Continuing the line of thought in my last entry, what happens when a list is sorted alphabetically or numerically? If a list such as this:

'4, 6, 2, 5, 9, 3'

is sorted into this:

'2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9'

What happens when I do this? While I'm sorting, maybe I'm merely remembering that 2 goes before 3, 3 goes before 4, etc. I understand it more in terms of left-to-right and before/after than in terms of quantity. Maybe several things are going on here: I visually divide the list into distinct symbols (i.e., I see one list comprising six numerals); I remember that 3 always goes to the left of 4; and, either using the keyboard or using my imagination, I place 3 to the left of 4, and so on.

On the surface, it seems this thought process has little to do with quantities and the nature of numbers than it does with remembering an ordering of symbols. This is more clear when comparing two large numbers, such as the following:

121,432,131,272,983 and 121,432,131,282,983

In this case, I don't understand the magnitude of the numbers in question, I simply notice that 8 is greater than 7 and so I conclude that the first number is larger. When I say "greater than", I'm not sure if I'm simply in the habit of seeing the numeral 8 after the numeral 7, or if I somehow quickly see that 8 is quantitatively larger than 7. So, on second thought, maybe the way we "see" numerals does have something to do with their quantitative value, at least in some cases. But if I had to decide on the question now, I'd side with the notion from Meno, that it's a matter of recollection.

Writer's block. I was going to write in this blog every day, but this is more difficult than I thought it would be.

I was thinking about Meno, and the notion that learning is really recollection. That's my understanding of what the dialog says, anyway. I was thinking of how this might apply to an ordinary problem, such as ordering the following list:

x, f, i, g, m, h, z, t

If you're asked to arrange the elements in order, I suppose the only thing that's really happening is that you remember that f is before g, g is before h, etc.

Consider a list of numbers:

4, 6, 2, 5, 9, 3

As I'm ordering the list, do I understand that 2 is less than 3, or do I simply remember to place 2 before 3, because I've seen that ordering so many times, and it's merely something I remember, like a habit?