Did our brains evolve to understand quantum mechanics?

[zoobyshoe]

Conflict with QM

Spatial reasoning relies on continuity, smoothness, and locality. The unintuitive concepts in QM are exactly the ones that conflict with these: nonlocality, discretization, uncertainty. Particles can't have a precisely defined position and momentum, a particles can exist in a superposition of states.

Ode to learning

Obviously, without learning, none of this would be possible... learning is necessary, but (imo) insufficient to explain our readily available grasp of spatial reasoning. It's interesting that how we learn is influenced by spatial concepts, so in some sense, the adaptation of learning itself may be closely tied to spatial reasoning.

So, was our ability to learn 'selected' for the advantage it gave us, or are you asserting it's neither here nor there in regards to our survival?

 

[Pythagorean]

When I say adaptation of learning, I refer to selection (that learning was selected for*), but that was only part of a side point. The main point was that learning classical physics (by interacting with the world) is only part of why it's so intuitive to us. The other part, I think, is due to selection.

Oh yeah, place cells. I forgot about those. We (mammals, at least) even have a neural encoding process dedicated to locality in Euclidean space. I've never heard of any other function for place cells beside navigation. The encoding process may be used elsewhere, but I've never heard of it. (They are also in the hippocampus).


*and I don't really know that, it's just an assumption that seemed self-evident to me.

 

[zoobyshoe]

When I say adaptation of learning, I refer to selection (that learning was selected for*), but that was only part of a side point. The main point was that learning classical physics (by interacting with the world) is only part of why it's so intuitive to us.

Classical physics is not intuitive to us at all! Example: Galileo spent most of his life trying to explain things like, no, we won't be thrown off the Earth if it's revolving, which was the intuitive belief, and that a heavier object will not fall faster than a lighter one. It makes complete intuitive sense to suppose the heavier object will fall faster, and it was like pulling teeth for him to get people to believe otherwise. Mark Twain said something like, "Common sense is the ability to look around you and see with your own eyes the world is flat."All humanity started out intuiting the world was flat. Columbus had a hard time getting a crew because so many sailors believed that if you went too far out to sea you'd come to the edge of the world and fall off. Just about every bit of classical mechanics was shocking to people at first. How is it you don't know that, before Galileo, people didn't realize bodies in motion were brought to rest by outside forces? Aren't you aware of all the crackpot notions Aristotle propagated that held supremacy for 2000 years?

We've been solving excruciatingly counter-intuitive puzzles from day one, amigo: √2

 

[atyy]

Conflict with QM

Spatial reasoning relies on continuity, smoothness, and locality. The unintuitive concepts in QM are exactly the ones that conflict with these: nonlocality, discretization, uncertainty. Particles can't have a precisely defined position and momentum, a particles can exist in a superposition of states.

Classical physics is not intuitive to us at all! Example: Galileo spent most of his life trying to explain things like, no, we won't be thrown off the Earth if it's revolving, which was the intuitive belief, and that a heavier object will not fall faster than a lighter one. It makes complete intuitive sense to suppose the heavier object will fall faster, and it was like pulling teeth for him to get people to believe otherwise. Mark Twain said something like, "Common sense is the ability to look around you and see with your own eyes the world is flat."All humanity started out intuiting the world was flat. Columbus had a hard time getting a crew because so many sailors believed that if you went too far out to sea you'd come to the edge of the world and fall off. Just about every bit of classical mechanics was shocking to people at first. How is it you don't know that, before Galileo, people didn't realize bodies in motion were brought to rest by outside forces? Aren't you aware of all the crackpot notions Aristotle propagated that held supremacy for 2000 years?

We've been solving excruciatingly counter-intuitive puzzles from day one, amigo: √2

A question along the lines of zoobyshoe's thought: isn't Newtonian physics nonlocal?

 

[Pythagorean]

I agree not all of classical physics is intuitive. (Though being thrown off the Earth revolving indicates that someone is exercising their intuition about centripetal force).

What's intuitive about classical physics is the framework, whereas the framework of QM is not intuitive. Klauss isn't talking about doing advanced physics problems, either. Just how particles move through (and exist in) space and time. It's really quit simple to predict a thrown spear's motion because you can count on continuity and locality.

Anyway, even infants know many of the fundamental concepts of classical physics:

" The evidence supports the view that certain core principles
about these domains are present as early as we can test for them and the nature
of the underlying representation is best characterized as primitive initial concepts
that are elaborated and refined through learning and experience"
Physics for infants: characterizing the origins of knowledge about objects, substances, and number
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcs.157/pdf

@atty:

I refer to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality

specifically, I was thinking that you can simultaneously define the position and momentum of a classical particle (or a person), it is localized in space. Not so with a quantum particle. It exists as a probability distribution in space.

addendum:

I agree that the classically nonlocal concept electromagnetism is extremely unintuitive, too. Not so much gravity. Gravity serves as a constant asymmetry in our spatial coordinate system, and I wager you could find obvious adaptations involving it in all species in all kinds of different ways.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Specific things like throwing spears or catching fly balls wouldn't be what was selected for. Coordinate frames don't matter either... what the cultures, spear throwers, ball-players, etc, have in common is that they can construct an n-particle coordinate system in euclidian space, they all do it through the same part of brain (whether it's parietal or temporal. It seems to be parietal in monkey, temporal in humans according to reference 4 in my last post).

Is it an adaptation or a side-effect? I don't know, I will spend more time looking for sources when I have time; obviously I suspect it was an adaptation. Navigating and tracking seems indispensable in hunting for food and avoiding predators. Visuospatial navigations seems to have a clear advantage over chemotaxic navigation for large animals. Wouldn't it have been selected for a while ago in mammalian (or even vertebrate) evolutionary history as our olfactory system diminished and our visual system began to dominate?

