I’m sure there aren’t specific mathematics and programming modules in the brain. There certainly are different kinds of functionality in the brain (how helpful it is to think of it as divided into modules is debatable) and some of it is more useful for doing mathematics or programming or whatever than other parts.
(Camera A may be better than camera B for landscape photography and camera B better than camera A for taking pictures at rock concerts. That doesn’t require that the cameras have landscape-specific modules. All it needs is that, e.g., A has better optics and a higher-resolution sensor, while B has better autofocus and less noise when its sensitivity is cranked way up.)
So, if it sometimes happens that (1) two people’s natural mental faculties differ drastically in their “distribution of power” and (2) there’s a substantial difference in how useful the bits where they differ are for two different kinds of thinking, then there will be subject-specific “immutable levels”.
Prima facie it seems that both #1 and #2 do happen. Of course it might turn out that #2 doesn’t really, because (a) differences in intellectual power are all malleable, so that no kinds of “immutable levels” are real, or (b) differences in mental power are concentrated in some universal “g-factor” that affects all kinds of thinking equally, or (c) it just so happens that more specific variations always more or less cancel out overall (it’s hard to see how that would work, but who knows?).
I’d be interested to see evidence for any of those, or for any other good reason to reject #1 and #2. So far, though, they look pretty plausible, and I don’t see where I’ve failed at reductionism any further than we all have to on account of not actually knowing very much about how intelligence works.
It’s also worth noting that “immutable” means something like “largely fixed from adulthood on” rather than “largely determined by one’s genes”, and whatever there may have been in our ancestral environments there are all kinds of interesting things in our early environments when our brains are most malleable that might correlate with later ability in fields like number theory, psychology, AI programming, music, etc.
(Examples, in case they’re needed, of mental faculties that seem like reasonable candidates for varying differently in different people, and that could be of varying importance across different fields: Visual imagination. Short-term memory. Modelling of other people’s likely feelings, thoughts, and behaviour. Language acquisition. Visual pattern-spotting. Auditory pattern-spotting.)
I’m sure there aren’t specific mathematics and programming modules in the brain. There certainly are different kinds of functionality in the brain (how helpful it is to think of it as divided into modules is debatable) and some of it is more useful for doing mathematics or programming or whatever than other parts.
(Camera A may be better than camera B for landscape photography and camera B better than camera A for taking pictures at rock concerts. That doesn’t require that the cameras have landscape-specific modules. All it needs is that, e.g., A has better optics and a higher-resolution sensor, while B has better autofocus and less noise when its sensitivity is cranked way up.)
So, if it sometimes happens that (1) two people’s natural mental faculties differ drastically in their “distribution of power” and (2) there’s a substantial difference in how useful the bits where they differ are for two different kinds of thinking, then there will be subject-specific “immutable levels”.
Prima facie it seems that both #1 and #2 do happen. Of course it might turn out that #2 doesn’t really, because (a) differences in intellectual power are all malleable, so that no kinds of “immutable levels” are real, or (b) differences in mental power are concentrated in some universal “g-factor” that affects all kinds of thinking equally, or (c) it just so happens that more specific variations always more or less cancel out overall (it’s hard to see how that would work, but who knows?).
I’d be interested to see evidence for any of those, or for any other good reason to reject #1 and #2. So far, though, they look pretty plausible, and I don’t see where I’ve failed at reductionism any further than we all have to on account of not actually knowing very much about how intelligence works.
It’s also worth noting that “immutable” means something like “largely fixed from adulthood on” rather than “largely determined by one’s genes”, and whatever there may have been in our ancestral environments there are all kinds of interesting things in our early environments when our brains are most malleable that might correlate with later ability in fields like number theory, psychology, AI programming, music, etc.
(Examples, in case they’re needed, of mental faculties that seem like reasonable candidates for varying differently in different people, and that could be of varying importance across different fields: Visual imagination. Short-term memory. Modelling of other people’s likely feelings, thoughts, and behaviour. Language acquisition. Visual pattern-spotting. Auditory pattern-spotting.)