Poll: Sense of logic

[fromderinside]

Doesn't rejection of religion in favor of arbitrary processes based on ability to cope resolve the issue? The brain needn't do anything beyond what it evolved to do. Current beings, including brains, are the most fit for the surviving the previous generation. No forward stuff here, just what got us here. It may or may not be adequate.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I don't think the brain often has to really resolve any properly logical contradiction. As I see it, logical contradictions only appear within the context of a speculative model of the situation under consideration. Solving such a contradiction may never be absolutely necessary in anybody's entire life. Rather, failing to do it would invalidate the speculative model being used and force the subject to find another solution or renounce his considered plan of action. I suspect it wouldn't be very often fatal. Just possibly more expensive in terms of time and energy. This ability may have served Homo Sapiens, possibly even to out-compete Neanderthal, but I don't think it was really necessary. It just works. Neanderthal may have disappeared more like any endangered species today may disappear. Nothing really necessary to most Homo Sapiens on this planet.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Precursors of logical reasoning in preverbal human infants
Science 16 Mar 2018, Vol. 359, Issue 6381, pp. 1263-1266
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6381/1263

Abstract
Infants are able to entertain hypotheses about complex events and to modify them rationally when faced with inconsistent evidence. These capacities suggest that infants can use elementary logical representations to frame and prune hypotheses. By presenting scenes containing ambiguities about the identity of an object, here we show that 12- and 19-month-old infants look longer at outcomes that are inconsistent with a logical inference necessary to resolve such ambiguities. At the moment of a potential deduction, infants’ pupils dilated, and their eyes moved toward the ambiguous object when inferences could be computed, in contrast to transparent scenes not requiring inferences to identify the object. These oculomotor markers resembled those of adults inspecting similar scenes, suggesting that intuitive and stable logical structures involved in the interpretation of dynamic scenes may be part of the fabric of the human mind.

Oh well, seems like science is catching up!

About time.
EB

EDIT
Congratulations to all those who voted for the first option!

 

[fromderinside]

So I watched my bird hunter cat do what it does. A bird, probably cornered goes still. Cat advances a step. Bird remains still. Cat advances another step. Bird takes to wing more or less straight up. Cat leaps forward with claws outstretched and swats the bird to ground ending what was any possibility of bird's speculation about getting away from cat. Speculations have consequences.

 

[Speakpigeon]

So I watched snails do what they do. When it rains, they wake up from their dreams and rush up my wall. Not that of the neighbour, though. I counted twenty-four of them, coming in all sizes from really small to rather biggy. One was trying to pass in between the wall and a pipe running down the wall. Tried really hard but couldn't do it, his/her own backpack house too big to go through.

So why do they come on my wall and not that of the neighbour? Well, unlike on my neighbour's wall, on my wall there's some moss. It's not much but apparently my snails here, all twenty-four of them, just wait for the opportunity to go for it. Rain. And you can see the trails left by the snails eating through the moss, one year to the next. And it's going on and on and on.

So, I would guess, moss must be good for snails. What do you think.

No, no, look carefully, not a question, you see?
EB