Understanding Psychology and Cognition

[Cavernio]

Originally Posted by stargroup100

Just as a general comment, I notice that a lot of your arguments have this intellectual edge to them, but lack a realistic worldview. You think like a philosopher/physicist/mathematician, but when it comes to applying that knowledge to the real world, you make claims that an engineer would laugh at you for. It's like when Michio Kaku says that fusion is 20 years away. I recognize him as a brilliant physicist, but no matter how smart he is, engineers all over the world find this statement of his completely ridiculous. (And I'm willing to bet everything short of my life that we won't see fusion in 20 years.)

Little peeved at being analyzed as an example of what you're talking about simply for posting in this thread...Also I'm not sure what claims I've made for you to say that. Suffice it to say I don't feel that I'm missing out for not being particularly interested in engineering.

Originally Posted by stargroup100

Ideally, we wish that the world is logical, structured, etc. However, the fact that there are subjective experiences tied directly to our detection of the world around us and the evaluation of logical propositions, as well as other particular properties of reality itself, we need to consider other aspects of the human condition. There are far too many things in this world that simply cannot be explained logically, no matter how much we try. We can make very general statements, or analyze particular examples in certain ways, but to think that science and logic can potentially figure out everything in the entire world is simply not realistic nor true.

Ummm, ok? Was this addressed at me specifically for some reason? Is this some sort of call-back to that religion debate from ages ago? Of course science and logic, as people know it, cannot figure out the entire world because we're entities that are trapped, ourselves a manifestation of what we're trying to understand. But you're not exactly giving any particular reason why rationalism can be superseded by something else without having a 'something else' to fall back on. That my ability to have subjective experience is not explained satisfactorily can only be otherwise be explained via mysticism, which is, pardon the expression, basically masturbating...enjoyment of my own existence which circularly explains itself.

Originally Posted by stargroup100

As for an example, I once tried to teach a student the fundamentals of calculus, specifically the difference between position and derivative (velocity). After exhausting numerous ways of trying to explain the concept, what finally clicked for him was comparing the graph in question with taking pictures and putting the frames together to make an animation. To me, it barely made any sense, with only a very vague connection to the problem, but for him it totally worked.

So because the student was able to generalize something they didn't understand at all to something that they understood quite well, that is illogical? That's how people think and what makes them different from computers to-date, they generalize and then can attach a separate idea onto multiple different things that aren't connected in the real world. I suppose if you define generalization as illogical then I suppose, yes, people are illogical.