@2ck Can you give any example in humans where we instinctively understand a concept but not consciously so?
I'd say most people do not understand color, instinctually or otherwise. we have labels for colors that are completely arbitrary but we fail pretty badly at being able to objectively categorize color, in fact our physical limitations make it harder to understand than it otherwise would.
Take for example distinguishing between pure green and a composite green (made of blue and yellow). to a human they would look indistinguishable when in fact they arent even related colors in any way. You'd insist two colors with no similarity were the same to someone who actually understood the colors being presented.
Yea but my point is without understanding color we as humans have very poor instinctual understanding of it.
Presumably the alien you refer to would not understand prime numbers but still be able to look at a number and know if its prime or not, even if it has no idea what being prime means.
But I cant think of any analogy like that in humans. For example color, humans **cant** identify colors without understanding. If shown a bunch of colors and told to match of the colors that were the same, we wouldnt be able to do it.
You and I **think** we have some automatic understanding of color only because you and I have the same instinctual system that agrees. So we assume if everyone agrees there must be some "truth" to it. But the fact is its just that we all have the same preprogramed fantasy as to what we think colors are and it doesnt match reality.
Sort of, you got some of the details off though.
The tribe you are referring to was the Himba tribe. The colors tested and in question was a light blue shade and green. They had one word which grouped green and blue together and no way to describe blue as its own thing, they did however have many different words for shades of green.
Finally they didnt look like the same color to them but instead simply took them a longer time in tests to distinguish the blue from green than the time it took them to distinguish shades of green.
@freemo @admin @aetios that's kinda what I was getting at, that we don't have to understand color. I admit it's not a great analogy in the context of my OP: I have a hard time extending it. My main theme though is that natural evolution could make weird creatures that don't calculate like we do because they don't need to. limitations in my knowledge of mathematics, evolution, and physics prevent me from taking that thought much further