Say you have a friend, he tosses some marbles on a table in front of you and asks you how many you see. He does this twice. The first time, he throws four marbles, and the second time he throws nineteen marbles.

How long does it take you to "count" the marbles? In the first case, I assume everyone will see four marbles, and blurt out the number. What about the second case? I can imagine someone who tries to size up quintets as well as a possible final remainder less than five, and then they do the mental calculation in their head and come up with the final figure. Or, someone else may just count up by ones. Another individual may look for triplets. Another person may simply estimate and be satisfied with whatever they come up with.

My general point in the first case is that the cognitive process is instinctive, a lightning fast mental evaluation, as if we automatically know four of a kind when we see it. In the second case, there are a host of pathways to the end point, because the answer must be arrived by a process, or a system. Not only is the outside signature of the behavior very different (the response time does not increase linearly with the number of marbles), one assumes that the neural activity would be different.

But in both instances, you're "counting," right?

Sometimes I wonder if a lot of "philosophy" isn't just attempting to translate into language things we "know" instinctively rather than systematically, that is, trying to make our animal nature fit into human shaped boxes, attempting to communicate the universal (perhaps we can never communicate some innate concepts because we all share them, ergo, language was not necessary to convey this information because it was not novel) . Instead of a treatise like Being and Time Martin Heidegger might have been better off writing songs (my opinion, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is just common sense on crack). Much of the counter-intuitional jibberish that comes out of "higher" religions also might be the result of the tendency for our systematic brain to attempt to capture, dissect and reduce instinctive elements of our nature (that is, religion doesn't attempt to explain the outer universe, but the inner universe). Since regular transparent language doesn't map well onto the "deep truths," gibberish does the trick, as it's a much more entertaining dance around the hole, rather than just standing there and admitting that we can't fathom the depths of the well.