Darkneos seems to be trading on the ambiguity of the term 'knowledge', What he said makes no sense if you consider knowledge as being JTB, but if you think of it as being know-how, then it does make sense. — Janus

Darkneos is trolling for now. I'm not seeing any reason to reward his trolling with further responses.

I like "being know-how".

The theory is a starting point, a launch pad toward a more accurate understanding of the reality of time. — Metaphysician Undercover

I've been meaning to get back to this for awhile. I hope your statement above is an accurate description of your view. However, I can't say that I get the impression that it really is true based on what I have read of this thread since I last posted in it.

I don't see how your comment about communication is relevant. Clearly communication is a difficult task, as my attempt at discussion with Luke indicates, and the capacity to communicate is not something which ought to be taken for granted. However, I don't see how this bears on my temporal theory.

I should have connected more dots. What I was hoping you would recognize is that we are communicating via the internet.

There are implications to that, relevent to having a theory of time that is explanatory in a general way of a great many events that go on in the world. Your theory of time defines time in terms of your subjective experience. It suggests solipsism.

The way things are in reality, is that in the period of time it takes you to have a subjective recognition of PRESENT-NOW, zillions of things happen, one after the other, all around you, and within you.

You lack sufficient resolution on your metric for time, because your metric for time is part of a paradigm that doesn't really work for communicating with people about time with accuracy.

Do you see how it's a bit egocentric to base your metric of time on your subjective experience?

He's definitely a very smart man but I find his style reminds me of a used car dealer, haranguing you to buy the product. For my taste he's too slick, too fast, too insinuating. — Tom Storm

Oh, me too. But I've spent 15 years biting my tongue while participating on his forum. Old habits die hard.

Having thought about it more, I guess I would expect courage to tend to manifest differently in men and women.
— wonderer1

I agree, given that expression, rather than traits, is what makes a gender. Care to say more? — Moliere

Sure. A significant element of my thinking is related to evolutionary psychology, and I see it as naive to think that humans are born blank slates. I know there is a tendency to antipathy towards evolutionary psychology among humanities types, so I won't be surprised if there are negative reactions to this sort of thinking from some on TPF, but this is where the evidence strongly points.

Having looked into the social behavior of chimpanzees a bit, I see us as sharing similar social impulses, human behavior is not determined by instincts to the same degree as is the behavior of chimps. Furthermore, homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species and it is unrealistic to think that human sexual dimorphism doesn't effect our mentality as well as our physicality.

An aspect of this is that I would expect the courage of women to tend to show up most strongly in defense of their offspring (and perhaps children in general). I think the trope of the human 'mama bear' fits well with this. Men I would expect to be more inclined to band together with other men, in defense of the whole social group.

The sexual dimorphism in humans (and chimps) is not as clear as in the case of gorillas. So like not all men are taller than all women, it's unsurprising from an evolutionary psychology perspective that the mental characteristics of men and women show a degree of overlap. So as I said, "*tend* to manifest differently".

BTW, there is a four part documentary available on Netflix called Chimp Empire. It focuses on a band of chimps that shows typical sexual dimorphism of behavior. However, one of the neighboring bands of chimps is a particularly small band, and the females and males of this other group go on raids together. So it seems that even chimps show a degree of flexibility when it comes to such aspects of behavior. But see https://news.yale.edu/2023/06/08/conflicted-opinion-yale-chimpanzee-expert-weighs-chimp-empire.

When I think of defensive, perhaps even aggressive reasoning, I tend to think of apologists. Especially the presuppositionalists. — Tom Storm

I don't associate aggressiveness with apologetics so much as naive confidence, and I can relate to having such naive confidence myself. When I was 16 or 17 I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and not having much in the way of exposure to philosophy, I was impressed and felt ready to argue with any atheist I had the chance to. I have the impression that for many W.L. Craig fans it is similar. WLC is skilled at presenting arguments, and conveying the sense that any reasonable person must come to the same conclusions he does. However, 'normal' apologists, who have an appreciation for logical reasoning have a lot of potential for developing a broader perspective.

Presuppositionalism is the worst though. It's mind poison. It really messes people up, and sets them up for becoming more and more out of touch with reality.

