Why does controlling warp fields require biological intelligence?

Question

The Namuh species consists of highly-intelligent organisms who have developed interplanetary travel and have colonized their home star system. Their science base has an excellent understanding of general relativity, to the point that they're capable of taking a few kilograms of plasma and generating an Alcubierre-style "warp field" that allows them to travel through warped space faster than light, and even produce gravity effects on small scales to produce what we humans would identify as "magic". So long as the wielder can calculate the necessary energy densities to produce the gravitational effect, they can apply their super-special "Namuh operator" to the energy configuration and produce another configuration that generates the exact same effects but doesn't require nearly as much energy. Important note: they never develop AI, so the only sentient thing they will ever have access to is themselves, living and breathing.

However, there's a catch: due to Insert Your Difficulty Here, sentience - and immense intelligence - are required to effectively use this "magic" to telekinetically kill a boar from 200 yards with gravity bullets or figure out how to program a ship's warp drive to take them to the next star on the left instead of imploding. That means that the young of the species, who are more simpleminded, aren't very good at "magic" and spend much of their time just being normies, the middle-aged adults, who are learned in the ways of tensor calculus, are more capable of effecting gravity and warp effects, and the elders are powerful mathematics who are more than capable of calculating a route through space or inverting gravity in a certain area at a whim.

The core aspect of this technology is that it cannot be efficiently executed by computers: set a computer just as powerful as the Namuh mind on the problem of lifting a cup with a warp field, and it'll run for hours, but a Namuh decently-well trained in the ways of nonlinear partial differential equations can think for a moment and then raise the cup high into the air. Computers can solve the trajectory problem and program a warp drive to take a ship between planets, but at longer distances the calculations start to break down, and if a computer is put in charge for too long without a Namuh mind to intervene, the warp drive will just straight-up implode.

Why is this? Why does manipulating the warp field and effecting magic and route calculation require a sentient brain to work?

Any and all suggestions appreciated! If any specifications are needed I can add them too.

Answer 1

Cosmic Horror angle: the Namuh are being played by a hostile third party.

The Namuh have no idea why it works the way it works; their best models start from incompatible axioms and make incompatible predictions, even though they can be mashed together into convoluted mathematical statements that allow predictions to be made with some accuracy.

In truth, however, it doesn't work the way it works. Not on its own. Call them what you want, because no mortal mind can comprehend them well enough for a true description: Demons, Star Gods, Primordial Chaos, the Old Ones... the unknown third party provides the real mechanism for the magic. When a resonance of thought is made, these beings can influence reality in accordance with the thought. Their end is to slowly shape the minds of the math-magicians, generation after generation, by manipulating the magicians with positive reinforcement to think more and more resonant thoughts.

One day soon the greatest Namuh intellects - rejecting consistent logic in favor of the power of embracing multiple contradictory models, while simultaneously using their magic to cross the stars swifter than causal influence and thus effectively be in multiple places at once, will be at last able to fit the terrible, incomprehensibly alien minds of their erstwhile benefactors in their totality. Ia ftagn.

Answer 2

This is a funny one, because we're still working on a satisfactory definition of "sentient" that would permit answering here. The question of consciousness is one of the hard problems in philosophy that yet has a complete answer. But it might be interesting to take the idea literally. The ability to think may be the thing that matters in this universe. Whatever actions one might do to apply the Namuh operator may be meaningless unless associated with the correct thoughts. Leave the definition of "thoughts" to the philosophers.

If that's too narrow, we could widen it a bit and claim that it's "how" the operator is applied that matters, not just its application. There's some prior art that we find in arts, although its rarer to see it in science. I can say there is some merit to the idea that an art can be expressed from one individual to another through person-to-person interactions which cannot be expressed in one-way media like books or videos. It may be that a non-sentient device, like a computer, cannot learn how to apply the Namuh operator, no matter how many CPU cycles it has. Or it may be that the Namuh simply haven't learned how to convey this ability to a non-sentient being. (an interesting aside would be whether the Namuh can teach a non-Namuh sentient being to apply the operator).

If the "how" is not enough, we could widen the idea further. Instead of the "how" being important, we can make the "what" extremely difficult for non-organic beings. It may be that the Namuh operator can really only be applied by an analog computer, like the brain. Perhaps the quantization issues that arise with floating point mathematics in a digital computer is insurmountable, except for massive monte-carlo analyses which are not practical. If the Namuh operator involves accounting for lots of hard to predict environmental effects, it would not be reasonable to pre-calculate the Namuh operator, and it may be that the giant monte-carlo simulations required to calculate it "in the moment" are just not practical -- other than through organic means that were already good at this sort of thing.

Personally, I would be careful with the references to the different human mathematical concepts. They start to suggest that the Namuh operator might be grounded in science we understand (which would suggest it isn't a sentient-only ability, based on our modern math and science assumptions). Perhaps instead the mathematical aptitude is merely a metric. Anyone capable of X manipulations with the Namuh operator will naturally be comfortable with Y mathematical concept because it's just absurd to not be comfortable with it if you can do X.

Answer 3

Only an Organic brain is capable of the levels of Abstraction needed

Think about a simple object - let us use the Cup in your example.

What is a Cup?

There are a large number of ways you could describe a cup. For example you could give it's dimensions, you could give it's material composition, you could describe it's colour, you could describe where you bought it etc. etc.

Then you could describe it's function, what it contains - whether it's liquids or solids etc. etc.

Point is - even for something a simple as a cup, if you were to describe it as a computer would describe it - there are an extremely large amount of data. This is actually part of the real world problem of AI. Identifying objects, extracting out what they are and then having a set of details about how to interact with them.

This means that for all these complex feats For a computer there is so much data that it needs to compile that the calculations take an unreasonable amount of time, whereas the Organic Brain is able to abstract a lot of this information into just the key variables that are required, meaning less computational time is needed.