[CG] Re: [ontolog-forum] Barry’s mike drop.

Gary, There is evidence of a priori knowledge in the genome. It's knowledge that is learned by the species and encoded in genes rather than neurons: The total genome of any species has an enormous amount of information. And very little of that information has been decoded. Gary B-C: One might ask if there is human a priori knowledge via say evolution for ideas such as space and time if Kant would argue for any immediately relevant a priori knowledge of what we now talk about via models in quantum physics or the notion of space-time in relativity. Every species from bacteria on up inherits a huge amount of knowledge about space, time, edible items, dangerous items, and species-specific methods for dealing with them. For example, just consider honey bees. The methods for finding honey-bearing flowers and bringing back both honey and pollen are extremely complex, and there is no way that a newly born bee could have learned that method by experience or by teaching from other bees. There are also complex methods by which a returning bee communicates the distance, direction, and amount of honey by a dance back in the hive. There is also evidence of learning how to communicate better. Bees that forage outside the hive acquire larger amounts of brain tissue that is devoted to memory of spatial distance and direction than their fellow bees that work inside the hive. Furthermore, the regions of a honeybee's brain for spatial info are analogous to regions of the hippocampus in mammals. Guess what? Humans and squirrels who need to remember large amounts of spatial info also acquire enlarged regions in the hippocampus. For humans, this fact was discovered by observing London taxi drivers who had to memorize a huge amount of information about streets and locations. They had significantly larger regions in their hippocampus. But now that taxi drivers use computer displays for that information, there is no enlargement of the hippocampus. For squirrels that bury nuts in autumn and must remember the locations for several months, their hippocampus grows larger in autumn and decreases in size in the spring. Re quantum mechanics and relativity: A critical aspect of QM computation is the need for reasoning about probabilities. That would imply that humans would need to have inherited reasoning methods that can deal with probabilities. But such reasoning methods would be useful for many non-QM reasoning as well. Reasoning about space time is also essential, and it's hard to distinguish QM aspects from the many other factors involved. John