Most atheists I know (certainly those who are not in America and don't have to face fundamentalists) are complacent and don't care much about the arguments for or against god. Their atheism is often a kind of lazy cultural scientism. You know the kind of thing - 'science makes sense, god's don't.' — Tom Storm

Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate that more such atheists don't understand the thinking of believers better because they tend to say cringeworthy things (from the perspective of people with an insider view of the thinking of believers) which feed into the stereotypes many Christians have with respect to atheists. However, I don't blame such atheists for not getting the thinking of Christians better, and not being prepared to have a potentially fruitful dialogue with Christians. The cultural gap is just too wide.

On a weirder note... I just found out Sunday that my mom is going to be passing on a letter from my fundamentalist home schooled 16 year old niece, which I'm pretty sure is going to be a 'come to Jesus' letter. So I get to look forward to deciding how or whether to respond without alienating my whole family of origin.

I'm interested in Pantagruel's suggestion that there may be more of the analog input in the system than the digitized projection of that reality. That's really interesting. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, it is an interesting aspect of things to consider. My knowledge of human hearing is not very up to date, but what I recall is that for low frequency sounds the system generates nerve impulses in sync with the incoming low frequency components of what is heard. So hearing may be a good sense to consider, in looking for analogicity in human neural processing. There might be some sense to be made of why we find music so affecting by looking into that. (Not something I've really thought about before, so there may be all sorts of relevant research out there that I'm not aware of.)

But in a general way you could choose to self-consciously do something *different* from what your hardware does on its own, and I think this is kind of the goal in practices like meditation and phenomenology. — Srap Tasmaner

I've never been enough of a meditator to have much to say about what understandings might be reached through meditation. However, in the vein of doing "something *different* from what your hardware does on its own", I find conversations with diverse people to be a good way of getting my brain out of the ruts it is inclined to ride in on its own.

That's why David Chalmers, a professional Neurologist... — Gnomon

A neurologist is an MD. Wikipedia says:

Chalmers received his undergraduate degree in pure mathematics from the University of Adelaide in Australia.[10] After graduating Chalmers spent six months reading philosophy books while hitchhiking across Europe,[11] before continuing his studies at the University of Oxford,[10] where he was a Rhodes Scholar but eventually withdrew from the course.[12] In 1993, Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter,[13] writing a doctoral thesis entitled Toward a Theory of Consciousness.[12] He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995.

Do you have any evidence for Chalmers being a neurologist?

The people expressing opinions about what "we" need to do are not the ones who actually pull any of the levers. — Vera Mont

:up:

Exactly.

:up:

Ah, that's a shame. I happened on that article some time ago. Probably before the website became so annoying. I'll keep an eye out (and if I get really motivated maybe even look) for something else that communicates some of the important issues in a reasonably accessible way.

I am not talking about bit states, I am talking about the objective data (information) which is digitally encoded. Since data is being specifically symbolically encoded, digital neural networks have only that known data to work with. Versus an analog system which works with a "signal" whose total data properties are not necessarily so restricted. — Pantagruel

I think we are talking past each other to some extent. We can hypothesize about some sort of neuromorphic hardware which maintains analog fidelity to a greater degree than current artificial or natural neural networks do. However, I'm skeptical that such a system can be practically implemented.

There is neuromorphic hardware under development, but from what I've seen, much of what is under development uses spiking/sampling. Spiking necessitates a loss of fidelity to a representation of an analog signal due to the the fact that maximum spike frequency cannot be infinite. Now, as is the case with the digitized audio that we listen to all the time these days, the loss of fidelity with a spiking architecture might be for practical purposes undetectable. However, I think it important to recognize that any sort of information processing is going to result in some loss of fidelity in the processing of an analog input.

Still, if you can cite something discussing a practically implementable information processing system which maintains analog fidelity, I'd be interested in taking a look.

You can talk about bit states being "information", it is a level of abstraction below that at which artificial neural nets actually operate, part of the underlying mechanism and addressed via back-propagation, which is a function of error-correction, which is determined at the top informational level. — Pantagruel

I referred to bit states to make clear that we are talking about digital information. Yes we can combine bits to represent numbers, but any digital representation of a number is going to have a finite bit depth, and I think it important to keep in mind, the loss of fidelity that comes with such encoding.

In the context of considering our sensory and information processing apparatus, there is strong evidence that we do not have some ideal 'purely analog' system. Simply considering the fact that our visual system relies on discrete rod and cone cells, producing outputs in the form of spike trains, points towards ideal analog representations not being what our brains have to work with.

All these simplifications do good work and save real time and energy. They are useful approximations of reality, not the other way around. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

:up:

I loved the Chandler quote the first time I saw it, as well as reading it again just now.

The example everyone agrees on is that women who behave in masculine ways (self-assertive, whatever) are often given a hard time for it. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, they are given a hard time for it, but I don't see confident, competent, and assertive women as unfeminine. I have a bad habit of falling in love with them.

:up:

...you’ve so far been unable to address the rather basic question of whether “I am conscious of this text” is a truth-baring proposition. — javra

What is your theory of truth?

I would say the cat on the mat is the truth bearer for the proposition, "The cat is on the mat.", and I don't see it as making sense to think that a proposition could be inherently truth bearing.

Since I have it in my c/p buffer:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/11/5113/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

Having thought about it more, I guess I would expect courage to tend to manifest differently in men and women.

Yes. Analog vs digital collection and processing of information becomes interesting in this respect. Analog collection of information captures an actual "imprint" of the real world. In which sense, there may actually be information captured which is unexpected or unknown. — Pantagruel

:up:

This is a good point to bring up.

Analog can preserve a more accurate representation, and per Nyquist's theorem, there are limits to how accurate a digital representation can be, as a function of sample rate. Finite bit depth of samples is another dimension of error in the case of digital.

Neural networks are able to exploit such "hidden" information and extrapolate hidden connections. In fact, that is more or less exactly how they work. By contrast, digitization only encodes what it is specifically designed to encode. — Pantagruel

That is somewhat true, but my inner pedant insists that I point out some inaccuracies.

It may be the case that there is a degree of fidelity maintained, due to the somewhat more analog properties of neurons. However, spikes in action potential are a significant feature of our neurons. So there is an element of sampling, playing a significant role in the way our neural nets work.

Rather than an analog vs digital issue, it's more a matter of how is the hardware arranged, and what sort of information processing is the hardware well suited for. Neural networks, natural or artificial, are very good at pattern recognition. Much of the 'hidden information' results in recognized patterns which happen preconsciously.

Also, it's not exactly the case that "digitization only encodes what it is specifically designed to encode". There is a trivial sense in which that is true, in that digital hardware is designed to encode bit states and can only encode bit states. However, it is very much the case that digitally instantiated artificial neural networks, after training on whatever inputs were provided to the ANN, will have a great many bit states which were not determined by the designer. This article touches on aspects of this sort of information processing, that people who care about humanity's future might want to be aware of.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/11/5113/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

As I preach from the perch of my soap box, one cannot yank out either the subject or the object and still have the real thing. The true is the whole : promises, sassy looks, and earthquakes; checkmates, wankbanks, quarks, and continuous functions. — plaque flag

Amen brother Flag!

I don't think reason counts much in the god debates. You either buy the idea or you don't. — Tom Storm

Most of my relevant experience in recent years has been with discussions at William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith Forum. So not a remotely unbiased sample. Still, there certainly are Christians who are very good reasoners and knowledgeable.

I think the intuitions individuals have, and the willingness those individuals have, to question intuitions, plays a big role. The premises of arguments for God depend greatly on intuitions, and intuitions (key to making the arguments seem like sound arguments) tend to get reinforced on Sunday mornings.

Any other guys feel that way? — Srap Tasmaner

Interesting question. I think I will be thinking about it for awhile.

I think in some sense I know what you mean. It seems I have a more clearly delineated picture associated with "good man" (or "good woman") than associated with "good person".

I see courage as strongly associated with my "good man", and I see that I have a lesser expectation of courage associated with "good person" and "good woman".

As someone who has watched a lot of chimp documentaries, it makes some sense that I would have thinking biased in such a way.

As someone who likes to think of himself as a feminist, I likely wouldn't have recognized this in myself had you not asked the question.

That said, I think arguments like Plantinga's, if successful, do more than just show us our epistemic limits. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think Plantinga's EAAN does succeed in showing people their epistemic limits except in cases where the person recognizes that the EAAN fails.

