One more crux that we should have included (under the section on “The Human Brain”): ”Human brain appears to be a scaled-up version of a more generic mammalian/primate brain”
Does this seem likely? I would guess this is basically true for the sensory and emotional parts, but language and mathematical reasoning seem like a large leap to me, so humans may be doing something qualitatively different from nonhuman animals. Nonhuman animals don’t do recursion, as far as I know, or maybe they can, but limited to very low recursion depth in practice.
OTOH, this might be of interest; he argues the human cerebellum may help explain some of our additional capacity for language and tool use:
One more crux that we should have included (under the section on “The Human Brain”):
”Human brain appears to be a scaled-up version of a more generic mammalian/primate brain”
Does this seem likely? I would guess this is basically true for the sensory and emotional parts, but language and mathematical reasoning seem like a large leap to me, so humans may be doing something qualitatively different from nonhuman animals. Nonhuman animals don’t do recursion, as far as I know, or maybe they can, but limited to very low recursion depth in practice.
OTOH, this might be of interest; he argues the human cerebellum may help explain some of our additional capacity for language and tool use: