Two Pillars of Human Cognition

 In science :

• The first thing to understand, is hypothesis testing.
• The second, is the limits to the quantification of human experience.

1. The general concept of hypothesis testing is easy to explain to a child. I learnt of it formally when I was 8, but all higher animals have an intuition for it, as it undergirds the post-infant capability to execute risk management.

2. The general concept of transcendental "idealism / aesthetics" is slightly harder. I learnt of it formally when I was 14, but most conversational animals have an intuition for it, as it is simply a reflection on consciousness prior to the activity of verbalisation. Its study may involve a systematic review of the process of verbal communication, which encodes pre-verbal information, in very abstract (lossy) signals.

All of this is tremendously exciting to think about, because we now live in a world which spends TONS of money on building machines which are failing to execute these very pillars of cognition, while performing all sorts of baroque operations which are non-fundamental to the process of organic human thought.