Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>no matter how hard you try you can never teach a mouse to understand French.

humans couldn't so far teach mouse a human language. That doesn't mean that mouse doesn't have something like several thousands or tens of thousands of basic sounds and combinations of them into meaningful (for mouse) sequences. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/catch-the...

After all as a mouse says to another mouse - "no matter how hard you try you can never teach a human to understand mouse language".

The same is through the history of physics/mathematics. It takes a change in fundamental point of view. The notion of derivative took decades of work to develop by geniuses of that time. Imagine how physics/mathematics looked without it.

When i look at strings theory of today i see epicycles, a very intricate and complex system of epicycles in 11 dimensions :) We need a genius like Newton or Einstein to again see and tell us what is behind that apparent complexity.

> After all as a mouse says to another mouse - "no matter how hard you try you can never teach a human to understand mouse language".

But mice don't say that. They can't. jahnu's statement wasn't a parable.

>But mice don't say that.

check the various articles on animal language decoding. Mice and other animals do say that or similar complexity things.

>They can't.

That just an empty statement of belief unsubstantiated by facts. Again check the articles.

In general, the "only humans have language" is simply the religious "only humans have soul" dogma in disguise.

It doesn't look like they're having conversations. It looks like they're seeing some sort of stimulus, and are making relevant noises. It's a pretty impressive reflex, but it's not a conversation - it's an announcement. It's no more of a conversation than a hungry baby crying.

> Mice and other animals do say that

Okay, find me a link that says mice complain about humans not learning their language.

>>check the various articles on animal language decoding. Mice and other animals do say that or similar complexity things.

You aren't stating the solution, you are stating the problem.

You didn't get the point. If all of humanity had limited capabilities to speak and express. Say we could all utter only 3 kinds of sounds namely x,y,z- due to that sheer limitation our language and written systems have to be expressed in permutations and combinations of x, y, z.

That sort of stuff works only for simple things. The moment you start venturing into any complexity, trying to express those concepts in only 3 ways will lead to verbosity and interplay that will blow up beyond practical ability to grasp, given limited resources to interpret them.

And take note if the animal has no means of recording information somewhere and check over time, keeping that level of verbosity in one's brain and workout complex physics is just out of question.

No but the point is a mouse simply does not have the capacity to understand French.

Maybe humans do not have the capacity to understand the complete workings of physics.

>a mouse simply does not have the capacity to understand French.

we don't really know what capacity is required to do it. 1PFlops? 1P neuron synapse transfers/minute? What capacity and in what units mouse brain is?

Our human brain evolution has abused low efficiency size increase approach. As result we're using only like 10% of capacity of our brain.

This dog knows 1000 words in human language. That's more than i know in Chinese, and the task of learning a 1000 Chinese hieroglyphs scares the hell out of me:

https://www.thedodo.com/worlds-smartest-dog-chaser-752002926...

>Maybe humans do not have the capacity to understand the complete workings of physics.

why would it be so? So far the physics has been pretty simple (any abnormal complexity has been usually an indication of our lack of understanding and has been successfully cleared with time) , and even several orders of magnitude complexity increase will fit into our brain.

Edit: to the comment below on 10% - there is a difference between 10% capacity and 10% neurons. The fact that most of our brain is physiologically participating while producing that little capacity most of the time in most of the people is exactly the low efficiency i was talking about.

> As result we're using only like 10% of capacity of our brain.

This myth needs to die in a fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_the_brain_myth

It's been said (I don't know how accurately) that some people do use 100% of their brains. They just happen to be in the midst of a grand mal epileptic seizure.

> This dog knows 1000 words in human language. That's more than i know in Chinese, and the task of learning a 1000 Chinese hieroglyphs scares the hell out of me.

Okay; but that dog can't have a conversation. It doesn't know what they mean, it just knows that follows a certain stimulus. It's like saying I understand cloud language, because I can tell when it's going to rain after looking at the sky.

And even if that dog "understands" a thousand words, and you're scared of learning a thousand Chinese characters, you still have the capacity for learning Chinese. Or French. Or Spanish, or Esperanto, or Russian, or Thai. You could spend a year learning Russian, and we could have this conversation in that language; I will never be able to explain this conversation to a dog, in any language.

>Okay; but that dog can't have a conversation.

dogs do have conversations. And other animals too. Check the link on the prairie dogs for example.

>I will never be able to explain this conversation to a dog, in any language.

it is the deficiency of human-to-dog communication, not the dog's lack of mental capacity to handle the complexity of conversation.

Chinese characters are not 'hieroglyphs.'

And they are logograms, or at least they compose a logographic system.

Does the dog have the capacity to understand how the universe works? Does the dog have the capacity to understand physics to the degree that we understand it now?

No. So the dog has its limits, as we have ours. Where the limits are is certainly up for debate, but hard to believe there is no limit.

> to the comment below on 10% - there is a difference between 10% capacity and 10% neurons. The fact that most of our brain is physiologically participating while producing that little capacity most of the time in most of the people is exactly the low efficiency i was talking about.

And still no. Phrase it however you like, it's still wrong. You are not using just 10% of your brain in any manner or means, there is not some great untapped potential waiting to be turned on, your brain is not low efficiency.

You'd probably be better off linking to something like this: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116

Or this: http://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem....

Less than a million neurons and Portia's interpreting complex visual scenes and making detailed attack plans.

While "we only use 10% of our brains" is clearly bollocks, the implication that our brains may not be particularly efficient for our level of intelligence doesn't seem too unlikely given the way evolution works - our brain's a crudely scaled-up pile of accidental hacks guided by endless local maxima it can't readily escape from, it'd be very surprising if you couldn't improve on it.

You might draw parallels with modern computers. All these transistors to play with, but we're certainly not using them as well as we could - we're limited by the software we want to run and know how to write using our existing tools.

But that could only be the case if those laws are very, very complicated. So far physical laws have been on the side of "understandable if you invest a couple years of study as a reaonably intelligent person".

We wouldn't have discovered the impossible to understand laws no matter if they exist or not.

Or we have already discovered some of the impossible to understand laws and we are desperately throwing any theory at these inconsistencies in our understanding to no avail.

Does a human have the capacity to understand the complete workings of an Intel CPU? I doubt it.

But we augment our capacities with tools, something mice don't do.

Well, the irony is that string theory IS the attempt at the elegance behind the apparent complexity of the standard model. But I agree with you that dark matter and dark energy are undoubtedly works in progress (if that's what you were trying to say)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com