Comment by jonahx

> Limited in what way? Its basic structure is sufficient to eventually let us discover anything there is to discover. It's a fully general problem solving framework.

That "eventually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's limited in the most literal, empirical way. We don't have answers to most things. If we stood in relation to a gargantuan code base as we stand in relation to the natural world, with an equal proportion of known vs unknown, we'd be pretty screwed.

As an aside, even with the "eventually" qualifier, the claim isn't true. The generation of hypotheses, in particular, and even sometimes the experimental setups to test them, happens through an "out of band" process -- namely, human creativity and intuition. Which is effectively a computational process we don't understand, and limited in its own way (despite its incredible productions). The history of scientific breakthroughs is the history of astonishing insights out of nowhere, from the brains of individual people, sometimes literally from dreams. The experimental method provides a reliable way to test the insights more or less "mechanically", but it would be mostly impotent without the other part.