I agree with you here that it is probably true that evolution has led humans to develop greater capacities for visual and spatial reasoning. What I think is less clear is that there is a hereditary reason why spatial reasoning underlies abstract thinking. Again, I think that we learn to think about abstract notions spatially, and that such associations are not innate. For example, it was once thought that the concept of the number line (a clear example of using spatial reasoning to address abstract concepts) was something that was genetically programmed into the brain. New research suggests that this view is wrong:

Results suggest that cardinal number concepts can exist independently from number line representations. They also suggest that the number line mapping, although ubiquitous in the modern world, is not universally spontaneous, but rather seems to be learned through — and continually reinforced by — specific cultural practices.

(Núñez et al. 2012. Number Concepts without Number Lines in an Indigenous Group of Papua New Guinea. PLoS ONE 7: e35662. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0035662)

Although you cite a number of studies pointing to spatial reasoning underlying other types of abstract thinking, it's worth noting that these types of psychological and behavioral studies have a very hard time distinguishing effects that are innate and effects that are learned. Indeed, many have criticized psychological studies for studying how people in the Western world think then claiming that these modes represent the entire human population (see for example Henrich et al. 2010. The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 61. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X). Indeed, the article singles out visual perception and spatial reasoning as areas in which the broader human population exhibits much greater variation than in modern societies:

Human societies vary in their linguistic tools for, and cultural practices associated with, representing and communicating directions in physical space, the color spectrum, and integer amounts. There is some evidence that each of these differences in cultural content may influence some aspects of nonlinguistic cognitive processes. Here we focus on spatial cognition, for which the evidence is most provocative. As above, it appears that industrialized societies are at the extreme end of the continuum in spatial cognition. Human populations show differences in how they think about spatial orientation and deal with directions, and these differences may be influenced by linguistically based spatial reference systems.

I think, when looking at research into human behavior, we must take great care in not mistaking the limitations of our culture for the limitations of our species.

 

[atyy]

Wow, k-means clustering is intuitive :p

 

[zoobyshoe]

What's intuitive about classical physics is the framework, whereas the framework of QM is not intuitive. Klauss isn't talking about doing advanced physics problems, either. Just how particles move through (and exist in) space and time. It's really quit simple to predict a thrown spear's motion because you can count on continuity and locality.

If you've never seen a boomerang before, you going to predict it's motion?

 

[Pythagorean]

Yggg, that's fair. I can appreciate the caution with psychology, but I feel your last quote is inline with my thinking (it actually sounds like the weak Sapir Whorf hypothesis). We all have a vestibular system. We may come up with different ways to describe the sensation imparted by physics onto our vestibular system but they're all consistent with continuity and locality.

That paper is interesting though, I love things like this:

Speakers of English and other Indo-European
languages favor the use of an egocentric (relative) system
to represent the location of objects – that is, relative to
the self (e.g., “the man is on the right side of the flagpole”).
In contrast, many if not most languages favor an allocentric
frame, which comes in two flavors. Some allocentric
languages such as Guugu Yimithirr (an Australian
language) and Tzeltal (a Mayan language) favor a geocentric
system in which absolute reference is based on
cardinal directions (“the man is west of the house”). The
other allocentric frame is an object-centered (intrinsic)
approach that locates objects in space, relative to some
coordinate system anchored to the object (“the man is
behind the house”). When languages possesses systems for
encoding all of these spatial reference frames, they often
privilege one at the expense of the others. However, the
fact that some languages lack one or more of the reference
systems suggests that the accretion of all three systems into
most contemporary languages may be a product of longterm
cumulative cultural evolution.

All that really changes here, though, is where the origin is defined in the coordinate system which is still completely in line with the classical framework. In fact, you could find the same kind of differences between the homework solution of two different physics students: one will choose the particle to be at the origin, one will choose an absolute origin.. and in different cases one will be easier to solve (less math) but both are perfectly valid.

 

[atyy]

specifically, I was thinking that you can simultaneously define the position and momentum of a classical particle (or a person), it is localized in space. Not so with a quantum particle. It exists as a probability distribution in space.

But classical waves also do not have a definite position.

I agree that the classically nonlocal concept electromagnetism is extremely unintuitive, too. Not so much gravity. Gravity serves as a constant asymmetry in our spatial coordinate system, and I wager you could find obvious adaptations involving it in all species in all kinds of different ways.

I was reminded of http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24077562 "neural correlates of an internal model that has been proposed to compensate for Einstein's equivalence principle" :)

This, I think, is why we so commonly use concept of space in the sciences, we even take non-spatial variables and plot them against each other and call it phase space in order to get better idea of what a system is doing. Every time we plot a variable, we're translating that variable to space. We assume all the properties of space for most classical variables (continuity, smoothness, deterministic trajectories in Euclidian space). Here's more research about using spatial reasoning for thinking about other things:

musical pitch:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027705000260

numbers:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/135467996387552#.UrJAGPRDuMM

time:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01094.x/abstract;jsessionid=7867474264EC5E729B9863EF5DE600E8.f02t04

Conflict with QM

Spatial reasoning relies on continuity, smoothness, and locality. The unintuitive concepts in QM are exactly the ones that conflict with these: nonlocality, discretization, uncertainty. Particles can't have a precisely defined position and momentum, a particles can exist in a superposition of states.

Ode to learning

Obviously, without learning, none of this would be possible... learning is necessary, but (imo) insufficient to explain our readily available grasp of spatial reasoning. It's interesting that how we learn is influenced by spatial concepts, so in some sense, the adaptation of learning itself may be closely tied to spatial reasoning.

As before, I'm not sure QM is more unintuitive than classical mechanics, especially after Bohm. Nonetheless, your comments reminded me also of

http://clm.utexas.edu/fietelab/Papers/WidloskiFiete_bookchapter_13.pdf
"In this chapter we have focused on exploring how the brain's navigational circuit solves the problems of map-building and self-localization in novel environments. Despite this focus, it bears emphasizing that the hippocampus does not likely exist solely or even primarily to serve this function. ... To understand the elevation of the spatial variable, we might build on the analogy. The full record kept by the librarian includes a title, author names, a summary, a publication date, a publisher, number of copies in the library, and importantly, a call number. The call number is a privileged indexing variable: one author can have multiple books and multiple books may share a title, etc., but each book has a unique call number, and this number further specifies where on the shelves to find the book. On the shelves, books placed near each other address related topics, and thus the call number conveys semantic meaning that goes beyond simply providing a unique identier. Similarly, whereas the full record of an episode consists of a place, a time, context, valence, reward contingency, and landmarks, the place or location index is privileged. It is an efficient locator of a memory, and, in general, records with similar spatial labels will tend to have important relationships to each other because of the spatiotemporal continuity of the world."

 

[zoobyshoe]

What's intuitive about classical physics is the framework, whereas the framework of QM is not intuitive. Klauss isn't talking about doing advanced physics problems, either. Just how particles move through (and exist in) space and time. It's really quit simple to predict a thrown spear's motion because you can count on continuity and locality.

Anyway, even infants know many of the fundamental concepts of classical physics:

" The evidence supports the view that certain core principles
about these domains are present as early as we can test for them and the nature
of the underlying representation is best characterized as primitive initial concepts
that are elaborated and refined through learning and experience"
Physics for infants: characterizing the origins of knowledge about objects, substances, and number
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcs.157/pdf

Overall you're making a very logical case that classical physics should be more intuitive than QM. Your argument makes complete sense. The only flaw I can find in it is that it's wrong.

It's wrong because it bears no resemblance to the reality of the history of physics. Again, I refer you to the writings of Galileo and historical accounts of the difficulties he encountered getting people to accept ideas which you feel are intuitive. It's a good theory in that it's logical, but it isn't supported by the naturally occurring experiments that have taken place throughout history by which, we can see, it is tested.

Modern man has existed for something like 40,000 years, but in all that time, despite whatever "intuitive physics" infants develop, we simply did not grasp the first law of motion. It took 40,000 years for that to sink in. By contrast, QM, which started with Planck, was sketched out in 20-30 years. Yes, it's a completely different frame, but our experience in working out the classical frame, our long history of counter-intuitive puzzle solving, allowed for the adaption to the new kind of problem to happen quite fast. We got traction on it remarkably quickly compared to classical physics.

I agree not all of classical physics is intuitive. (Though being thrown off the Earth revolving indicates that someone is exercising their intuition about centripetal force).

Yeah, erroneously, which supports my case. The fact people automatically conflate motion and acceleration is a good example of the considerable limits of "intuitive" physics.

The fact classical physics has to be taught at all is an argument against the notion it's intuitive. How can we call that which has to be laboriously taught, intuitive?

 

[zoobyshoe]

Anyway, even infants know many of the fundamental concepts of classical physics:

Just to be clear, this was a whimsical remark, right?

 

[Pythagorean]

You seem to be thinking me (or Klauss?) is making an argument for all classical physics, which is not the case. The argument I'm making is that classical physics is more intuitive than QM (you said it yourself in #46) not that all of classical physics is intuitive (the strawman you also raised in #46, #43, etc).

Again, it's the framework that's intuitive, not the whole science (it makes learning the whole science easier though) and remember the context: it's in comparison to QM. Most importantly, continuity and locality in Euclidian space are what's intuitive in classical physics and their violations in QM are what's unintuitive about QM.

For examples (and this is one example from the infant study) we don't expect balls to go through walls. In QM, tunneling is possible (thanks to nonlocality) and that's weird to us (and to infants). The point isn't that you are born knowing how to find solutions to Navier Stokes, it's that your systems are tuned to a world with spatial continuity and particle locality because that's the world they developed in.

And, by the way, intuition for centripetal force is intuition for Newton's First law.

 

[Pythagorean]

Also, here's opinions and summaries from the authors of the infant physics study in case you don't want to read the study:

In the MU Developmental Cognition Lab, we study infant knowledge of the world by measuring a child’s gaze when presented with different scenarios,” said Kristy vanMarle, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences in the College of Arts and Science. “We believe that infants are born with expectations about the objects around them, even though that knowledge is a skill that’s never been taught. As the child develops, this knowledge is refined and eventually leads to the abilities we use as adults.”

In a review of related scientific literature from the past 30 years, vanMarle and Susan Hespos of Northwestern University found that the evidence for intuitive physics occurs in infants as young as two months – the earliest age at which testing can occur. At that age, infants show an understanding that unsupported objects will fall and that hidden objects do not cease to exist. Scientific testing also has shown that by five months, infants have an expectation that non-cohesive substances like sand or water are not solid. In a previous publication, vanMarle found that children as young as 10 months consistently choose larger amounts when presented with two different amounts of food substance.

“We believe that infants are born with the ability to form expectations and they use these expectations basically to predict the future,” vanMarle said. “Intuitive physics include skills that adults use all the time. For example, when a glass of milk falls off the table, a person might try to catch the cup, but they are not likely to try to catch the milk that spills out. The person doesn’t have to consciously think about what to do because the brain processes the information and the person simply reacts. The majority of an adult’s everyday interactions with the world are automatic, and we believe infants have the same ability to form expectations, predicting the behavior of objects and substances with which they interact.”

While the intuitive physics knowledge is believed to be present at birth, vanMarle believes parents can assist skill development through normal interaction, such as playing and talking with the child and encouraging him/her to interact with objects.

http://munews.missouri.edu/news-rel...uitive-physics”-knowledge-says-mu-researcher/

 

[atyy]

Also, here's opinions and summaries from the authors of the infant physics study in case you don't want to read the study:



http://munews.missouri.edu/news-rel...uitive-physics”-knowledge-says-mu-researcher/

Do the present evidence that these expectations were not learnt?

 

[Pythagorean]

No, it's always a possibility. In the context of the articles demonstrating selection for spatial reasoning, it's suggestive evidence. But it's not just a matter of learned or not, it's also a matter of how much the hardware facilitates the learning of.

 

[Pythagorean]

What I think is less clear is that there is a hereditary reason why spatial reasoning underlies abstract thinking...

I meant to respond to this but I got distracted by other aspects of the discussion. I agree with this. In the post you refer to, I intentionally separated the discussion of selection from the discussion of abstract thought with the bold headers to make this point clear.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Now the debate over whether CM or QM is more intuitive seems to be missing the point. I think the really interesting question at hand now is whether certain "physical intuitions" about the world, such as the expectations of solidity, continuity, cohesion and property changes that the Hespos and vanMarle article discusses, are genetically programmed or learned. The fact that these show up in two month old infants is a sign that they may be innate. However, two month olds still have considerable experience with the world and it is also possible that they have learned these expectations from observing the world around them. Of course, both nature and nurture could have some role in the process. These seem like very difficult questions to answer.

 

[zoobyshoe]

You seem to be thinking me (or Klauss?) is making an argument for all classical physics, which is not the case. The argument I'm making is that classical physics is more intuitive than QM (you said it yourself in #46) not that all of classical physics is intuitive (the strawman you also raised in #46, #43, etc).

Again, it's the framework that's intuitive, not the whole science (it makes learning the whole science easier though) and remember the context: it's in comparison to QM. Most importantly, continuity and locality in Euclidian space are what's intuitive in classical physics and their violations in QM are what's unintuitive about QM.

For examples (and this is one example from the infant study) we don't expect balls to go through walls. In QM, tunneling is possible (thanks to nonlocality) and that's weird to us (and to infants). The point isn't that you are born knowing how to find solutions to Navier Stokes, it's that your systems are tuned to a world with spatial continuity and particle locality because that's the world they developed in.

I'm not maintaining that classical physics is just as hard for a modern student to grasp as QM, I'm saying it was a lot harder to figure out in the first place. A bright person can be taught, and grasp, Newton's three laws, in, let's say, an hour. It's very, very easy to receive knowledge that someone else spent millennia figuring out from scratch, and to get the completely erroneous impression we, ourselves, could have figured it out from scratch quite quickly had we set our minds to it. Once someone else makes sense of something they can pass that understanding to another without all the false starts, errors, and red herrings that delayed the understanding.

If you re-watch the whole video, you'll see that Kraus agrees with me that we seem to have a penchant for tackling mysteries and puzzles and that we're usually surprised by the results (they're very often counter-intuitive). I think he's at cross purposes to himself by prefacing all that with the remark that "we didn't evolve to understand QM". He seems to be crediting our survival exclusively to the automatic fight or flight type of reactions, which are genetic. That's true in the very short term, but he's missing the equally important long term activities we engage in when we're not running from tigers, which are often tackling mysteries like QM. That is so all pervasive in human behavior that we've moved from hunter-gatherers to city builders and space explorers.

Tigers are still out there hunting people, when they can get to them, while we're sitting here debating over the internet by means of astonishingly complex technology. Tigers didn't evolve to understand QM. I think, in a very important sense, it's much more accurate to say we did evolve to understand QM than to say we didn't. If our puzzle solving penchants and abilities weren't selected for, whatever specific brain functions you wish to parse these abilities to, where did they come from?

And, by the way, intuition for centripetal force is intuition for Newton's First law.

If they had an intuitive grasp of Newton's First Law, why did they deny the Earth could be rotating, a situation they "intuited" would result in all things on the surface being thrown off into space?

 

[zoobyshoe]

“We believe that infants are born with the ability to form expectations and they use these expectations basically to predict the future,” vanMarle said. “Intuitive physics include skills that adults use all the time. For example, when a glass of milk falls off the table, a person might try to catch the cup, but they are not likely to try to catch the milk that spills out. The person doesn’t have to consciously think about what to do because the brain processes the information and the person simply reacts. The majority of an adult’s everyday interactions with the world are automatic, and we believe infants have the same ability to form expectations, predicting the behavior of objects and substances with which they interact.”

You realize that birds, for example, are vastly better at this "intuitive physics" than people, right?

 

[Pythagorean]

More, less is beside the point. But like I said, it's a vertebrate adaptation. One of the papers I cited was about birds and the anatomical comparison of specialized systems for object tracking to visual systems for pattern recognition, though it also mentions the homologous system in humans and primates.

That the adaptation is conserved across species is even more evidence that it's selected for : )

 

[Pythagorean]

I'm not maintaining that classical physics is just as hard for a modern student to grasp as QM, I'm saying it was a lot harder to figure out in the first place. A bright person can be taught, and grasp, Newton's three laws, in, let's say, an hour. It's very, very easy to receive knowledge that someone else spent millennia figuring out from scratch, and to get the completely erroneous impression we, ourselves, could have figured it out from scratch quite quickly had we set our minds to it. Once someone else makes sense of something they can pass that understanding to another without all the false starts, errors, and red herrings that delayed the understanding.

If you re-watch the whole video, you'll see that Kraus agrees with me that we seem to have a penchant for tackling mysteries and puzzles and that we're usually surprised by the results (they're very often counter-intuitive). I think he's at cross purposes to himself by prefacing all that with the remark that "we didn't evolve to understand QM". He seems to be crediting our survival exclusively to the automatic fight or flight type of reactions, which are genetic. That's true in the very short term, but he's missing the equally important long term activities we engage in when we're not running from tigers, which are often tackling mysteries like QM. That is so all pervasive in human behavior that we've moved from hunter-gatherers to city builders and space explorers.

