As we saw in chapter 2, this reflects Moravac’s paradox, the insight that the sensory and motor skills we use in our everyday lives require enormous computation and sophistication.27 Over millions of years, evolution has endowed us with billions of neurons devoted to the subtleties of recognizing a friend’s face, distinguishing different types of sounds, and using fine motor control. In contrast, the abstract reasoning that we associate with ‘higher thought’ like arithmetic or logic is a relatively recent skill, developed over only a few thousand years. It often requires simpler software and
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