"There's a speech by Noam Chomsky somewhere on YouTube that I found enlightening a while ago. He talks about how different animals have limits on what concepts they can grasp. Apparently rats, for example, can solve surprisingly complicated math problems if they are rewarded for doing so. But it appears that no matter what is at stake, rats can't grasp the concept of prime numbers. For whatever reason, their brains just can't get it."
I marvel at this - it is beyond my imagination how an experiment could be devised that would prove that a rat can't "grasp the concept of prime nos.". I guess if the point is akin to you can't get a rat to grasp ANY concept at all (like you can't get them to understand the concept of the psychological causes of depression) but its obviously silly to state as a conclusion if there really wasn't something real to measure to base a scientific conclusion on.
I marvel at this - it is beyond my imagination how an experiment could be devised that would prove that a rat can't "grasp the concept of prime nos.". I guess if the point is akin to you can't get a rat to grasp ANY concept at all (like you can't get them to understand the concept of the psychological causes of depression) but its obviously silly to state as a conclusion if there really wasn't something real to measure to base a scientific conclusion on.
