclusions about what's probably true, follow necessarily from some unnecessary premises you already believe about what's probably true, would require setting up a complicated problem in calculus and probability that would describe how to infer the ball's trajectory from what your eyes had seen of the ball.  And then translating that calculus problem into the more universal language of logic.  It is a whole lot easier to just run and catch the ball by thinking about it in your native brain's native style."

"I mean, maybe if you were a god you could solve the whole problem using explicitly valid reasoning - or not, I'm not sure how mentally powerful your gods are, exactly.  And if you were a god and you could do that, then you could get tossed into another plane of existence where gravity works differently, and rapidly recalculate how to catch flying balls from scratch and do that successfully on the first try, instead of having to relearn the preprogrammed rules your brain uses for that through a lot of trying and failing.  But I am not a god, yet, and you are not gods, also possibly yet, and I doubt that any intelligence headbands we can afford in the foreseeable future will let us do it either.  So don't get ahead of yourselves just because logic is absolute, timeless, and universal; if you can't think fast enough to solve a problem using explicit logic, or if it would require humanly unmanageable huge problem statements even in principle, or if you simply don't know how, then all that absolute and timeless stuff won't help you.  The fact there exists a better method that gods or super-gods could use to solve a problem doesn't mean that you can solve it that way, or that you can get closer to the super-god's solution by using bad, clownlike, and tiny imitations of the outer forms of the ideal methods they'd use."  Gods seem like a surprisingly useful metaphor, now that he's in a world that has them; Keltham is a little surprised it wasn't a more common explanatory metaphor used in dath ilan.

"I don't know if any of you actually needed me to say that, to be clear.  But it's the sort of thing they tell you when you're 8 years old, and you get into your head the idea that if logic is so great, you should be able to use it to crush your opponents at sportsball by making only sharply logical muscle movements.  I mean, actually they just let me make the mistake and lose the sportsball game, but then afterwards, that was what they told me when I asked what I'd been doing wrong and how to do it correctly."

Keltham pauses, at least partially to catch his own mental breath.  He should probably call a break sometime soon, but he was working around to a point, some time earlier before the whole digression into Validity and first-order arithmetic, and he feels like it would be only polite to actually finish the digression and work around to what he meant to say, before then.  There's still some distance left to go before he can pop the stack - he wasn't actually expecting, on some wordless level, that it would take this long to teach grown teenagers first-order logic and how to axiomatize arithmetic.

"In saying all this, I'm jumping ahead in a dath ilani education and skipping over a number of exercises required to actually understand everything and a dozen dozen precautions we were given against common mistakes, some of which now seem pretty silly and obvious to me, but which might turn out to be a lot more necessary to otherwise unprepared minds, I don't know.  For example, if somebody throws a ball and you need to catch it, trying to translate your thoughts into predicate logic about the ball having the property of flying and this implying an eventual fall given gravity, is going to utterly fail to help you.  You would be, first of all, better off thinking in your mind's native wordless language that tries to visualize the ball's fall and run to there, because your native language is faster and the ball will fall before you can think of anything logical.  You would, second of all, be engaging in a particularly naive kind of jumping ahead of your real capabilities, by trying to translate your thoughts about the ball directly into a logic with a falling predicate.  What you would actually need to predict the ball's fall using serious math is calculus, and not simple calculus either; it would include terms like how the resistance of the air to the ball's flight changed with the ball's speed.  If you try to summarize all that by saying that the 'falling' predicate on the ball was true, when that 'falling' statement would be equally true if gravity was pulling on the ball a different amount or if the air was more resistant, you're throwing away details that actually matter in order to try to squeeze down the issue into predicate logic.  You wouldn't be absolutely certain about the ball, and managing uncertainty inside of mathematics is a whole separate topic I haven't broached to you.  Actually solving this using a full written-on-paper account of how conclusions about what's probably true, follow necessarily from some unnecessary premises you already believe about what's probably true, would require setting up a complicated problem in calculus and probability that would describe how to infer the ball's trajectory from what your eyes had seen of the ball.  And then translating that calculus problem into the more universal language of logic.  It is a whole lot easier to just run and catch the ball by thinking about it in your native brain's native style."

