Curious Wonder web notes

 We are almost ready to dissolve Wallace's paradox that a forager's mind is capable of calculus. The human mind, we see, is not equipped with an evolutionarily frivolous faculty for doing Western science, mathematics, chess, or other diversions. It is equipped with faculties to master the local environment and outwit its denizens. People form concepts that find the clumps in the correlational texture of the world. They have several ways of knowing, or intuitive theories, adapted to the major kinds of entities in human experience: objects, animate things, natural kinds, artifacts, minds, and the social bonds and forces we will explore in the next two chapters. They wield inferential tools like the elements of logic, arithmetic, and probability. What we now want to know is where these faculties came from and how they can be applied to modern intellectual challenges. Here is an idea, inspired by a discovery in linguistics. Ray Jackendoff points to sentences like the following:   ...

Rules: sets of instructions, that when followed, will guarantee a specific correct result. Often Idealized to facilitate understanding. Idealization: generalization and simplification of concepts into forms that are easier to understand, transmit, explain, remember. Abstractivity: an interpretation of reality that involves arranging information into concepts and idealizing on them.  We often hear that we cannot derive an ought from an is, this is Hume's Guillotine and it is the philosophical principle that we cannot derive prescriptions solely from factual descriptions. A description of the world is necessary because without them prescriptions would not have any content to target nor any context to be relevant. In addition to descriptions, a second missing piece is also needed to form prescriptions: information processing into idealized rules. However, information processing is something a bit more complex, some groundwork needs to be set first in our origins. Origins   ...

  This variable can be measured by quantifying 3 subvariables :    Uniqueness : How many others like it there are available and how many different or similar features the item has from others.   Replaceability :   How much effort, time, energy or resources are needed to (re) create.       Importance : How much use, in time and instances, the item had. The amount of increase/decrease in efficiency with or without it. The consequence of its absence.      Imagine the following two scenarios involving the loss of a pencil.   You're about to draw something as a hobby but notice you've lost your pencil, you have a pack of 10 pencils of this same type, so you just grab another one. The store where you bought them is also around the corner, so grabbing another pack is also a simple task.   You're about to take a test, which requires a no.2 pencil. You managed to buy the last no.2 pencil they had at the store, wh...