(Continued) liberal arts and scientific thinking

I am very glad that the discussion in the previous log is intense. Axgle's speech reminds me of such an interesting example. This is a sci-fi concept I like very much. I have referenced it in the bitwise explanation. I will reference it again to express my other strange point of view.

Chinese and mathematics are always the two most basic subjects, and we have been in touch with them since elementary school. These two disciplines teach people two completely different ways of thinking, rational thinking and emotional thinking. In many disciplines, only Chinese language does not require logical thinking. Most of the time, you only need to follow your feelings. Sometimes I often wonder what will happen to the world if human civilization does not develop the discipline of mathematics and only has the ability of perceptual thinking. Robert J. Sawyer's sci-fi novel calculating God creates a world like this. As mentioned in the novel, humans have 10 fingers, so they have developed a counting system that is full of ten. 10 is the sum of the first four positive integers and the product of 2 and 5. This carry system is very suitable for the development of mathematics. However, the alien creature conceived in the novel is not so lucky-it has 23 fingers. This awkward number can only be thought of by Jordan and chromosomes, without any features. This has brought insurmountable obstacles to the development of mathematics in this creature. In fact, this creature does not need to develop mathematics. Like humans, he has the ability to directly perceive a small number of objects. The number of objects that humans can directly perceive generally does not exceed 6. That is to say, if you have three or five items in front of you, you don't need to count them. You can see at a glance how many items are there; but when the number of objects that appear in front of you reaches 7 or 8, you must count one to know the number. When we talk about the number of objects facing a creature as many as 46, we can still tell at a glance how many objects are. After the number of objects exceeds 46, it is collectively referred to as "a lot. 46. This number is enough for race survival. When a tribe is formed, they always ensure that the number of individuals in the tribe does not exceed this number. Therefore, such creatures do not need the ability to count, and they do not need to develop mathematics. As a compensation, they are extremely keen to perceive things. They even intuitively perceive the theory of relativity because their thinking is not bound by deductive logic. Is deductive logic thinking limiting our thinking? Perhaps it is a good thing to have only the ability to think emotionally.