Tigers are still out there hunting people, when they can get to them, while we're sitting here debating over the internet by means of astonishingly complex technology. Tigers didn't evolve to understand QM. I think, in a very important sense, it's much more accurate to say we did evolve to understand QM than to say we didn't. If our puzzle solving penchants and abilities weren't selected for, whatever specific brain functions you wish to parse these abilities to, where did they come from?

If they had an intuitive grasp of Newton's First Law, why did they deny the Earth could be rotating, a situation they "intuited" would result in all things on the surface being thrown off into space?

You seem to be conflating intuition with knowledge and technical know-how. Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or reasoning. It doesn't mean you get everything right. False starts, red herings, etc are not in contradiction with intution. You don't hire a central manager for a bank if all they have is intuition. You need experience and practice to be able to harness your intution. Furthermore, the claim is "there exists", not "for all".

Klauss doesn't contradict himself at all. He talks about that we like puzzle solving and the we're drawn to it, not that we're adapted to it (and that's not true across the human species, anyway, not everyone likes puzzles). Klauss doesn't say that it was selected for (i.e. that we evolved to solve puzzles).

Because via Newton's first law, if you're rotating (and there's the balancing force isn't strong enough) you will be "thrown off" the sphere (you will actually just be continuing on your path via Newton's First... it's gravity that keeps you on Earth). That's good intuition. They happen to be wrong about which force dominates (they assumed gravity was weaker) but they didn't have to be taught Newton's First Law to comprehend that consequences of it! That's (by definition) intuition for physics!

(Also.. if you want to explore the adaptation of "puzzle solving", that's on your to provide the literature and the arguments and how it links to QM and demonstrate that it's as pervasive as the intuition for classical properties. It seems like a long shot to me, but it's your time.)

 

[Pythagorean]

Now the debate over whether CM or QM is more intuitive seems to be missing the point. I think the really interesting question at hand now is whether certain "physical intuitions" about the world, such as the expectations of solidity, continuity, cohesion and property changes that the Hespos and vanMarle article discusses, are genetically programmed or learned. The fact that these show up in two month old infants is a sign that they may be innate. However, two month olds still have considerable experience with the world and it is also possible that they have learned these expectations from observing the world around them. Of course, both nature and nurture could have some role in the process. These seem like very difficult questions to answer.

Well, those "phsyical intutions" (solidity, continuity, cohesion) are all pervasive in classical physics and not in quantum physics, but I completely agree with you besides our semantic disagreement.

A third way to look at it is that the innate properties of the circuit facilitated the learning quickly (within two months of birth). Remember also that babies can't see that well or interpret what they see in the first month, so they wouldn't have really had the full two months to learn (well, not visually anyway, which is the system we think is responsible for detecting these physical properties).

There are some anatomically functional division that have been found in owls between innate neural circuits and neural circuits for learning (namely whether they use a disinhibition process vs. a silent-synapse process)[1]. Maybe if we investigated which was associated with the active networks in object tracking and expectation violation in infants, we could see which dominates (nature or nurture?) or if they are more-or-less equivalent. I would assume they are closer to equivalent because of the well-known blind-the-baby-kittens experiment which demonstrate a strong nurture effect in at least one sensory system.

[1]"Studies in barn owls have revealed that the additional learned circuits that had been assembled during a sensitive period in juvenile birds were turned on and off in the adult through mechanisms distinct from those that turn innate natural circuits on and off (disinhibition versus AMPA/NMDA ratios for the innate and learned circuits, respectively), suggesting that innate and acquired circuit arrangements can be distinguished functionally"

http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v13/n7/full/nrn3258.html

 

[zoobyshoe]

Because via Newton's first law, if you're rotating (and there's the balancing force isn't strong enough) you will be "thrown off" the sphere (you will actually just be continuing on your path via Newton's First... it's gravity that keeps you on Earth). That's good intuition. They happen to be wrong about which force dominates (they assumed gravity was weaker) but they didn't have to be taught Newton's First Law to comprehend that consequences of it! That's (by definition) intuition for physics!

I concede this point completely. The fact they thought we'd be thrown off the Earth were it rotating demonstrates an intuitive grasp of Newton's First Law. Their error was in not accounting for mitigating forces.

What did you mean here, then:

(Though being thrown off the Earth revolving indicates that someone is exercising their intuition about centripetal force)

?

You seem to be conflating intuition with knowledge and technical know-how. Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or reasoning. It doesn't mean you get everything right. False starts, red herings, etc are not in contradiction with intution. You don't hire a central manager for a bank if all they have is intuition. You need experience and practice to be able to harness your intution.

No. The whole point of the word is to describe insights that are in place without preliminary conscious trial and error, corrections, experiments to check theory against reality, etc.:

intuition:
1: quick and ready insight
2
a : immediate apprehension or cognition
b : knowledge or conviction gained by intuition
c : the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference

The learning that leads to intuition is effortless and unconscious, which is why an individual experiencing an intuition would have no rational explanation for why they knew what they knew. A person operating a slingshot could easily acquire intuition about Newton's First Law and suspect we would be thrown off the Earth if it were rotating, but they wouldn't be able to articulate why they worry that is the case. They wouldn't be able to consciously explain, "A body in rest or in uniform motion in a straight line will remain that way unless acted on by an outside force."

And, it has to be right. You can't call it "knowledge" if it's bunk. There's no point in using the word "intuition" if you're talking about a succession of random, incorrect confabulations.

Klauss

Krauss, actually. (It's OK, I've been calling him "Kraus".)

...doesn't contradict himself at all. He talks about that we like puzzle solving and the we're drawn to it, not that we're adapted to it (and that's not true across the human species, anyway, not everyone likes puzzles). Klauss doesn't say that it was selected for (i.e. that we evolved to solve puzzles).

