Interesting thought: How would one be able to tell if their own language had become stuck in such a minimum or saddle-point? Just in the same way the Piraha can't discover Einstein's relativity, are there things we can't discover because of language boundaries? How would we know?
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Replying to @colejhudson
The Piraha could apparently not even learn how to count to ten with 8 months training. Perhaps they have a mutation that affects numerosity or other things? They must have been heavily inbreeding in a tiny population.
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Replying to @Plinz
I'm not sure an inability to count past 2 actually displays a lack of numerosity. This paper, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.4141.pdf …, in the course of talking about Hilbert's first problem, demonstrates the effective equivalence of their counting system with ours:pic.twitter.com/ZKzoWh705y
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Replying to @colejhudson
I recall reading that their quantity words roughly mean "lots" and "a few", not 1 and 2. Their apparent inability to tell apart 4 from 5 objects may indicate a possible difference in brain function, not just in language. It is a small, closely related population.
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Replying to @Plinz
You're right, Everett more or less demonstrated that ambiguity in this paper (https://daneverettbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/FEFG-cognition-in-press.pdf …). He also showed how numbers are better thought of as compressing information into what's useful, the implication being that it's not at all inevitable we develop numbers.
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Replying to @colejhudson @Plinz
Cole Hudson Retweeted Devon
I also like how counting as a technology gels with the paper
@devonzuegel posted: https://twitter.com/devonzuegel/status/987860902056681472 …. More,@michael_nielsen's response has a clear analog to the Piraha: they have no means of conveying where something is, and, they have a problem with cultural memoryCole Hudson added,
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Replying to @colejhudson @Plinz and
As for the brain, I looked into it and get this: we know that numerosity - size approximation - takes place in the intraparietal suculus (iPS) via (http://sci-hub.hk/10.1177/1073858409333073 …), which is common in all kinds of animals per (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626588/ …).
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Replying to @colejhudson @Plinz and
But, per the two studies mentioned here (http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2008/08/27/parietal-cortex-and-object-per/ …), it's been shown that object permanence _also_ takes place in the iPS! I'm suspicious of how neat a solution this is though. To my mind this makes testing with infants even more valuable.
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How do you think object permanence is implemented?
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I'm not sure I totally understand. Do you mean in regards to the morphology? Or in relation to the Piraha's deficit in numerosity
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In terms of algorithmic functionality, which in turn lets us think about its neurobiological implementation.
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