Is it possible that some concepts are knowable to some but not others? I think about this sometimes when I think about how the vast majority of people have difficulty understand complex theories in science, such as Einstein’s Relativity Theory or Quantum Mechanics. I’ve always assumed it was a matter of intelligence or learning ability - as if all they had to do was to think hard and study more and eventually they’d get it - but lately I’ve been contemplating whether it’s a matter of simply having a whole different brain chemistry/wiring, one that’s genetically “hardwired” so to speak and might not even be changeable. Might there be several different brain types, each with a different chemistry and wiring, and suited to understanding different types of concepts at the cost of others.
There are billions of human beings on this planet - that’s enough for a wide array of diversity to exist within our species. Could this diversity spill over into our neurology in such a way that what comes easily conceivable to some is just impossible for others?
You are correct. Some people lack the capability for understanding certain concepts inasmuch as some people lack the imagination for understanding heightened sensitivities between highly empathetic persons. Also, beyond varying degrees of ages, from person to person, concepts become so ingrained in people that they be unable to cope with divergence. This causes religious fanaticism and fundamentalism. A man of God cannot do without his god. An atheist cannot do without atheism. People latch onto some concepts so strongly, probably due to psychological trauma in their youth, that they do not question them and reorder them. Sex abuse between adults and children also causes concepts to solidify prematurely. Fearful events of any kind can do this.
While some individuals are born with more advanced brain structures than others, which appear as more intelligent due to adaptation, life has its say in the matter of development. Minds are born unequal. Some have inherently different capacities for actions than others, different abilities to produce thoughts, languages, and dreams. Maturation processes see these difference come out and children begin acting differently, based on both their heritage and environment.
You are basically defining who is stupid and who is intelligent under different contexts. The rocket scientist excels at rocket scientist. The alligator farmer excels at training and handling alligators. Because society values rocket science at least a hundred times more than alligator farming, then the rocket scientist is deemed as communally smarter than the alligator farmer. The issue is between nature and nurture.
Can you train a African black man to be a rocket scientist from birth?
Will he perform better or worse than an American white man trained from birth?
You are correct but you can teach the concepts if you know what you’re doing, in fact I consider myself a conceptologist (naturally), I can reconstruct the true meanings of words from a list of definitions and cull the extraneous or badly formed ones.
Each concept is derived from the world itself through a process of conceptualization, now if you understood the process you could construct concepts for all the different brain types in their particular way of learning and understanding. I’ve always thought about doing this - teaching logic in terms of art, or teaching math in terms of computer animated physics (no symbolic math), etc.
Focusing on each persons way of learning and expressing and forming the concepts in such a way in their own personal language.
Personally I think everyone should watch this video, since it shows that nobody understand what reasoning is and how learning works…