Thread by @gro_tsen

Let's take a second to ponder how marvelous the human brain is in its versatility and its ability to learn things it never evolved to do. ⤵️ •1/16

You're probably reading my words as squiggles on a computer screen. The absolutely incredible fact, here, is that these squiggles have ❋meaning❋, and your brain is able to decode these squiggles at an incredible speed to extract said meaning. •2/16

So the meaning travels from my brain to yours through an incredible convoluted, almost rube-goldberg-esque path of my moving my fingers to type keys on a keyboard and generate signals which then enter a very sophisticated electronic system which mankind designed, … •3/16

… to appear at the other end as little LEDs flashing or not, emitting light which your retina sensors detect and which your brain decodes as meaning. ✳︎Every✳︎ step along this path is its own special wonder. •4/16

But what really amazes me is that our brains never evolved to do this “decoding-the-meaning-squiggles” magic, yet we're essentially all able to learn it — and able to do it at a pretty incredible rate. •5/16

And if rather than reading my words you're hearing them instead, the magic is no less impressive: the meaning is now encoded in very minute variations in the pressure of air molecules. We've evolved to detect such variations of pressure, of course, … •6/16

… but the density of meaning we're able to pack into them is still impressive. The entries “Vibratory Telepathy” and “Psychometric Tracery” in Eliezer Yudkowsky's description of “Mundane Magic” are relevant here: lesswrong.com/posts/SXK87NgE… •7/16

I like to learn languages. Or rather, I like to ✳︎start✳︎ learning languages: I never get too far, but the start is the most rewarding part I think, when utterances in the target language cease to be gibberish and the brain realizes there is meaning to be extracted, … •8/16

… after listening repeatedly to the same utterances and thinking about their meaning (initially communicated through translation) the brain connects the two and rewires itself accordingly. This is an almost ecstatic experience. •9/16

But here's another mundane experience which our brain did not evolve for: driving. I thought about it while steering my motorcycle at a speed that rivals the fastest cheetahs: we need a machine to achieve the speed, of course, … •10/16

… but so far, most of us (and certainly those on two wheels) still use our own brains to guide the mechanic. It's incredible that we're able to do this: it requires a lot of complex actions which are nothing like the environments in which we evolved. •11/16

Amazingly, almost everyone can be taught to handle these incredibly fast vehicles and do it safely enough that we put our lives at stake. Almost everyone can be taught to drive with a gear stick, which involves further unnatural complications and “feeling” the engine, … •12/16

… and almost everyone can learn to drive a motorcycle, which involves an even more complicated dynamic equilibrium than a car (look up “countersteering” if you don't know what it is!), and it becomes completely natural in very short time. •13/16

I learned to drive at a fairly late age (three years ago), so I realize perhaps more acutely how strange the rewiring was: the task initially seemed impossible (like making sense of foreign gibberish) and somehow, voilà, my brain rewired itself! •14/16

And of course, the last example I could give is my own profession (not that it's in any way unique or exceptional, but I just happen to know it): our brains did not evolve to think about mathematics beyond, perhaps, the smallest natural numbers, … •15/16

… yet somehow I find myself able to form a mental representation and an intuition of ordinal numbers or finite groups or L² functions, deduce things about them, and communicate them to others. I never cease to find this wonderful. •16/16