So if Majus’s post (on Pinker) is correct, and the underling processing engine(s) (aka “the brain”) determine the boundaries of what you can think about, then it is almost tautological that no one can give you an example since to date almost all folks have a very similar underlying architecture.
So what I argued was that thoughts are by nature commensurable: it’s just in the nature of thoughts that any thinking system can think any thought from any other thinking system. There are exceptions to this, but these exceptions are always on the basis of limited resources, like limited memory.
So, an application of this view is that there are no incommensurable scientific schemes: we can in principle take any claim from any scientific paradigm and understand or test it in any other.
All I argued was that if their thesis is correct, then unless you’ve had some very odd experiences, no one can give you an example because everyone you meet is similarly bounded.
That is the limit of what my statement was intended to convey.
I don’t know enough neurology, psychology and etc. to have a valid opinion, but I will note that we see at most 3 colors. We perceive many more. But any time we want to perceive, for example, the AM radio band we map it into a spectrum our eyes can handle, and as near as I can tell we “think” about it in the colors we perceive.
It is my understanding that there is some work in this area where certain parts of hte brain handle certain types of work. Folks with certain types of injuries or anomalous structures are unable to process certain types of input, and unable to do certain kinds of work. This seems to indicate that while our brain, as currently constructed, is a fairly decent tool for working out the problems we have in front of us, there is some evidence that it is not a general purpose thinking machine.
(in one of those synchronicity thingies my 5 year old just came up to me and showed me a picture of sound waves coming into an ear and molecules “traveling” into your nose).
So if Majus’s post (on Pinker) is correct, and the underling processing engine(s) (aka “the brain”) determine the boundaries of what you can think about, then it is almost tautological that no one can give you an example since to date almost all folks have a very similar underlying architecture.
So what I argued was that thoughts are by nature commensurable: it’s just in the nature of thoughts that any thinking system can think any thought from any other thinking system. There are exceptions to this, but these exceptions are always on the basis of limited resources, like limited memory.
So, an application of this view is that there are no incommensurable scientific schemes: we can in principle take any claim from any scientific paradigm and understand or test it in any other.
All I argued was that if their thesis is correct, then unless you’ve had some very odd experiences, no one can give you an example because everyone you meet is similarly bounded.
That is the limit of what my statement was intended to convey.
I don’t know enough neurology, psychology and etc. to have a valid opinion, but I will note that we see at most 3 colors. We perceive many more. But any time we want to perceive, for example, the AM radio band we map it into a spectrum our eyes can handle, and as near as I can tell we “think” about it in the colors we perceive.
It is my understanding that there is some work in this area where certain parts of hte brain handle certain types of work. Folks with certain types of injuries or anomalous structures are unable to process certain types of input, and unable to do certain kinds of work. This seems to indicate that while our brain, as currently constructed, is a fairly decent tool for working out the problems we have in front of us, there is some evidence that it is not a general purpose thinking machine.
(in one of those synchronicity thingies my 5 year old just came up to me and showed me a picture of sound waves coming into an ear and molecules “traveling” into your nose).