I know he's not making the overt assertion we evolved for puzzle solving. But it's a property he attributes to us, mysteriously, after having listed our evolutionary endowments as limited to fight or flight responses. Here's my original remark:

Having watched it, I think Kraus is wrong to say we didn't evolve to understand QM, due to what he says later about us enjoying puzzle solving so much. Clearly there's been selection in favor of puzzle solvers, and QM is just another puzzle. Figuring things out is what we do, and it's not an activity limited to humans. A lot of animals are puzzle solvers, to the best of their ability.

Since he ascribes puzzle solving to us he would have, if confronted, to admit it must have been selected for. However, he opens by specifically only mentioning fight or flight, shelter seeking, and spear and rock throwing (which, in the context of the video, seems to be a reference to a 'fight' reaction to danger rather than an expression of tool-making).

So there is a contradiction between the limited list he gives of what was selected for at the start of the video and the ability he ascribes to us later on. If all that was selected for was rudimentary fight or flight responses, how is it he suddenly finds us solving puzzles and being amazed by the results? He doesn't address the cause or origin of puzzle solving, he brings it in without explanation, having specifically excluded the only thing he mentions that could be construed as a form of puzzle solving, understanding QM, from what was selected for.

Krauss believes we didn't evolve to understand QM because it's outside the scale we evolved in. Makes sense. It also makes sense to propose we did evolve to understand classical physics. Makes sense, but untrue. Every inch of our progress in Classical Physics was hard won through, collectively, millions and millions of hours of puzzle solving. Made possible by the fact we did evolve to solve puzzles (at least, we evolved the ability and drive to learn to solve them).

I think what you're failing to observe is that the ability to throw a spear accurately is a completely different kind of activity than intellectually sorting out and articulating the 3 Laws. Intuitively grasping that the harder you throw it, the further it will go into the mammoth, is a million miles away from being able to say F=ma. The latter requires sorting out the concept of force, the concept of mass, the concept of acceleration, and then that the magnitude of the force will be equal to the product of the mass and acceleration, and then finding suitable units for all. The former (spear throwing) isn't physics, the latter is. The former can be learned relatively quickly, the latter (specifically F=ma) took us 40,000 years to sort out, despite the fact we were living in the world of, on the scale of, spear throwing that whole time. Saying it is a completely different activity than doing it.

(Also.. if you want to explore the adaptation of "puzzle solving", that's on your to provide the literature and the arguments and how it links to QM and demonstrate that it's as pervasive as the intuition for classical properties. It seems like a long shot to me, but it's your time.)

I suppose I would, if I'd ever made such a claim.

 

[atyy]

(Also.. if you want to explore the adaptation of "puzzle solving", that's on your to provide the literature and the arguments and how it links to QM and demonstrate that it's as pervasive as the intuition for classical properties. It seems like a long shot to me, but it's your time.)

For the first point, there is the Pinker proposal I linked to earlier. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/PNAS-2010-Pinker-8993-9.pdf

Interesting related commentary
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/did-humans-evolve-to-fill-a-cognitive-niche/
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress...olutionary-psychology-mostly-by-steve-pinker/
"Second, “developmental plasticity†does not stand as a dichotomous alternative to “evolved features.†Our developmental plasticity is to a large extent the product of evolution: our ability to learn language, our tendency to defer to authorities when we’re children, our learned socialization—those are all features almost certainly instilled into our brains by natural selection as a way to promote behavioral flexibility in that most flexible of mammals."

The Bohmian interpretation makes QM as intuitive as classical statistical mechanics. And yes, classical mechanics is not intuitive - there was Aristotelian physics for a long time before that. I think this is in the spirit of what zoobyshoe has been saying.

"Aristotle’s physics bad reputation is undeserved, and leads to diffused ignorance: think for a moment, do you really believe that bodies of different weight fall at the same speed? Why don’t you just try: take a coin and piece of paper and let them fall. Do they fall at the same speed? Aristotle never claimed that bodies fall at different speed if we take away the air. He was interested in the speed of real bodies falling in our real world, where air is present. It is curious to read everywhere “Why didn’t Aristotle do the actual experiment?â€. I do not know if he did, but I know that if he did observation would have confirmed his theory." http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057

 

[Pythagorean]

I think what you're failing to observe is that the ability to throw a spear accurately is a completely different kind of activity than intellectually sorting out and articulating the 3 Laws

This is interesting, because this is what I think you're failing to observe:

"Intellectually sorting out and articulating the 3 laws". That is not intuition. You're conflating cognitive concepts here. Intuition is not knowledge, it's an ability to acquire knowledge; it's parallel to reason and deduction (other abilities used to acquire knowledge that you seem to be confusing with intuition when you say "intellectually sorting" and "articulating"). Look at the definition:

"the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning."

https://www.google.ca/search?q=define:+intuition&oq=define:+intuition

or the psychology-motivated wiki (which restates the above definition and adds:)

"Intuition provides us with views, understandings, judgements, or beliefs that we cannot in every case empirically verify or rationally justify."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_(psychology )

Whereas... throwing a spear is something arises without the need for conscious reasoning:

A caveman didn't need to formulate the range law to predict his spear
He didn't need to find the law of gravity to throw the spear
He didn't need to find the cohesion force of animal flesh or formulate pressure laws to show that a spearhead would penetrate it

A caveman knows about the laws governing spear flight "without the need for conscious reasoning".

(Also, I never said we evolved to understand classical mechanics in the sense that it was selected for, all I'm saying is that lots of hardware underlying aspects of classical mechanics were selected for. Please see my first post on page 1; I've re-introduced it in my response to atty below. Once again, I repeat, it's the underlying framework: space and particles.)

 

[Pythagorean]

@atyy, was their a particular paragraph from that paper you had in mind? They use the word puzzle, but in a meta-context only. Other than that they conclude we may have evolved to figure out stuff about our world.. which applies equally to QM as CM.

