What makes something unlearnable?

Can it be that the only limiting factor in learning concepts is time or are there concepts that are too complex to be ever understood by an average perosn?

If so, what is the specific cause that makes something unlearnable?

Complex concepts can be broken down to simpler ones, and you can keep breaking them down the chain as low as you need, meaning complexity in itself should not pose a problem ever. You should be able to explain anything from complex economical theories to advanced mathematical theorems like this. The only obvious limit to this is time - the amount of time it would take, depending on the individual, of having to go through the entire chain up the pyramid of complexity of concepts. The less capable the individual, the lower you'd have to start - the more time it would take.

But is that all there is to it? Or is there something less flexible than time stopping people from being able to understand something? Something like simply the capacity of keeping the simpler concepts in mind when learning the harder ones. Basically like you have to be able to hold at least two cards in hands when building a cardhouse - you cannot do it one by one. Can this be the difference between understanding a concept and failure - that less capable people simply lose track of stuff when dealing with multiple things?

Essentially the answer to these questions would determine the conflict of discipline versus ability and their relationship to success.

Pic unrelated.

Another potential limit is memory but the memory capacity of the human brain is very flexible and can contain enormous amounts of information. So just like with time, it's not really a 'hard' limit, so to speak.

Time isn't a hard limit because only a small fraction of our lives goes towards study so we have a ton of room to maneuver.

Ideally I'd like to find out what's the 'hard' cause for things being unlearnable. One that cannot be ignored or improved as drastically as with time (a lot of free time to utilize, discipline) or memory (huge innate capacity, practice). Assuming there even is one.

I'd say it's just working memory. You may be able to piece-wise break everything down but you won't be able to form a cohesive picture because your working memory isn't good enough to store all the pieces at the same time.

>working memory isn't good enough to store all the pieces at the same time.
Is working memory innate though?

Or could it be that your ability to mentally juggle various things simultaneously merely depends on how familiar you are with each piece, allowing you to rearrange them faster to form new understandings?

What if intelligence just boils down to some sort of curiosity that makes a person read and learn about things? Not necessarily all the time studying behind a book, but even just small tidbits here and there. What if that's what makes them intelligent - the fact that they just have a wide horizon, making them feel more comfortable adapting to numerous different challenges? Like having a bigger set of building material to choose from would allow you to build a better house?

Most probably there is a working memory limit, though. The question is - is that really what it generally boils down to, or could it be something else eg curiosity?

I should specify that it wouldn't be the curiosity itself that it would boil down to, but the familiarity with a wide array of topics and concepts that it would produce.

Bump

Stop shitposting in the endless fucking determinism and consciousness threads, Veeky Forums

a roach can solve the riemann hypothesis in some time, but by then they may be stomped out of it by something like death or not evolving to becoming intelligent species, y'know. if u think about, have sonics brain power and his speedy legs switched around, and he will be crippled, but hell have the fastest brain in the world wow

you're tossing around concepts without realising what they actually mean i.e working memory, curiosity

I don't really see why'd you get that impression.

My point was that perhaps what makes some people more able to work with multiple concepts at once is not necessarily a bigger "working memory" equivalent for brain but instead a familiarity with said concepts, allowing them to manipulate the concepts without losing track of their properties.

Curiosity is just pleasure gained from interacting with the world with observation and understanding in mind.

but how does that explain savants or people that take to concepts easily?

Lets be real, nothing explains savants. We treat them as exceptions for a reason.

but its not discrete. its a continuum. what im saying is that people differentially grasp concepts in a way that is not explained by curiosity. which can be shown in the sense that people dont grasp these concepts as a result of extensive cognitive search which is probably the best way to view curiosity in a functional sense. curiosity is a seriously underdetermined model for intelligence and quite frankly, naive.

Grothendieck in his autobiography states explicitly that he knows mathematicians naturally far more talented than himself. He also writes that his own commitment,i.e. his will lo learn and to understand, was total. That goes a long way.

One of the best psychology-related threads in a while. It is worth noting that Dual N-Back, a cognitive training program that aims to increase working memory, reliably improves some elements of working memory capacities if done properly (near-transfer). What is harder to show is if it can reliably improve general intelligence (far-transfer), which implies that working memory is not always the bottleneck to learning.

what about processing speed?

>its a continuum
Are you sure about that?

Looking at how those savants that can describe how they do what they do, it doesn't look like anything normal people do. The answers don't come to them via conscious cognitive effort, but by some very strong type of intuition.

Take this guy, for example: Daniel Tammet, a well spoken and studied savant that goes in depth how he is able to do maths on the extraordinary level he can - he just interprets the synesthetic "landscape" his imagination creates as numbers that are answers to problems. Hardly reminiscent of what a normal person does to calculate an answer. This may shed some doubt on the idea of a continuum, at least what concerns savants. So lets leave them out of this for now.

>people dont grasp these concepts as a result of extensive cognitive search
People grasp concepts by tying them with existing concepts. Everything can be broken down to the simplest 'building blocks' of ideas that we acquire as children. If we take into account the rule of diminishing returns and the immense plasticity of the child's mind, couldn't it be possible that even a seemingly small amount of difference in curiosity and the ability to employ it (environment) in a child would potentially result in huge differences later on in life? Would it really be that farfetched?

its relativistic. lets compare the brain of someone who is retarded with a normal person? and yes concepts are built on smaller ones but can there not be differential ability to attain concepts? especially since the world is an ill posed inverse problem. there are many possible solutions to any problem. im not saying curiosity isnt involved but its clearly not true that it makes the big difference. many people especially on sci can attest to their own curiosity without being able to attain concepts as quickly as others. you cant deny that the ability to attain concepts no matter how small is an ability that can vary.

