Try looking into Joshua Tenenbamu’s cognitive-science research. As I recall, he’s a big Bayesian (so LW will love him), and he published a paper about probabilistic learning of causality models in humans. If I had to bet, I would say that evolution came up with a learning system for us that can quickly and dirtily learn many different possible kinds of causality, since the real thing works too quickly for evolution to hardcode a model of it into our brains. Also, the real thing involves assumptions like The Universe Is Lawful that aren’t even evolutionarily useful to non-civilized pre-human apes—it doesn’t look lawful to them!
We could then have evolved language out of our ability to learn models of causality, as a way of communicating statements in our learned internal logics. This would certainly explain the way that verbal thinking contains lots more ambiguity, incoherence and plain error than formalized (mathematical) thinking.
Try looking into Joshua Tenenbamu’s cognitive-science research. As I recall, he’s a big Bayesian (so LW will love him), and he published a paper about probabilistic learning of causality models in humans. If I had to bet, I would say that evolution came up with a learning system for us that can quickly and dirtily learn many different possible kinds of causality, since the real thing works too quickly for evolution to hardcode a model of it into our brains. Also, the real thing involves assumptions like The Universe Is Lawful that aren’t even evolutionarily useful to non-civilized pre-human apes—it doesn’t look lawful to them!
We could then have evolved language out of our ability to learn models of causality, as a way of communicating statements in our learned internal logics. This would certainly explain the way that verbal thinking contains lots more ambiguity, incoherence and plain error than formalized (mathematical) thinking.