The Bohmian interpretation makes QM as intuitive as classical statistical mechanics. And yes, classical mechanics is not intuitive - there was Aristotelian physics for a long time before that. I think this is in the spirit of what zoobyshoe has been saying.

"Aristotle’s physics bad reputation is undeserved, and leads to diffused ignorance: think for a moment, do you really believe that bodies of different weight fall at the same speed? Why don’t you just try: take a coin and piece of paper and let them fall. Do they fall at the same speed? Aristotle never claimed that bodies fall at different speed if we take away the air. He was interested in the speed of real bodies falling in our real world, where air is present. It is curious to read everywhere “Why didn’t Aristotle do the actual experiment?â€. I do not know if he did, but I know that if he did observation would have confirmed his theory." http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057

You have to qualify. When you say "classical mechanics is not intuitive" that could mean anything. Do you mean "all", "there exists", "most". I would even agree that most specific laws, theorems, etc, in classical mechanics is not intuitive. But that still doesn't conflict with my original point in this thread (see page 1):

"I think the basic point of the OP quote is just that determinism and continuity (concepts of classical physics) are extremely intuitive to humans, and have (arguably) been selected for as part of motion prediction and spatial navigation. There probably aren't many predator or prey that behave like quantum particles."

As I've said many times, it's the underlying framework that's intuitive: determinism, continuity, locality (and apparently even cohesion and solidity). Probablity (statistical mechanics) is not intuitive to students at all. People struggle even with the Monty Hall problem. In fact, the probabilistic nature of QM is one of the things that makes it intuitive. People tend to interpret events in the world as if they were deterministic.

 

[atyy]

@atyy, was their a particular paragraph from that paper you had in mind? They use the word puzzle, but in a meta-context only. Other than that they conclude we may have evolved to figure out stuff about our world.. which applies equally to QM as CM.

So you do agree with zoobyshoe's point?

The remaining debate about whether classical or quantum mechanics is more intuitive on what aspects seems like hairsplitting then.

 

[Pythagorean]

I don't know what point you're referring to. When Zooby made puzzle-solving about hunting as well as QM then it's so all-inclusive that it's not meaningful discussion really. And I wasn't agreeing with the article, just stating their conclusion for clarification of your point. I provided several sources from several different disciplines that focused on a clear point.

I don't think it's hairsplitting, I think the wealth of evidence I've provided are all about intuitions that are pervasive in CM and directly contradict much of QM.

 

[atyy]

I don't know what point you're referring to. When Zooby made puzzle-solving about hunting as well as QM then it's so all-inclusive that it's not meaningful discussion really. And I wasn't agreeing with the article, just stating their conclusion for clarification of your point. I provided several sources from several different disciplines that focused on a clear point.

I don't think it's hairsplitting, I think the wealth of evidence I've provided are all about intuitions that are pervasive in CM and directly contradict much of QM.

As I understand, zoobyshoe's (and others') point was that even spear throwing is not intuitive, and that the ability to learn unintuitive things like throwing a stone, a spear, classical mechanics and quantum mechanics could be selected for. Certain aspects of each may be more or less intuitive, and even then the intuitive aspects may vary from person to person, and not be hardwired, let alone specifically selected for, into human beings with any reliability. At this point in my life, I don't consider quantum mechanics more unintuitive than classical mechanics, but I do still feel Newton's first law is unintuitive.

A basic problem with all your sources is that they do not show that the things were not learnt, but were selected for. I agree that the opposite - the ability to learn unintuitive things has been selected for - has not been demonstrated either. But it remains a possibility, and seems to me would undermine Krauss's point.

 

[atyy]

Here for example, is an alternative to Krauss's comments (I realize this is taking them too seriously, but anyway, the whole thread is.)

How about: human beings learn. From an early age, we learn intuitions that are more consonant with some aspects of classical mechanics. Consequently, when we are exposed to quantum mechanics in the Copenhagen interpretation at a later age, some aspects seem unintuitive given the intuitions we learned at an earlier age.

 

[Pythagorean]

I'm just going to summarize my argument here and I'm done. I feel like I've been rehashing old points for a while now. Sometimes it seems like semantics and hair-splitting, but I don't think we're going to advance the conversation past where it is.

Summary

interpreation of OP Krauss: (my opening post in this thread)

I think the basic point of the OP quote is just that determinism and continuity (concepts of classical physics) are extremely intuitive to humans, and have (arguably) been selected for as part of motion prediction and spatial navigation. There probably aren't many predator or prey that behave like quantum particles.

My more formal argument (evidence in post)
https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=4607304&postcount=35

P1) Spatial reasoning is selected for (and possibly other underlying aspects of classical physics if you consider the infant physics article as evidence)

P2) This spatial (and physical) intuition underlies the abstract reasoning that makes up classical mechanics (i.e. the the intuition upon which we built classical physics).

P3) many of the intuitive concepts underlying CM are opposite of observations in QM (particles are not localized, they can tunnel through walls, lack of continuity in state transitions, identical particles)

I would also just note that much of the language and perspectives we adopted for classical physics are used in quantum physics. Classical physics is a framework for quantum mechanics, but we had to make major adjustments that violated some of our most "sacred" aspects of classical physics because classical physics is just a fundamental part of our intuition that we think it describes our universe. But it seems to be wrong, and QM seems to be right.

To me, this suggests that our classical physics has more to do with our intuition than it does with reality.

 

[Pythagorean]

As I understand, zoobyshoe's (and others') point was that even spear throwing is not intuitive, and that the ability to learn unintuitive things like throwing a stone, a spear, classical mechanics and quantum mechanics could be selected for. Certain aspects of each may be more or less intuitive, and even then the intuitive aspects may vary from person to person, and not be hardwired, let alone specifically selected for, into human beings with any reliability. At this point in my life, I don't consider quantum mechanics more unintuitive than classical mechanics, but I do still feel Newton's first law is unintuitive.

