01-29-2011, 10:35 PM
One more idea solution
idea solution
• Not really -- we think that way with some things ("man" and "woman" are subclasses of "person") but the real world has so many exceptions to basic structure and is so capricious and random that trying to define it all in terms of classes leads to disaster. The Victorians experienced this problem when trying to fit the duck-billed platypus and the echidna into their taxonomic system of latin naming for species: to them, everything should follow the rules they assigned to phylum, genus, family, etc. but these two animals didn't. So the Victorians said they were freaks of nature, whereas what they actually meant was that they were freaks of the Victorian classification system. They'd have loved it if they really could make classes and subclasses of everything... but the universe just doesn't work that way, and the way our brains deal with the universe doesn't, either: to try to get our heads around things we do make patterns - sometimes patterns which aren't really there, hence optical illusions - but in a basic sense, no.
• Disagree. Computers and brains work differently (and I'm talking about the logical differences.)
idea solution
• Not really -- we think that way with some things ("man" and "woman" are subclasses of "person") but the real world has so many exceptions to basic structure and is so capricious and random that trying to define it all in terms of classes leads to disaster. The Victorians experienced this problem when trying to fit the duck-billed platypus and the echidna into their taxonomic system of latin naming for species: to them, everything should follow the rules they assigned to phylum, genus, family, etc. but these two animals didn't. So the Victorians said they were freaks of nature, whereas what they actually meant was that they were freaks of the Victorian classification system. They'd have loved it if they really could make classes and subclasses of everything... but the universe just doesn't work that way, and the way our brains deal with the universe doesn't, either: to try to get our heads around things we do make patterns - sometimes patterns which aren't really there, hence optical illusions - but in a basic sense, no.
• Disagree. Computers and brains work differently (and I'm talking about the logical differences.)