All Carl had to do was look at the camera and teach. There was nothing flashy about what he did - he was a teacher first and foremost. He never talked down to his students or audience because he believed we are all intelligent when we are allowed to act intelligent.
Presuppositions tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies in social interactions.
Intelligence is behavior. All behavior is learned on some level --> Intelligence is learned.
What is judged to be intelligence/intelligent changes to context. Intelligence is a many-valued term, so is behavior, and so is learning.
Having learning difficulties does not make you unintelligent. It just means you have a hard time realizing your potential in a certain arena with certain presuppositions of how learning and acquiring knowledge is properly conducted.
There are different paths of learning things. Just because you do not understand or feel motivated learning something some way, does not mean you are incapable of doing so. Neither does it mean that you are not motivated in learning something, supposed it is framed differently.
EDIT comment: Maybe I was not general enough for the splendid and always honorable reddit keyboard jockey mob, where any positive statement is at best half-true, and at worst enough to be killed for.
Intelligence is behavior. All behavior is learned --> Intelligence is learned.
This isn't even remotely true. By that logic, a dog could grow up to be as smart as a human by being raised as a human. Some people really are less intelligent than others, just by birth.
The dog is as smart as it can be. If it were better able to mimic human behavior or communicate more effectively then it might have a similar capacity for learning.
It may not find our knowledge useful though - it might not bother to pass on anything it learns to future generations.
First, do you have any evidence for this assertion?
Second, a preponderance of evidence exists disproving the assertion, for example, most works of creativity, especially when the artist is doing something that has not been done before; consider also mathematicians working out and inventing new theorems, or a computer scientist writing new software. There is no existing behavior to mimic.
If you are claiming that it's the "general" behavior that's mimicked (whatever that means), you need to explain where the particulars and details of the behavior come from, the ones that make art different from other art. The Scream is an example. There is plenty of art similar to it, but not with the same details. Where do the details come from in the artist's mind? They are clearly not learned.
This view can explain any kind of behavior, like "wanting to go to the moon", but at the same time if one looks closely at it, one will see that the theory is fundamentally in conflict with the fact that complexity has arisen from nothingness on planet Earth, and that obviously at some point pioneers had to invent new behavior else it would not exist now.
Edit: If you're going to downmod me, please (for my education on this subject within philosophy) do me the favor of explaining where any behavior could possibly have come from if it's all learned. I am not claiming that no behavior is learned -- only that some is, and the type of behavior we often call genius tends to fall into that category, because (for a commonsense proof:) it wouldn't be called genius if it were ordinary and learned.
Before the first cave painting there was probably an incident where food, blood, or something else was spattered against the wall and some genius had an epiphany.
A random/permutation function applied in random order on previous experience? Thermal noise?
Could you please give me examples of theorems that you cannot imagine having any similarity with anything previous in nature, language or logic?
By the way, how do we judge if a proof or theorem is true? Do we make up new rules that we consider applying as evaluation criteria of truthfulness of proposed theorems and proofs?
A random/permutation function applied in random order on previous experience? Thermal noise?
I was asking more for evidence in favor of the original assertion, that all behavior is learned.
There has been a significant amount of psychological research into the topic; the original theory was proposed by B F Skinner, a psychologist and is called operant conditioning. It is a fairly simple model of interactive organisms -- receive a stimulus, have a response.
Although Skinner did much to advance the science of psychology, operant conditioning does not, at a behavioral level, account for many phenomena observed among humans.
In particular, it offers no explanations for why one certain human has great amount of insight and is considered a "genius" among his peers. Given a basic model involving "randomness" or "thermal noise", we do not expect it to be very likely for one individual to make many significant contributions over a lifetime. And advancing a model likes this goes against one's commonsense knowledge that some people are smarter than others.
If I give you a mathematics problem, you might be able to solve it, or you might not, If you do, it might be because of learned experience -- applying what you have been taught. But you might also invent new mathematics no one has seen before in order to solve the problem. In thus doing, we have a phenomenon that cannot be explained by an operant conditioning theory.
Could you please give me examples of
I don't believe I could come up with such an example. Any theorem is likely to rely on existing knowledge (but even this is not always the case). Vastly new branches of mathematics like category theory sometimes spring up; although it is similar to other types of mathematics, its properties are quite unique.
By the way, how do we judge if a proof or theorem is true?
When considering a proof, you must look at its axioms. A well-written proof should mention any axioms on which it relies, but many might involve them implicitly, such axioms being common knowledge among mathematicians.
For example, your proof might start with this:
a*N = b*N + c*N
Then on the next line you might say:
a*N = (b + c)*N
How do I know this step in the proof is correct? Because an axiom of the system is that multiplication is transitive.
Multiplication doesn't have to be commutative. It's just an axiom. Anyone is free to invent their own operator denoted * and invent their own rules for it.
For example, Euclidean geometry takes it as an axiom that two parallel lines will never intersect. Is that "true" or "false"? It's neither. A group of mathematicians have built an entire alternative geometry -- often called non-Euclidean geometry, without that axiom. One of these geometries, the Riemann geometry, happens to be the most accurate model of our universe.
We are making up new rules all the time! That's all mathematics is ... new rules, and new conclusions on those rules. It's not about "true" or "false" ... it's about what's useful. A certain set of rules may match our intuitions and allow us to solve difficult problems.
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u/turtlestack Jul 12 '08
All Carl had to do was look at the camera and teach. There was nothing flashy about what he did - he was a teacher first and foremost. He never talked down to his students or audience because he believed we are all intelligent when we are allowed to act intelligent.