A basic problem with all your sources is that they do not show that the things were not learnt, but were selected for. I agree that the opposite - the ability to learn unintuitive things has been selected for - has not been demonstrated either. But it remains a possibility, and seems to me would undermine Krauss's point.

I'll respond to this since it was made before my announcement, but it seems like semantics and/or strawman really: I didn't say all of these things "were not learned but were selected for". I am saying that spatial reasoning was selected for (and arguably other physical notions) and that they made learning spear throwing easier (P1 leads to P2 in my review above).

Again, the formal definition of intuition "the ability to acquire knowledge without reasoning" (i.e. learn). Zooby's strawman is different than yours. He seems to think I'm saying that "we formulated classical physics without reasoning". Or that "every outcome of classical physics is accurately predicted by human intuition". Further, atyy, your post #66 isn't in conflict with my point. There is no dichotomy between learning and innate: things can be more one or the other or they can be somewhere in between. I believe Yggg and I have come to agreement that they're somewhere in between. Also see "ode to learning" in my linked post above to my formal argument and reread my opening post (also included in my post above).

I could easily be misinterpreting points, too. Maybe if we all take a break and read the thread later we'll be able to read original arguments more clearly without whatever presumptions we have in our heads that cause mis-communication.

Thanks to all for the discussion.

 

[atyy]

I'll respond to this since it was made before my announcement, but it seems like semantics and/or strawman really: I didn't say all of these things "were not learned but were selected for". I am saying that spatial reasoning was selected for (and arguably other physical notions) and that they made learning spear throwing easier (P1 leads to P2 in my review above).

Again, the formal definition of intuition "the ability to acquire knowledge without reasoning" (i.e. learn). Zooby's strawman is different than yours. He seems to think I'm saying that "we formulated classical physics without reasoning". Or that "every outcome of classical physics is accurately predicted by human intuition". Further, atyy, your post #66 isn't in conflict with my point. There is no dichotomy between learning and innate: things can be more one or the other or they can be somewhere in between. I believe Yggg and I have come to agreement that they're somewhere in between. Also see "ode to learning" in my linked post above to my formal argument and reread my opening post (also included in my post above).

I could easily be misinterpreting points, too. Maybe if we all take a break and read the thread later we'll be able to read original arguments more clearly without whatever presumptions we have in our heads that cause mis-communication.

Thanks to all for the discussion.

I'm not really responding to your OP - I'm thinking largely of this post, where the researchers wish to support that some knowledge is innate.

http://munews.missouri.edu/news-rel...uitive-physics”-knowledge-says-mu-researcher/

In the first place, the supposed innate knowledge is very weak. For example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11340923 "The results indicated that at this age infants are able to reason about height in occlusion but not containment events. Experiment 3 showed that this latter ability does not emerge until about 7.5 months of age. The marked discrepancy in infants' reasoning about height in occlusion and containment events suggests that infants sort events into distinct categories, and acquire separate rules for each category." I couldn't get that free, but this seems to provide some details http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/infantlab/articles/baillargeon2004b.pdf.pdf

So in fact, a 2.5 month-old infant's view of the world is very unintuitive to an adult, which would be more like that of a 7.5 month old infant.

Secpnd, there appears to be some controversy, eg. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16637762 about what sort of innate knowledge these experiments test. "The authors use the model to simulate a set of influential experiments by R. Baillargeon (1986, 1987a, 1987b) using the well-known "drawbridge" paradigm. The dynamic field model provides a coherent explanation without invoking infant object knowledge."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2605404/ gives some references which may be interesting to look at "Some researchers claim that the relevant data can be explained without appeal to “initial knowledge†of the world, based on familiarity preferences (e.g. Bogartz et al., 1997; Cohen and Marks, 2002; Haith, 1998). Others have attempted to rebut these arguments, arguing that these interpretations cannot account for the full array of data in each domain (e.g. Baillargeon, 1999; Carey, 2002; Spelke, 1998; Wynn, 2002)."

 

[Enigman]

Okay, I skimmed through the thread...and got lost.
Intuition as defined in #61

"the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning."
"Intuition provides us with views, understandings, judgements, or beliefs that we cannot in every case empirically verify or rationally justify."

A few questions :
----
1. Does the definition necessarily preclude prior knowledge and or experience?
2. Given enough knowledge and experience in a subject matter would one become more intuitive with regard to that?
(- If yes, the experience we have with classical mechanic approximations is much greater than QM which means Classical mechanics or at least its basic applications are more intuitive than of QM)
---
Coming back to the absent OP's question-

We evolved as human beings a few million years ago on the Savanna in Africa and we evolved to escape tigers, or lions, or predators. You know, how to throw a rock or a spear or how to find a cave and we didn't evolve to understand quantum mechanics.

Assuming 'evolve to' means 'evolutionarily selected for'
---
I don't think that the understanding QM has ever been a factor in evolution so yes, as far as the bare-bones go it seems justified.
Extrapolating it however to all problem solving involved would be foolish. Evolution has enabled us to acquire the intelligence to understand QM. (#23Ygg)
In #25

The intuition we (and most mammals) start with allowed us to track prey and avoid predators, to know our bodies position in space, to predict trajectories, to judge depth so we don't walk off cliffs. We have great spatial intuition in the classical physics sense. These are readily available for throwing a rock or spear [...]

'Intuition we start with'
-that's a bit vague. Do you mean that its innate ? Anyway the citations given in #35 seem to refer to spatial reasoning rather than intuition, innate or otherwise.

QM concepts like nonlocality, indistinguishability, superposition of states... intuition for such concepts wouldn't have had any usefulness in reproduction in the 99.9% of human history.

Sit-coms tell me that it is a liability to one's reproductive prospects...