If your theory of the world is self-defeating, if there is a contradiction in your justification for having true beliefs, it's worth looking at how you can avoid this problem. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it depends on what is meant by "how you can avoid this problem".

The EAAN suggests that given evolution and naturalism we have good reason to doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties. (The argument utterly overlooks the fact that we are members of a social species, and therefore there is a huge adaptive benefit to homo sapiens being able to communicate with some accuracy. So the argument fails to make a very good case, but still...)

It seems to me there are two major categories of responses to this:

1. Go with epistemic grandiosity, and deny that one's cognitive faculties have questionable reliability, and reject evolution and/or naturalism.

2. Go with epistemic humility and accept that one's cognitive faculties have questionable reliability, and keep on following where the evidence leads to the best of your abilities.

Now I'm not saying those categories are exhaustive. Certainly they are rather exaggerated charicatures to make a point. However, with those categories in mind I do want to ask, what is the problem to be avoided here?

Nope, that's pretty much it. Intuition is improved by acquiring knowledge. That's all. — Darkneos

Your intuitions about intuition could use some development.

If knowledge is justified true belief, then that is different than intuition. (Or at least the 'justification is of a different sort than what we typically think of as justification for a belief to be considered knowledge.)

Right, you often refer to the importance of metaphor, and I think it is the "softness" and "flexibility of metaphor which enables the communication of ideas through evocation and allusion, allows them to escape the hard walled prison of rigorous logic and mechanistic (cause and effect) thinking. — Janus

:up:

By acquiring knowledge — Darkneos

There is more to it than simply acquiring knowledge. Tom Storm and T Clark brought up important points. TS brought up experience and TC brought up attentiveness.

Of course acquring knowledge from reading books is valuable and of course reading can result in development of intuitions in all sorts of ways. However, there are important aspects to developing intuitions which are a function of the means by which knowledge is acquired.

For example, I'm 99% sure TS would agree (though he is free to correct me if I am wrong) that he didn't develop the intuitive recognitions he has (e.g. that someone has a weapon) from reading a book. Instead those intuitions came from years of interactions with, and observations of, people. Attentiveness to body language and other nonverbal signals undoubtedly played an important role.

Similar for TC and his engineering intuitions. Attentive observations of the way things worked in the domain of his career resulted in the development of intuitions related to his area of expertise that are substantially better than just guesses.

First of all, I have to make an apology to wonderer1 for my earlier, flippant dismissal... — Amity

No problem. It was perfectly understandable for you to respond as you did, in light of my newness here on TPF.

I'll try to get around to writing something up relatively soon. However, I'm finding it a bit difficult to keep up with all the discussions here on TPF that I am interested in, and I already feel that I owe a couple of other forum members responses that are likely to take me significant time to formulate.

In any case, I'm not going to present much (if any) of a case for what people should do. That's way above my pay grade. At best I'd hope to present some stuff that might spark some recognition of what you can do with some degree of effectiveness.

:lol:

And because I'm tired of playing the forum's logic cop. It's my own damned fault: no one appointed me to that post and no one wants me to do it. — Srap Tasmaner

Hasty generalization!!! I want you to do it. :razz:

I'm caught up on the thread now. I don't really want to get into a discussion of the fine tuning argument, because I've spent the past 15 years arguing with (mostly) Christian apologists and I'm pretty bored with discussing it at this point. My thinking is that the appearance of fine tuning to the universe gets us (at best) to recognition that there are things we aren't in an epistemic position to be able to explain.

We can speculate, and there are lots of speculative attempts at explanation, and not much strong reason to choose among speculations or even decide that anyone yet has speculated in a way that is somewhat accurate. I lean towards there being a multiverse (in line with Guth's thinking on eternal inflation) as being relatively parsimonious, but I don't lean that way nearly strongly enough to think it is worth spending any time arguing for it.

One point I would raise in the context of speculating about goddish minds as an explanation is, "What reason do we have to think that it is metaphysically possible for a mind to exist without supervening on some sort of information processing substrate?"

I did want to comment more on the following though:

When taken together with Plantinga's argument that naturalism is self-defeating (or Hoffman's more fleshed out, but similar argument against mind-independent reality) I find this line of reasoning compelling. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Plantinga has a brilliant mind, but his brilliance is very limited by his nescience with respect to 'the' scientific picture and naturalistic perspectives. Unfortunately Plantinga is only able to present straw men to attack with the EAAN. Admittedly the EAAN can be highly effective as an apologetic that maintains others in a state of nescience similar to that of Plantinga.

