FBI on Einstein

[Gordon Fitch]

Lisa & Ian Murray:
> 
> 
>  Well, unless you are a Millean about math and logic, we don't know
>  mathematical and logical truths through experience. And if you
>  think there
>  are a priori philosophical truths, such as that time, space, abd
>  causality
>  are necessaty conditions of knowledge, or every effect has a
>  cause, then you
>  might think these are derived from nonempirical sources. --jks
> =======
> I'm not a Millian, but this make no sense, because I cannot make sense of
> non-experience. And no one has yet shown what a non-experience is. Do we
> know english, russian etc. through non-experience too or is math more like
> them than we care to admit and we deny it because a bunch of DWM's told us
> so before they and we knew s**t about the brain? Please don't tell me you
> hang out with Roger Penrose :-) Try Gerald Edelman instead....

You're supposed to be _just_born_ knowing certain things.  I
don't think this is such an outlandish idea.  For instance,
it could be the case that there is a knowledge X without
which no complex living being is likely to survive.  The
process of natural selection would filter strongly for such
beings so that before long their genes would specify X as a
starting state for their nervous systems.  They would "just
know" X as a result of evolution.  Noam Chomsky's theory about
an innate language capability could be an example of this kind
of knowledge.  Mathematics, or some of mathematics, could be
another.  Many mathematicians seem to experience mathematics
in this way -- it's _already_there_ -- not in the experience
of the being, but in the being itself.