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What really blows my mind about driving is that with a little bit of training, we get a feel for how big the car is. You can squeeze into a tight parking lot an

What really blows my mind about driving is that with a little bit of training, we get a feel for how big the car is. You can squeeze into a tight parking lot and you won't scratch your or the other car! By feel! We can somehow transfer our feeling for how big our body is to avoid running into obstacles, to feel how big our car is. There is nothing in the history of mankind that would need for this to be a possible skill; no conceivable evolutionary pressure lead to being able to transfer the feeling for the size of our body onto other objects, while being inside those objects. We can just do that!

wasmitnetzen 4y ago
I'm not so sure. Using tools is the defining specialty of our species, and knowing where the end of your tool is in 3D space seems fairly important to be able to hit that tiger with a spear.
snowwrestler 4y ago
Well for this to work you also have to “feel” how big the parking space is, which is obviously not an extension of your body. What’s happening here is that your eyes are connected to a very highly trained model of the physical world around you. And your subjective experience of vision occurs post-processing through that model. It’s the same model you use to physically navigate the world, so it has a similar subjective feel regardless of what you’re doing. It’s not limited to cars and tools; pitchers can “feel” the strike zone, even though it’s 60 feet away. Like driving, this takes a lot of reps to develop (lots of training data).
kroltan 4y ago
Maybe our monkey cousins carrying their offspring on their back? But yeah it's a very slight pressure.
lukeschlather 4y ago
We evolved to wear all sorts of clothing. And really when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet, so in a sense it's exactly what a brain was originally adapted for is glomming on weird new appendages.
- scubbo 4y ago
  > when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet I haven't heard this claim before - any specific reading I should look for?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

wasmitnetzen 4y ago

I'm not so sure. Using tools is the defining specialty of our species, and knowing where the end of your tool is in 3D space seems fairly important to be able to hit that tiger with a spear.

snowwrestler 4y ago

Well for this to work you also have to “feel” how big the parking space is, which is obviously not an extension of your body. What’s happening here is that your eyes are connected to a very highly trained model of the physical world around you. And your subjective experience of vision occurs post-processing through that model. It’s the same model you use to physically navigate the world, so it has a similar subjective feel regardless of what you’re doing. It’s not limited to cars and tools; pitchers can “feel” the strike zone, even though it’s 60 feet away. Like driving, this takes a lot of reps to develop (lots of training data).

kroltan 4y ago

Maybe our monkey cousins carrying their offspring on their back? But yeah it's a very slight pressure.

lukeschlather 4y ago

We evolved to wear all sorts of clothing. And really when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet, so in a sense it's exactly what a brain was originally adapted for is glomming on weird new appendages.

scubbo 4y ago
> when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet I haven't heard this claim before - any specific reading I should look for?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]