I'm not interested in picking up the burden of presenting a standalone counterargument to the EAAN, because I'm not cognitively well suited to doing things that way. However if you, or anyone else wants to start a new thread discussing the EAAN specifically I'd be happy to jump in and point out flaws in the EAAN. Furthermore, I do see consideration of the EAAN to be valuable, in that engaging in consideration of it can lead to a well warranted humility with regards to the reliability of our cognitive faculties.

I'm much less familiar with Hoffman's argument, having only briefly looked into it today, but my initial impression is that it looks self defeating to me. Something along the lines of, "Our knowledge of how things work in reality proves that we know nothing about how things work in reality." Again, it seems like there is thinking there that is well worth considering in the interest of developing a nuanced understanding of the reliability and lack thereof of our cognitive faculties. However, I think it is important to avoid black and white thinking about the issue(s) and develop a nuanced understanding of our cognitive faculties.

Science assumes the world is rational because it must. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not really. Scientists observe regularities and develop strong intuitions as to the reliability of the observed regularities. It is not a matter of having made a choice to assume the 'rationality' of the world. For scientists it is a matter of having an undeniable intuitive understanding of the 'rationality' of the world.

It would be more accurate to say, "Scientists have a working hypothesis that the world is 'rational' because doing so has reliably allowed for much better than chance accuracy of predictions."

You go with what works best for you until some new information comes in and reorganizes your entire brain from top to bottom. — frank

:up:

They don't have to focus on the human element because you are the human element and if everything goes right, you'll be thrilled to head to campus or to the lab or to the site everyday because you get to do science all day! — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

The software runs on the crowd, enough of us always alive to not lose our progress in the game's attempt to understand itself. — plaque flag

I like it.

It feels like a pragmatist take on language ought to fit better with science-engendering prejudices (or metaphysical assumptions) than with science-blocking ones, but it's beyond me at the moment. — Srap Tasmaner

This seems insightful to me, although I've never been very interested in philosophy of language, and I don't know much about it, beyond the idiosyncratic philosophy of language I've developed on my own.

In science, and at least some engineering, there is a need to be able to zoom your perspective in and out, and switch between different conceptual frameworks (and associated vocabulary) fairly fluidly. It seems to me that efficiency of conveying ideas often trumps the accuracy of statements, in face to face examples of such conversations. There is a trust that the person you are discussing things with can connect the dots, or let you know where you have been insufficiently clear.

So it seems to me, that at least in cases of collaborative or interdisciplinary, science and engineering, there is social reinforcement for speaking in a pragmatic way, and it is a matter of sinking or swimming in many such environments to develop techniques for, and facility with, treating language very pragmatically.

Another factor is a tacit recognition that some things aren't going to be effectively communicated linguistically, and some sort of visualization technique needs to be used. I doubt many scientists or engineers would put it this way, but I'd say that it is neurologically important to communicate to a collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties with through the collaborator's eyes being the most effective only way of engaging the neural networks that instantiate the collaborator's visuo-spatial faculties.

I'm trained in math, and group theory... — plaque flag

I've got some talent for math, but never developed a love of mathematics for its own sake. I remember one day, during my first semester of college calculus, the TA telling us that the homework assignment for that day was all story problems. The whole class seemed to groan, whereas my reaction was, "Thank goodness." I enjoy math much more when I can see how to apply it to solving problems I can visualize.

I prefer the notion of horizon or background to that of things-in-themselves, but it's not that important in this context. The idea is that we can zoom in on reality, that we have a sense of greater detail waiting for us in every direction, if making the effort becomes worthwhile. The lifeworld (the encompassing world in which and for which we make models) has 'depth' but (for me) no ultimate Reality 'behind' it. — plaque flag

I like the notion of horizon in this context, but I don't know how to interpret that last sentence. I'd be inclined to say that the lifeworld is an aspect of reality, or at least the part of reality we have some epistemic access to. I don't know what it would mean to talk about a reality behind the lifeworld.

