Re:Imagining Life as a Stack of Mental States
by coldtea on Monday June 03, 2019 @03:47AM
(#20081202)
>So, in discovering the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory, which our brains presumably weren't designed for, we were just being lucky?
No, it was using a tool evolved over million years for something else, and very good at that something else (that it can even do it instinctively), to do another task.
And that task only 1 in millions of us can do (how many "discovered the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory"?) that have uniquely smart brains, and that even them had to undergo years and years of training to perform them.
Case in point, billions of people can predict where a baseball would fall instinctively, thanks to their brain's evolutionary capabilities, without solving the physics equations. But to do it with solving the equations takes years of training.
Even in Einstein or Feynman or whatever, their basic evolutionary capacities and instincts (hunger, anger, lust, fight or flight, etc) would trump their physics prowess anytime...
No, it was using a tool evolved over million years for something else, and very good at that something else (that it can even do it instinctively), to do another task.
And that task only 1 in millions of us can do (how many "discovered the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory"?) that have uniquely smart brains, and that even them had to undergo years and years of training to perform them.
Case in point, billions of people can predict where a baseball would fall instinctively, thanks to their brain's evolutionary capabilities, without solving the physics equations. But to do it with solving the equations takes years of training.
Even in Einstein or Feynman or whatever, their basic evolutionary capacities and instincts (hunger, anger, lust, fight or flight, etc) would trump their physics prowess anytime...