Re: Thomas Covenant series

Jonathan L Cunningham schrieb:

Gruff <gruffstar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Joy Beeson wrote:
On Thu, 11 May 2006 04:20:40 GMT, Sea Wasp
<seawaspobvious@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Strange. Calculus was EASIER than some of the math that came before
it for me. I ended DiffyQ with an average greater than 100%.

The first semester, differential calculus, was easy.

The second semester, integral calculus, was easy.

But I STILL don't understand how one is the inverse of the other.

And it was half a century ago, so I'd have to start over from scratch
if I tried to understand it now.

I realise I'm the only one still banging on about this, but it's been
nagging at me. It's important to me because I have at stake that
difficult ideas can be communicated (I'm sure I'm not alone). I

I used to think that.

Non-existence proof: explain calculus to your cat.

Alas, this will only prove that cats don't understand human languages.
And you're willfully misunderstanding the notion, which i assume to
speak about communicating the idea to a human that you can actually
converse with.
A more honest test would be trying to _train_ your cat to solve
calculus problems. The success would depend on several factors: the
capability and willingness of the cat to solve such problems; your
capability of formulating the problem so the cat could understand it;
the establishing of a means for the cat to express the solution so you
could actually check whether it's correct or not.

How are you going to motivate the cat to participate, anyway? They're
suspected of being all but incapable of thinking in terms of acts and
consequences - unless there's some instant gratification/punishment
involved, it may well fail to see any reason to solve the problem.

After you've done that successfully, and your cat does your calculus
problems for you, explain calculus to an ant.

No fair. You have to use an ant colony. Approached properly, i'd
expect this to be more likely to give meaningful results than working
with a single cat.

This raises a number of interesting SFnal questions:

(1) Is there a threshold of intelligence, below which it is impossible
to explain calculus?

I don't see what this has to do with animal training. There are much
more severe constraints than 'braininess' involved in getting a
meaningful answer to a question out of a ferret. Even if you're
explaining calculus in a way which _could_ be understood, you can
still entirely fail to explain it successfully to an able-minded human
who doesn't speak your language or is uninterested or distracted.

Getting back to your question: there may be, but how are we supposed
to know when lack of interest and insufficient explanations can never
be ruled out entirely? And of course, these two are as today easier to
alleviate than lack of intelligence, however _that_ may be defined.

ObSFSeed: "Intelligence enhancers" become the default method for
handling learning deficits - children have "substandard" brain areas
replaced with biochips.

(You could probably train a hamster to carry out a series of rote
operations -- that doesn't count as "understanding" any more than
a pocket calculator understands logarithms.)

I can add and subtract numbers without spending an actual thought,
it's naught but rote operations. I assume that means i don't
understand basic algebra?

I'm extremely hesitant to apply a word like 'understand' to the
workings of a non-human brain.

--
Een koe is een merkwaardig beest; wat er ook in haar geest moge zijn,
haar laatste woord is altijd boe.

.

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