alt Hacker NewsBecause we don't experience reality through language but direct sensory perception. Language is arbitrary bird song and visual representations dragged forward from history, accepted definitions never uniformly distributed.
Testing based on contextual correctness makes no sense when there is no center to the universe. No "one true context to rule them all".
We learn from hands on sensory experiences. Our bodies store knowledge independent of the brain; often referred to as muscle memory.
Gabe Newell mentioned this years ago; our brain is only great at some things like language and vision processing but the rest of our body is involved in sensory information processing too: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gabe_Newell
The most potent evidence the brain is not the center of the universe we commonly think it to be is that patient with 90% of their skull filled with fluid while they carried out a typical first worlder life: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-lives-without-90-of-h...
States are banning a reading education framework that's been linked to lower literacy scores in younger generations; 3-cueing relies on establishing correctness via context assessment: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/more-states-are-tak...
"Establishing context" is a euphemism for "arguing semantics".
Putting the brain at the root of of human intelligence is a relic of hierarchical and taxonomical models. There are no natural hierarchies.
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”Because we don't experience reality through language but direct sensory perception”
That statement is patently false. We know that language influences our senses to a degree where we are unable to perceive things if our language doesn’t have a word for it, and will see different things as being equal if our language uses the same word for both.
There are examples of tribal humans not being able to perceive a green square among blue squares, because their language does not have a word for the green color.
Similarly, some use the same word for blue and white, and are unable to perceive them as different colors.
Your last statement misses the mark—of course the brain is the root of human intelligence. The error is in assuming that consciousness is the primary learning modality. Or, as you put it, “arguing semantics”.
From my own personal experience, this realization came after finally learning a difficult foreign language after years and years of “wanting” to learn it but making little progress. The shift came when I approached it like learning martial arts rather than mathematics. Nobody would be foolish enough to suggest that you could “think” your way to a black belt, but we mistakenly assume that skills which involve only the organs in our head (eyes, ears, mouth) can be reduced to a thought process.