On 6/18/2018 11:35 PM, 'scerir' via Everything List wrote:
Il 18 giugno 2018 alle 14.08 Jason Resch <[email protected]> ha
scritto:
I think a lot of our abstract reasoning ability results from our
being social creatures, and having to create mental models of other
people/groups/tribes, etc. to predict their behaviors under different
scenarios. To guess what they want, what they will do, what is likely
to happen if this happens or if that happens. In our evolutionary
environment, nothing was more complex than other humans or groups of
humans, and the smarter we became, the smarter we had to get to
maintain some ability to model and predict the behavior of others.
It is then, perhaps not too major of a leap to turn this "abstract
modeling of a systems behavior" ability from analyzing people or
groups, to analyzing other systems, be they games, puzzles,
engineering, mathematical objects, contemplating physical laws, etc.
A question might arise, why don't other social animals have similar
abstract reasoning abilities? Perhaps they do and cannot communicate
it, or perhaps communication itself adds so many additional layers of
complexity to the analyzing of social systems and people that it
required the evolution of special purpose structures in the brain
which enhanced abstract reasoning abilities. Still a third option,
is that human analytical capability largely relies on the high level
of language processing capacity of the brain as a necessary
ingredient in performing some forms of abstract reasoning. -- I think
there are exceptions and counter examples in many of these cases, for
example Tesla could visually manipulate designs in his mind, and high
level Chess players can see and manipulate board states in their
minds without relying on language to represent those states.
But do they represent them realistically, or schematically? I think
language had a lot to do with the evolution of abstract thinking. It's
very hard to think of something like a battle plan either in full 4d
realism or in language, but it is possible visualizing things
schematically and the first abstract mathematics, geometry was a matter
of graphic abstraction plus reasoning in words.
Brent
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