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by lisper
780 days ago
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> it's entirely possible for humans to be using a completely different process to catch balls etc, than kinematic equations. This all turns on what you mean by "completely different". Yes, obviously when you learn to actually catch a ball your brain is not doing anything that maps straightforwardly onto the kinds of symbolic manipulations that happen when you do math. On the other hand, it has to map onto doing math somehow even if that mapping is not straightforward. The only other possibility is that your brain is actually doing something that doesn't map onto math in any way, but still somehow produces the same results that math does by sheer coincidence. If you could actually demonstrate that, it would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of science because it would refute the Church-Turing thesis. |
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For the time being of course we can agree that our brains probably do some kind of maths, as far as we understand it. I'm guessing the way we understand maths has everything to do with the way our brains understand maths because, well, that's my position in our disagreement. But, see, I can do maths by counting on my fingers, so the question is really what kind of maths we're talking about and how complex can they realistically be. My argument is that if it's not the kind of maths a standard human being can calculate very quickly without pen or paper, then that's a no-go, because that leaves plenty of time to be eaten by a sabretooth, or what have you.