Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!riacs!danforth From: danforth@riacs.edu (Douglas G. Danforth) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Intuition and intelligence (was emergent properties) Message-ID: <1990Oct24.174143.20918@riacs.edu> Date: 24 Oct 90 17:41:43 GMT References: <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1990Oct3.183522.17076@riacs.edu> <3549@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <45348@apple.Apple.COM> <3560@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <4152@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <15238@venera.isi.edu> <1990Oct23.165301.9813@riacs.edu> burley@world.std.com (James C Burley) writes: >>In article <1990Oct23.165301.9813@riacs.edu> danforth@riacs.edu (Douglas G. Danforth) writes: >> >> The point is that our pleasures and pains guide and direct our >> paths of thought in ways that have very little to do with rational or >> logical thinking. Both facets (emotion,logic) work together to make us >> "thinking" creatures. ... >So while we may accept the limitation that in a given situation, we respond >to a stimulus in a fashion not directly governed by our capacity for >rational or logical thought, I think it is going too far to extend this >concept to include the limitation that we cannot in any way employ our >"higher" capacities in the training of our own responses. Very nice posting! Now we are begining to attend to issues of substance. I agree that higher level capacities can over-ride our trained responses. It now becomes a facinating question of how these two processes (automatic,conscious) interact and how one can be a benefit to the other. Obviously if nothing were "automated" then we would have to "think" about every step we took. This does not take advantage of the parallelism in a nervous system. Also as James Burley nicely points out that without "thinking" to over-ride automatic responses there would arise situations that would be detrimental to the organism. I introduced the idea of automatic responses in this discussion to counter the trend of over-reliance on the "rational" and "logical" facets of human thought. It has been said that Einstein relied on an almost kinesthetic sense to guide him in his research. This "intuitive" or non-logical component gave him direction. It allowed him to winnow out the wheat from the chaff, to set a course, a direction, to have a standard. Surely, an intelligent system that did not have such facilities would be unlikely to duplicate the accomplishments of an Einstein. -- Douglas G. Danforth (danforth@riacs.edu) Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS) M/S 230-5, NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA 94035