"I mean, maybe if you were a god you could solve the whole problem using explicitly valid reasoning - or not, I'm not sure how mentally powerful your gods are, exactly.  And if you were a god and you could do that, then you could get tossed into another plane of existence where gravity works differently, and rapidly recalculate how to catch flying balls from scratch and do that successfully on the first try, instead of having to relearn the preprogrammed rules your brain uses for that through a lot of trying and failing.  But I am not a god, yet, and you are not gods, also possibly yet, and I doubt that any intelligence headbands we can afford in the foreseeable future will let us do it either.  So don't get ahead of yourselves just because logic is absolute, timeless, and universal; if you can't think fast enough to solve a problem using explicit logic, or if it would require humanly unmanageable huge problem statements even in principle, or if you simply don't know how, then all that absolute and timeless stuff won't help you.  The fact there exists a better method that gods or super-gods could use to solve a problem doesn't mean that you can solve it that way, or that you can get closer to the super-god's solution by using bad, clownlike, and tiny imitations of the outer forms of the ideal methods they'd use."  Gods seem like a surprisingly useful metaphor, now that he's in a world that has them; Keltham is a little surprised it wasn't a more common explanatory metaphor used in dath ilan.

"I don't know if any of you actually needed me to say that, to be clear.  But it's the sort of thing they tell you when you're 8 years old, and you get into your head the idea that if logic is so great, you should be able to use it to crush your opponents at sportsball by making only sharply logical muscle movements.  I mean, actually they just let me make the mistake and lose the sportsball game, but then afterwards, that was what they told me when I asked what I'd been doing wrong and how to do it correctly."

Keltham pauses, at least partially to catch his own mental breath.  He should probably call a break sometime soon, but he was working around to a point, some time earlier before the whole digression into Validity and first-order arithmetic, and he feels like it would be only polite to actually finish the digression and work around to what he meant to say, before then.  There's still some distance left to go before he can pop the stack - he wasn't actually expecting, on some wordless level, that it would take this long to teach grown teenagers first-order logic and how to axiomatize arithmetic.

"In saying all this, I'm jumping ahead in a dath ilani education and skipping over a number of exercises required to actually understand everything and a dozen dozen precautions we were given against common mistakes, some of which now seem pretty silly and obvious to me, but which might turn out to be a lot more necessary to otherwise unprepared minds, I don't know.  For example, if somebody throws a ball and you need to catch it, trying to translate your thoughts into predicate logic about the ball having the property of flying and this implying an eventual fall given gravity, is going to utterly fail to help you.  You would be, first of all, better off thinking in your mind's native wordless language that tries to visualize the ball's fall and run to there, because your native language is faster and the ball will fall before you can think of anything logical.  You would, second of all, be engaging in a particularly naive kind of jumping ahead of your real capabilities, by trying to translate your thoughts about the ball directly into a logic with a falling predicate.  What you would actually need to predict the ball's fall using serious math is calculus, and not simple calculus either; it would include terms like how the resistance of the air to the ball's flight changed with the ball's speed.  If you try to summarize all that by saying that the 'falling' predicate on the ball was true, when that 'falling' statement would be equally true if gravity was pulling on the ball a different amount or if the air was more resistant, you're throwing away details that actually matter in order to try to squeeze down the issue into predicate logic - an amount of predicate logic that you find easy to handle, which is too little to actually solve the problem.  You also wouldn't be absolutely certain about the ball's position or trajectory, and managing uncertainty inside of mathematics is a whole separate topic I haven't broached to you.  Actually solving the ball's flight using a full written-on-paper account of how conclusions about what's probably true, follow necessarily from some unnecessary premises you already believe about what's probably true, would require setting up a complicated problem in calculus and probability that would describe how to infer the ball's trajectory from what your eyes had seen of the ball.  And if you wanted that said in pure logic with all premises spelled out, you'd have to axiomatize that calculus problem into the more universal language of logic.  It is a whole lot easier to just run and catch the ball by thinking about it in your native brain's native style."

"I mean, maybe if you were a god you could solve the whole problem using explicitly valid reasoning - or not, I'm not sure how mentally powerful your gods are, exactly.  And if you were a god and you could do that, then you could get tossed into another plane of existence where gravity works differently, and rapidly recalculate how to catch flying balls from scratch and do that successfully on your first try, instead of having to relearn the preprogrammed rules your brain uses for that through a lot of trying and failing.  But I am not a god, yet, and you are not gods, also possibly yet, and I doubt that any intelligence headbands we can afford in the foreseeable future will let us do it either.  So don't get ahead of yourselves just because logic is absolute, timeless, and universal; if you can't think fast enough to solve a problem using explicit logic, or if it would require humanly unmanageable huge problem statements even in principle, or if you simply don't know how, then all that absolute and timeless stuff won't help you.  The fact there exists a better method that gods or super-gods could use to solve a problem doesn't mean that you can solve it that way, or that you can get closer to the super-god's solution by using bad, clownlike, and tiny imitations of the outer forms of the ideal methods they'd use."  Gods seem like a surprisingly useful metaphor, now that he's in a world that has them; Keltham is a little surprised it wasn't a more common explanatory metaphor used in dath ilan.