>retarded vs normal
Yes the fact that there exist retarded people who have severe inhibitions from the birth is something that undeniably says that not everyone is created equal. However there are specific causes to retardation like prenatal accidents or whatever, so it's not really saying much about their cognitive potential other than it getting stumped by an outside factor. What would really be a stronger argument is if there was evidence that normal people also simply lack the means to become smart, even if childhood was taken into account.

I'm interested in the cognitive potential of people, everything else being equal. And it is my understanding that when there's someone being born who's severely behind, there usually are outside causes to it.

>many people especially on sci can attest to their own curiosity without being able to attain concepts as quickly as others
But we know nothing about their history and how curious they were as children. Anyone can get curious about any topic at some point, but what really matters is their overall curiosity during their entire life, starting from the very early childhood.

Now I don't want to become anecdotal, but I am fairly certain that smarter children interact with their surroundings more. But then again how do you prove which came first; the curiosity or the intellect? The best we can do with this thread is determine whether at least the possibility of curiosity coming before the intellect is there. Anything more requires research.

>but its clearly not true that it makes the big difference
Please re-read my last paragraph. Is it really that clear? How so?

>but can there not be differential ability to attain concepts?
Oh and yes there definitely can be differences in ability. I'm just trying to figure out to what extent they are innate and unchangeable. However some hard limits are always going to be there, I suppose. Still I think there may be a lot more fluidity than may seem.

When you don't have the physical aspects to comprehend it. It'd be like trying to understand color when you were born not only without eyes, but without the parts of the brain that can perceive signals from eyes as well as the parts that would turn that into a specific type of memory.

You just gave an analogy. That's not an answer.

you dont get that its completely simplistic to attribute all these things to curiosity. youre using anecdotes about smart people and curiosity and ignoring mine saying that curiosity doesnt necessarily entail how smart you are. its running into brick walls and ultimately the burden is on you.

your curiosity argument is so simplistic and ignores many other potential factors.

my point about retardation was that the savant thing isnt an outlier. im saying that if you have a range of iq scores you can demonstrate similar kinds of disparities in a persons ability to attain concepts when comparing scores along any part of the spectrum. also your curiosity argument doesnt explain why intellectual abilities can often be specific to certain areas e.g. math, language, visuospatial etc. curiosity probably has a role in crystallized intelligence (i really dont doubt) but fluid intelligence probably alot less so.

It seems we've bumped into miscommunication. It's not really curiosity per se that matters It is, how should I even call it, the 'cognitive experience' curiosity would net, that is the main point - that it is familiarity with concepts and not brain power as such that is responsible for intelligence. Curiosity is but one way a person can attain this, though. There can be more, such as attentiveness to surroundings, some predisposition to replay past scenarios in imagination (a kind of thoughtfulness), or perhaps simply a better memory or an interplay of all of them or something else.

Then there's also the chance that this only matters during some critical period during ones childhood and that once it's past, very little, if anything at all, can be done to change it. That brain is best suited to gathering these "building blocks" of ideas at a specific age and loses most of the ability later. It doesn't mean learning isn't possible past that point, but that it is very much limited by what possibilities the gathered experience gives. This has to do with child's brain plasticity.

Furthermore there's the rule of diminishing returns, which states that there's a point past which efforts will net increasingly lower returns. In a non strictly economic sense that also means that vice versa is true, that the initial effort nets the most returns. This and aforementioned factors amplify each others and can mean that people lacking in these "childhood experiences" from the stage in their life where learning effort gave the best returns, are severely left behind.

I don't see how this could not account for lower intelligence.

>the burden is on you.
There is no burden. I am not trying to prove anything here. I lack the information for that. It needs to be researched. The most this thread can do is relay information pertaining to the subject and either leave open the possibility of what I'm saying being true or disprove it.

>ignoring mine
Well I did tell you that to prove or disprove the role of curiosity we need more than just a momentary curiosity in a field. We need to know either the overall curiosity of the person or (if that's true) their curiosity during the critical phase in childhood. Besides that lets not forget we're talking about posts on Veeky Forums which, leaving the potential of being made up out, are subjective as fuck because people have different understanding of what it means to be curious and of how curious exactly they are.

>explain why intellectual abilities can often be specific to certain areas
This could be explained by what I just said even better so than traditional intelligence could. How can you argue that if intelligence is simply a matter of brain power, then why does it not translate from one field to another? Whereby what I proposed would state that it is the early experiences that will define a persons future aptitudes. Enough of "building blocks" in one area and that person will have a relative advantage over others ie he will be 'talented'.

Tl;dr: the gist of what I'm saying is that what if intelligence is not about brain power, but about the amount of bricks you've gathered during your childhood (or life). Bricks you could lay so that they form complex and functional buildings.

And the bricks are formed by interacting with the world.

bemp

actually it was an answer
>When you don't have the physical aspects to comprehend it.
You can't learn how to appreciate music if you were born without ears.
So that makes something unlearnable.

So what exactly is the physical aspect that they're lacking?