How long will it take, for an (any) untrained brain, to fathom into the most intriguing aspects of human knowledge. The complexity is bottomless but yet within the grasp of the mental capabilities of the human individual. One can master any subject in any discipline human knowledge invented.
The question is asking, how long, as it takes for granted, and not assuming, that such a task can be accomplished. It is not, if, or whether, a human individual is capable of mastering any aspect of knowledge open to scrutiny, but how long. The current thought occurred, well not occurred, instantiated, out of thoughts triggered while reading the following paragraph page 102, 'emergence, from chaos to order' of John H. Holland
"Processing. For simplicity, the model will do its central processing via a large number of neurons that are interconnected at random. That is, the axon of any given neuron in the central group branches in such a way as to make random synaptic contacts with other neurons in the central group. The connections, once established, remain fixed thereafter. This arrangement, of course, sets aside all the structural biases that evolution has supplied to real nervous systems. There is, however, an advantage to using a model net that has no initial structural bias. Any feature extraction accomplished by such net can only be the result of learning; it cannot be built in by an initial structural bias."
Feature extraction. Features that describe and define concepts. Concepts assume their existence by the features that describe and define them. What the human brain is doing is identifying features, lost in the mists of insurmountable complexity, but lost to the untrained mind, only too obvious to the trained mind. The vast range of stimuli for the brain to take in, enormous. Hinders the efforts of individuals to acquire meaning, stimuli for all the features concepts or non-concepts are made out of, and acquiring the right stimuli of the right features, the features the trained mind will pick out from. And how this ability is afforded .. it is afforded by learning ..the process by which vast amounts of knowledge has been accumulated over eons by inquiring minds, one that is the signature of all individuals.
It sets aside the structural biases, the hardwiring aspect, the genes, the genetic makeup, what has been used up incessantly to separate people, into worthy and unworthy, capable and incapable, brilliant and stupid which attributes intelligence as something inherited through generations. The tendency of past and current societies to belittle the human individual and its constant efforts to stray the individual away from accomplishing its goals, collectively and individually.
What fed hordes of conceptions to support racism, sexism and all other discriminatory constructions to achieve ulterior goals. It (learning) shakes off, and keeps shaking of, all these maligning conceptions, the proof, the indication of such process, or whatever someone can call it, it is irrelevant
Humble me .. I will challenge the 'randomness' quality .. attributed by the sentences .. 'interconnected at random' and make 'random synaptic contacts' which do not give credit to the implications of chaotic processes which our brain employs, and by implicating chaos as a participant and as a way of processing, we make use of the attractor concept deeply seated within the chaos framework. The concepts sought after, lie within an attracting basin that chaos assisting processes leads us to.
Chaos enabled pathways, trajectories assists us in our journey to knowledge, as knowledge is already there, awaiting for our arrival.
