6 ms·
I think that if pattern recognition is essential to intelligence (it's got to be the best way to simplify the complexities of all the tons of data any intellige
by RugnirViking 4y ago
I think that if pattern recognition is essential to intelligence (it's got to be the best way to simplify the complexities of all the tons of data any intelligent being's senses will be giving it), then we will inherently group things by category.
There are ways to get along in common life while only making distinctions between "more" and "less", although you will still probably need counting, for example the classic case of shepards making tallies. For complicated behavior, numbers will inevitably arise. For example, the earliest writing we know comes from an sumerian accounting of a barley warehouse in Uruk making beer, which counts incoming and outgoing shipments. It miiight be possible to skip this sort of step some amount by only using comparative weights or things, although I would imagine to simplify things you'd want to move to a standardised system of weights, which it seems would inevitably progress towards some being multiples of others.
At the very least, a species advanced enough to develop ways to understand things like atoms or chemical bonds will have to start making distictions between hydrogen and helium all the way to lead etc, or HO and HO2. If they didnt think about numbers before, this will require them to in some regard.
- sparsely 4y ago"Solaris" is an interesting exploration of a situation in which this is maybe not the case.
- blueflow 4y agoIf you mean the Book written by Stanislav Lem, i did read that but i don't understand how you connect the Ocean with "not having the concept of numbers".
- adrianN 4y agoSolaris is too vague to call it an exploration of the idea imo. Lem postulates that there is an intelligence so different to ours that it's incomprehensible. Naturally he can't describe it in any but the most nebulous terms. It remains a postulation without any supporting arguments that such a form of intelligence is realistic.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoYou can compare quantities geometrically: draw a line expressing incoming shipments and under it a line expressing outgoing shipments. You can also replace counting with an imperative drawing process, there's real imperative counting method using the 正 character, it has five strokes, they are drawn one by one until the character is complete, then next character is drawn.
- avmich 4y agoJust curious, how would you represent discrete quantities geometrically? Line is for continuous quantities, that's clear.
- RugnirViking 4y ago"there's real imperative counting method using the 正 character, it has five strokes, they are drawn one by one until the character is complete, then next character is drawn." This is almost exactly what a tally is, like I mentioned its an early form of counting used in a lot of cultures to count animals incoming and outgoing of areas by shepards, often cut into a piece of wood. Suprisingly many cultures have almost the exact same system of making a pattern of 5 lines which then repeats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_marks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_marks
- nitwit005 4y agoThe problem with treating pattern recognition as fundamental, is you could describe almost any sort of analysis as being pattern recognition.