[x3ro]

> "Statistics"? You're saying that human minds calculate means and standard deviations and the like?

Clearly the brain is capable of some very powerful, yet unconscious math, otherwise catching a ball out of mid-air or simply walking would be impossible. It might not be able to solve them analytically or with extreme precision, but definitely approximately and extremely fast.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Yes, I'm aware of the concept. I don't think it is clear at all. I agree that it might be possible to model some of our behaviours using different kinds of maths. But that doesn't mean that those processes are actually carried out by a computation of the maths that we can use to model them.

By analogy- I don't think any phycisist would say that "the universe is capable of maths". Maybe our physics uses maths to model physical processes. But that doesn't mean that there is something that actually computes those processes, like a computer would.

Of course, intelligence is probably not a force of nature, like gravity. Then again, we don't know what intelligence is.

And just to kick this a bit more- why would this great computing power be "subconscious"? Why would it be the case that my brain can do maths better than I can? Does that even make sense? Who am I if not my brain? Is it really very likely that my brain is born with the innate ability to compute Pearson's correlation coefficient but I had to be taught what 1 + 1 is from scratch? And what about all the organisms that are perfectly capable of complex behaviours (spiders weaving webs, bees dancing, ants swarming etc) but have tiny little neural clumps rather than fully formed brains? On what substrate do they run all the statistics?