I think sure, we might be in a simulation or multiverse, so the simulation or universe exists in some context we don't have epistemic access to. However, I would still see the simulation or universe as being an aspect of reality.

Undoubtedly part of the context of that for me, is seeing people as varying in the extent that they are in touch with different aspects of the way things are in reality. So maybe you and I are too different in the way we think of "reality", for me to form a clear understanding of what you mean.

This has become a common guiding light when tackling the domain of the unknown in the sciences and is the reason that there is consternation over the "Fine-Tuning Problem," the problem that, in several respects, the universe is ‘fine-tuned' for life". — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've only read this far and need to step out, so will look at the rest later. I just want to point out that we might equally say that the universe seems tuned to cause the death of any life that evolves. 99.99% of the places we might imagine being teleported to in this universe would result in a quick death. It looks to me as if life in the universe is a fluke, despite the fact that we happen to be in a location where we notice life all around us.

There's also the issue of metaphor itself. What exactly is a metaphor ? If human cognition is fundamentally metaphorical, it's an important question. Roughly I relate it to analogy. I sometimes try to open my front door (where I live) by pushing a button on my car keys. The mind exploits skill in one domain in a new domain. Something like that. — plaque flag

:up:

Insightful.

"Analogy" in this context is also a metaphor, but a valuable one. Off the top of my head, I'd suggest that metaphors are simplistic but epistemically pragmatic abstractions (EPAs) we use in lieu of knowledge of things in themselves which is beyond the capacity of our brains to acquire.

I personally frequently think of metaphors as things we use in considering emergent properties that supervene on reality in ways more complicated than we can grasp. As an electrical engineer I see transistors as such EPA metaphors. While I know that the physics subvenient to the behavior of a particular transistor could in principle be investigated in order to have a more complete and complex understanding of the thing in itself, I don't have a pragmatic need for such understanding and can leave it to other engineers and scientists to be cognizant of such things. In turn, I can design things which use transistors and then provide a computer programmer with a higher level metaphor which the programmer uses in determining how to have a microprocessor interact with what I designed. The higher level metaphor I provide to a programmer is another EPA with no need to discuss the subvenient transistors for the programmer's pragmatic purposes.

Of course what I've presented here is a rather narrow perspective on metaphors, but perhaps others may find it useful to their thinking.

I used to say it's an accident that in slightly upgrading our capacity for communication, evolution selected for something that was far more powerful than we could possibly have needed -- and here we are, a globe-spanning civilization. Evolution aimed for better chitchat and gave us language, and we're still trying to understand what happened. — Srap Tasmaner

:100: :up:

Edit: The ARHGAP11b mutation looks like it might have been a key happy accident that resulted in our brains evolving so much 'overkill'.

But (1) language production and consumption is interaction with the world, social interaction, and (2) one of the things I wanted to get at -- and in a way, try to push back on the "map" metaphor -- is that it's not like children first acquire a complete conception of the world and then "paint" language onto it -- they have to do it all at once. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. While I often find 'the map' to be a handy metaphor, that is all it is. Certainly language plays a huge role in how our 'maps' evolve.

Is there an additional constraint on at least some of the concepts we form that they must be, so to speak, language-able? — Srap Tasmaner

I'd say that depends on who we include in "we". Certainly there are people with much less ability to participate in language than we tend to expect of people.

That said, as a species we have evolved to have a dependency on (and ability to benefit from) language to share our learnings with each other, in order to be adaptive. Our linguistic faculties are different from the intuitive faculties we share with other animals, with our linguistic faculties resting 'atop' our intuitive faculties but also playing an ongoing role in reshaping what our intuitions reveal.

I don't think there is any real possibility of cleanly disentangling our linguistic faculties from our 'more evolutionarily basic' non-linguistic faculties. (For those of us with relatively functional linguistic faculties, anyway.)

Language is a crowbar, a smokescreen, a mirror, all kinds of things. — plaque flag

:up:

Children are the ones who have to manage this mapping somehow; if it's a real thing (heh) then they're the ones who have to connect "ball" in their mouth to ball in their hand. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. There is a huge amount which can be learned about ourselves, from observing infants and young children learning. When we are very young all of our learning is a matter of automated deep learning in our brains, resulting from our interactions with the the world. The acquisition of capability for learning linguistically is secondary to learning from interactions with the world.