From: Matt Gingell (mjg223@is7.nyu.edu)
Date: Sun Oct 10 1999 - 22:40:12 MDT
> I would like your interpretation of the evident universality of some form
> of the "Law of Contradiction", "The Law of the Excluded Middle" the
> processes of "induction and axiomatic inference", interpretive prototypes
> like causality or conditionality, or evident perceptual stereotypes like
> "time" "quantity" and "space/size/distance". Not to mention the perva-
> sive use of hierarchical categorical structures.
If two individuals working separately on the same problem in
mathematics discovered isomorphic solutions, would that be surprising?
Would it imply that the mechanisms they used to deduce the proof are
universal to all humans, or would it just mean that it was a natural
and correct solution that any thinker might come to? What if a
computer discovered the same proof by brute force?
I view concepts like causality, duration, weight, etc. in the same
way. They don't have to be hard coded - they are learned because they
are so useful under the universal physical constraints imposed upon
all human beings. In natural language, for instance, I don't think the
fact every human language has an analogy to verbs and nouns proves
that either has a universal correlate in the mind's language facility.
It could simply be that we all live in a world that is well
described by nouns and verbs and the each mind observes that fact and
takes advantage of it.
To draw another analogy, what is to be inferred from the fact the the
eye has evolved independently in insects and mammals? It's not that
evolution is predisposed to producing eyes, rather an eye is such a
fantastically useful survival tool that it is selected for in
unrelated evolutionary threads.
In my view, are thoughts are similar because we each develop concepts
to take advantage of some of the same cognitive niches. We can
communicate because our formulations are constrained into some degree
of functional isomorphism. The implementation though might be profoundly
different.
I'm not implying that some concepts, like 'natural number,' etc.,
aren't implemented in hardware. But if so, I view that as a product of
evolutionary happenstance and optimization.
-matt
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