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by conceit 3641 days ago
People have an OK grasp of formal logic, that is the formalism. It's learned at an early age, it's prerequisite for deductive (or inductive?) learning actually. Most might lack the cognitive ability to exercise those formalism in an abstract synthesis into long formulas.
1 comments
woodman 3641 days ago
No, people suck at it - just look at your first sentence. There are a lot of likely reasons, my favorite being evolutionary pressure: 10,000 years ago two men see the tall grass twitch, while one scrambles up a nearby tree the other considers the cost in energy expenditure to flee vs the likelihood of a tiger attAAARGH. We can't trust brains to the point where we have to invent highly structured methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_competing_hypothes...
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conceit 3641 days ago
What's got energy expenditure to do with logic? Isn't what you talk about Bayesian Inference?

> while one scrambles up a nearby tree

I'm not sure that is just a nervous reflex or the result of the logic implication "If that's a Tiger and I stay then I will die". Even if the thought becomes hardwired, it would have to have been logically evaluated before it became subconscious. To react and be afraid, the danger must be recognized and categorized, "If the grass twitches then something moved it", etc. etc. Going down that argument, small life forms would be able of some small amount of logic reasoning, too. As long as those grow bulks of neurons, I don't see why that should be wrong.

> just look at your first sentence

What are you trying to say?

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woodman 3641 days ago
> What's got energy expenditure to do with logic?

Nothing, but it has everything to do with the point immediately proceeding - evolutionary pressure.

> ...it would have to have been logically evaluated before it became subconscious.

Yes, and at that point it would no longer be logic based - it would be pattern matching. The human brain is a pattern matching machine, because historically that has offered a major advantage. For your position to be true, that such a flight mechanism is logic based, then you would have to believe that the behavior would immediately change in the event of conflicting information being presented. That doesn't happen, see confirmation bias (or any other kind of bias).

> What are you trying to say?

Exactly what I did. Your statement was illogical, but I'm starting to suspect that we might not be conversing in your native language - which would also explain it.

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