"I don't know if any of you actually needed me to say that, to be clear.  But it's the sort of thing they tell you when you're 8 years old, and you get into your head the idea that if logic is so great, you should be able to use it to crush your opponents at sportsball by making only sharply logical muscle movements.  I mean, actually they just let me make the mistake and lose the sportsball game, but then afterwards, that was what they told me when I asked what I'd been doing wrong and how to do it correctly."

Keltham pauses, at least partially to catch his own mental breath.  He should probably call a break sometime soon, but he was working around to a point, some time earlier before the whole digression into Validity and first-order arithmetic, and he feels like it would be only polite to actually finish the digression and work around to what he meant to say, before then.  There's still some distance left to go before he can pop the stack - he wasn't actually expecting, on some wordless level, that it would take this long to teach grown teenagers first-order logic and how to axiomatize arithmetic.

"In saying all this, I'm jumping ahead in a dath ilani education and skipping over a number of exercises required to actually understand everything and a dozen dozen precautions we were given against common mistakes, some of which now seem pretty silly and obvious to me, but which might turn out to be a lot more necessary to otherwise unprepared minds, I don't know.  For example, if somebody throws a ball and you need to catch it, trying to translate your thoughts into predicate logic about the ball having the property of flying and this implying an eventual fall given gravity, is going to utterly fail to help you.  You would be, first of all, better off thinking in your mind's native wordless language that tries to visualize the ball's fall and run to there, because your native language is faster and the ball will fall before you can think of anything logical.  You would, second of all, be engaging in a particularly naive kind of jumping ahead of your real capabilities, by trying to translate your thoughts about the ball directly into a logic with a falling predicate.  What you would actually need to predict the ball's fall using serious math is calculus, and not simple calculus either; it would include terms like how the resistance of the air to the ball's flight changed with the ball's speed.  If you try to summarize all that by saying that the 'falling' predicate on the ball was true, when that 'falling' statement would be equally true if gravity was pulling on the ball a different amount or if the air was more resistant, you're throwing away details that actually matter in order to try to squeeze down the issue into predicate logic - an amount of predicate logic that you find easy to handle, which is too little to actually solve the problem.  You also wouldn't be absolutely certain about the ball's position or trajectory, and managing uncertainty inside of mathematics is a whole separate topic I haven't broached to you.  Actually solving the ball's flight using a full written-on-paper account of how conclusions about what's probably true, follow necessarily from some unnecessary premises you already believe about what's probably true, would require setting up a complicated problem in calculus and probability that would describe how to infer the ball's trajectory from what your eyes had seen of the ball.  And if you wanted that said in pure logic with all premises spelled out, you'd have to axiomatize that calculus problem into the more universal language of logic.  It is a whole lot easier to just run and catch the ball by thinking about it in your native brain's native style."

"I mean, maybe if you were a god you could solve the whole problem using explicitly valid reasoning - or not, I'm not sure how mentally powerful your gods are, exactly.  And if you were a god and you could do that, then you could get tossed into another plane of existence where gravity works differently, and rapidly recalculate how to catch flying balls from scratch and do that successfully on your first try, instead of having to relearn the rules your brain uses through a lot of trying and failing.  But I am not a god, yet, and you are not gods, also possibly yet, and I doubt that any intelligence headbands we can afford in the foreseeable future will let us do it either.  So don't get ahead of yourselves just because logic is absolute, timeless, and universal; if you can't think fast enough to solve a problem using explicit logic, or if it would require humanly unmanageable huge problem statements even in principle, or if you simply don't know how, then all that absolute and timeless stuff won't help you.  The fact there exists a better method that gods or super-gods could use to solve a problem doesn't mean that you can solve it that way, or that you can get closer to the super-god's solution by using bad, clownlike, and tiny imitations of the outer forms of the ideal methods they'd use."  Gods seem like a surprisingly useful metaphor, now that he's in a world that has them; Keltham is a little surprised it wasn't a more common explanatory metaphor used in dath ilan.

