>>16153
Oh. Well.

I don't know shit about neurology, but I know something about pattern matching. Determining amount without counting is probably pure pattern matching.
You see a continuous blob in your vision, and there's a learned neural pathway somewhere that signals "blob -> object". Similarly, when you see several blobs, there's probably a pathway from your eyeballs that connects the neural structure in your mind that represents a number. So you see four blobs, and your mind immediately evokes "4" without thinking.

And I imagine you could extrapolate that to counting rows and columns as well. Unconscious multiplication, simply because seeing certain visual patterns immediately sends a signal to a part of your brain that holds certain numbers.

t. bullshit expert
At least, those are my observations from lifetime of playing video games, learning the game to the point where some blurry pixels in the corner of my vision activate a complex sequence of responses that would be impossible to do consciously that quickly. ("blurry group of pixels - flick hand towards it -> click -> headshot").

So, no conscious thought involved, pure pavlovian learned reflexes.

>>16007
I think the thing actually is, most people who read books want an actual physical copy, and a very nicely bound book is more comfortable for most of us to handle. I absolutely hate kindle and pdfs for that very reason, in which case had I the money I would just buy book collections.

So your only actual reason to go to a publisher to begin with is to have an extremely nicely bound book and have the advertising. I would not ever go to a publisher who would treat me like this and only produce some trashy looking paperback.

A famous example of this attitude would be grimoires, which I think is one case where the very exact shallowness of the people who claim to criticize shallowness comes into play. These people want bullshit like "real human skin" or at least give them animal skin with runes and sigils burned into it with a soldering or wood burning iron, all hand made and signed editions. Then you can charge them out the ass. But for regular normal people it is exclusively to hold a nice book and be able to turn the pages, and then to have it actually look nice on a bookshelf.

But content wise yeah, I think that if you're an aspiring fiction writer even just having something written for free online like the equivalent of a garage band playing in bars would be fine. And if you're going to pay $20,000 to some ripoff artist just spend it on advertising. Unless the publisher is actively making large cardboard displays for your novel in book stores there is no reason to go to them or pay the greedy fuckers.

Sorry but I have an extreme negative view of people that don't know how to create any art of their own then steal and pillage other people's work, particularly types like Poe and Dickinson who basically die poor and alone and some dickhead makes millions of dollars off it. I want it clearly laid out in Scripture why these people are burning in the lowest pits of hell alongside rapists and traitors as Dante's fiction would say

>>15420

>you'd be a good philosopher or mathematician (if you aren't one).

Heh, I'd like to imagine that I'd do well as a philosopher in ancient greece or something, but that's more because ancient philosophy is about the level at which my expertise ends. The modern philosophical frontier in the subject of the mind as related to neuroscience and the mind body problem are beyond my level of intelligence. Hell, I'm struggling to figure out dialectics, even.

Besides, I feel that in order to be a philosopher / mathematician, one has to have an academic career in the field, which is impossible for me because >academia on the kazakhstan. So I'll have to be content with writing down my ramblings into a personal diary.

Also, interesting thought I had regarding language that I had while writing yesterday's posts. I am becoming acutely aware of the fact that I am limited by my language. The English language played a trick on me that I noticed while formulating my argument regarding the nature of art: there is a difference in meaning between "What is art" and "What art is", that can slip under one's awareness.

The question "What is art" and the statement "This is art" concerns itself with listing a set of objects that are art. It is a linguistic definition, a way by which we define words. So, when we ask "What is a sun" or "what is a rock", we simply point to the sun or the rock, and establish an understanding of the intended meaning.

But the answer to the question of "What art is", and the statement "Art is this", are categorically different to the above. Those are concerned with the logical definition: formulating a concept of the word in question. Pointing at a rock to explain what "rock" is only makes sense if both parties have a CONCEPTUAL understanding of "rockness". In fact, such an explanation only serves as a translation, not a definition: it establishes that the sequence of letters / sounds that are written as "rock" pertain to (or reference) the concept of rock. In order to discover the IDEA that those words are referencing, we need to formulate a logical definition of "rockness". After all, if someone who has never seen a rock is given a rock, and the word "rock", the only information they can extract is that the object is referenced by the name "rock", and absolutely nothing about what the object IS, conceptually.

I hope I'm making sense.

This discovery has made me question just how much my metaphysical world is being limited by language, limiting me to "seeing" only the concepts which I know words for. It is a strong argument for learning more languages, both natural and artificial.