The point was, doesn’t this require a lot of number crunching? Big numbers, for what its worth...
Ask such a blind mathematician to calculate an abstruse property of a geometric figure with randomized values down to the, say, 60th decimal place. Will they be able to do it? After all, it’s a trivial amount of computation compared to what you imply is going on in their heads when they do the math that so impresses you.
A general counter-example to your post is dreams: in a dream, one usually feels sure of the reality and convincingness of the dream (and when one has cultivated the rare & unusual skill of doubting dreams, then one can do things like lucid dreaming) and yet there’s hardly any information or calculation involved. Have you ever tried to read a book in a dream? Has an excellent logical argument been explained to you in a dream and then you tried to remember it when you woke up? I’ve heard both examples before, and when I was working on lucid dreaming & kept a dream journal, I did both, to no effect.
What’s going on is more a case of domain-specific calculating power being hijacked for other things, heuristics, and people looking where the light is.
(Why was research into fractals and chaotic functions delayed until the ’50s and later, when the initial results could often be shown to stem from material in the 1800s? It doesn’t require much calculating power, Mandelbrot did his weather simulations on a computer much weaker than a wristwatch. Because the calculating power required, unlike geometry say, was not one that fits nicely into the visual cortex or requires extremely few explicit arithmetical calculations.)
Ask such a blind mathematician to calculate an abstruse property of a geometric figure with randomized values down to the, say, 60th decimal place. Will they be able to do it? After all, it’s a trivial amount of computation compared to what you imply is going on in their heads when they do the math that so impresses you.
A general counter-example to your post is dreams: in a dream, one usually feels sure of the reality and convincingness of the dream (and when one has cultivated the rare & unusual skill of doubting dreams, then one can do things like lucid dreaming) and yet there’s hardly any information or calculation involved. Have you ever tried to read a book in a dream? Has an excellent logical argument been explained to you in a dream and then you tried to remember it when you woke up? I’ve heard both examples before, and when I was working on lucid dreaming & kept a dream journal, I did both, to no effect.
What’s going on is more a case of domain-specific calculating power being hijacked for other things, heuristics, and people looking where the light is.
(Why was research into fractals and chaotic functions delayed until the ’50s and later, when the initial results could often be shown to stem from material in the 1800s? It doesn’t require much calculating power, Mandelbrot did his weather simulations on a computer much weaker than a wristwatch. Because the calculating power required, unlike geometry say, was not one that fits nicely into the visual cortex or requires extremely few explicit arithmetical calculations.)