"I don't know if any of you actually needed me to say that, to be clear.  But it's the sort of thing they tell you when you're 8 years old, and you get into your head the idea that if logic is so great, you should be able to use it to crush your opponents at sportsball by making only sharply logical muscle movements.  I mean, actually they just let me make the mistake and lose the sportsball game, but then afterwards, that was what they told me when I asked what I'd been doing wrong and how to do it correctly."

Keltham pauses, at least partially to catch his own mental breath.  He should probably call a break sometime soon, but he was working around to a point, some time earlier before the whole digression into Validity and first-order arithmetic, and he feels like it would be only polite to actually finish the digression and work around to what he meant to say, before then.  There's still some distance left to go before he can pop the stack - he wasn't actually expecting, on some wordless level, that it would take this long to teach grown teenagers first-order logic and how to axiomatize arithmetic.

"In saying all this, I'm jumping ahead in a dath ilani education and skipping over a number of exercises required to actually understand everything and a dozen dozen precautions we were given against common mistakes, some of which now seem pretty silly and obvious to me, but which might turn out to be a lot more necessary to otherwise unprepared minds, I don't know."

"For example, if somebody throws a ball and you need to catch it, trying to translate your thoughts into predicate logic about the ball having the property of flying and this implying an eventual fall given gravity, is going to utterly fail to help you.  You would be, first of all, better off thinking in your mind's native wordless language that tries to visualize the ball's fall and run to there, because your native language is faster and the ball will fall before you can think of anything logical.  You would, second of all, be engaging in a particularly naive kind of jumping ahead of your real capabilities, by trying to translate your thoughts about the ball directly into a logic with a falling predicate.  What you would actually need to predict the ball's fall using serious math is calculus, and not simple calculus either; it would include terms like how the resistance of the air to the ball's flight changed with the ball's speed.  If you try to summarize all that by saying that the 'falling' predicate on the ball was true, when that 'falling' statement would be equally true if gravity was pulling on the ball a different amount or if the air was more resistant, you're throwing away details that actually matter in order to try to squeeze down the issue into predicate logic - an amount of predicate logic that you find easy to handle, which is too little to actually solve the problem.  You also wouldn't be absolutely certain about the ball's position or trajectory, and managing uncertainty inside of mathematics is a whole separate topic I haven't broached to you."

"Actually solving the ball's flight using a full written-on-paper account of how conclusions about what's probably true, follow necessarily from some unnecessary premises you already believe about what's probably true, would require setting up a complicated problem in calculus and probability that would describe how to infer the ball's trajectory from what your eyes had seen of the ball.  And if you wanted that said in pure logic with all premises spelled out, you'd have to axiomatize that calculus problem into the more universal language of logic.  It is a whole lot easier to just run and catch the ball by thinking about it in your native brain's native style."

"I mean, maybe if you were a god you could solve the whole problem using explicitly valid reasoning - or not, I'm not sure how mentally powerful your gods are, exactly.  And if you were a god and you could do that, then you could get tossed into another plane of existence where gravity works differently, and rapidly recalculate how to catch flying balls from scratch and do that successfully on your first try, instead of having to relearn the rules your brain uses through a lot of trying and failing.  But I am not a god, yet, and you are not gods, also possibly yet, and I doubt that any intelligence headbands we can afford in the foreseeable future will let us do it either."

"So don't get ahead of yourselves just because logic is absolute, timeless, and universal.  If you can't think fast enough to solve a problem using explicit logic, or if it would require humanly unmanageable huge problem statements even in principle, or if you simply don't know how, then all that absolute and timeless stuff won't help you.  The fact there exists a better method that gods or super-gods could use to solve a problem doesn't mean that you can solve it that way, or that you can get closer to the super-god's solution by using bad, clownlike, and tiny imitations of the outer forms of the ideal methods they'd use."  Gods seem like a surprisingly useful metaphor for ideal cognitive processes, now that he's in a world that has gods; Keltham is a little surprised it wasn't a more common explanatory metaphor used in dath ilan.

"I don't know if any of you actually needed me to say that, to be clear.  But it's the sort of thing they tell you when you're 8 years old, and you get into your head the idea that if logic is so great, you should be able to use it to crush your opponents at sportsball by making only sharply logical muscle movements.  I mean, actually they just let me make the mistake and lose the sportsball game, but then afterwards, that was what they told me when I asked what I'd been doing wrong and how to do it correctly."