On Mar 7, 6:39 pm, Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED] cybersource.com.au> wrote: > On Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:26:25 -0800, castironpi wrote: > > Humans have enormous "mental stacks"--- the stacks the contexts the > > speakers speak in push things they're hearing on to. > > This is not true.
Oh yeah. (See below.) > Human beings have extremely shallow mental stacks, limited by short-term > memory. Most people are capable of keeping seven, plus or minus two, > items in short term memory at once. Any more than that and they are > subject to fading away or being over-written. > efficiency expert by the company<strike> through</strike>. > Remarkable is the rapidity of the motion of the wing > of the hummingbird. Oh, you mean hummingbird wing motion rapidity remarkability! How - could- I! 'Stack' may have been the wrong word. I probably meant 'intermodal recognition': the "Ah yes, I know it" response. But whether that's related to our tool-bearer capacity, isn't something you can test all that easily. What animals encounter something they had a use for once, and forget what? The breadth of objects in, say, a leopard's representation table* (working term), doesn't include chisels and footballs. Nothing is its favorite football, and a football isn't its favorite anything. What are its favorites? * Proposition table is clearly wrong. But given the human ability to touch an object, then open eyes, and identify which it touched might suggest 'intermodal recognition table', 'resemblance table', or 'value table'. How about resemblance-value? It at least would explain our susceptibility and reaction to greedy traps and shock: it's a the shock and greedy trap susceptibility and reaction of ours explanation. That is, how close something you like is to something you like..... and how much you like it. How much you like and how close something is... <ahem>. Monotonically decreasing bivariate, delta> 0 => value( object, prior value+ delta )< value( object, prior value ) & value( object+ delta, prior value )< value( object, prior value ). ... which, by the way, should answer Archimedes' riddle: can you step in the same river? By degree. You're downstream and know it. Nota bene, how fast we can recall a song we even haven't heard in years we hear a snippet of, and not even from the overture. Given a 'symbol' that comes over a channel, in baud, our hash function maps it to a value close to previous hashings of it--- we merely search nearby memories and it's recognized. Odd! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
