Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!midway!ncar!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!world!burley From: burley@world.std.com (James C Burley) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Intuition and intelligence (was emergent properties) Message-ID: Date: 25 Oct 90 12:35:00 GMT References: <15238@venera.isi.edu>> <1990Oct23.165301.9813@riacs.edu <1990Oct24.174143.20918@riacs.edu> <10097@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> Sender: burley@world.std.com (James C Burley) Organization: The World Lines: 89 In-Reply-To: Larry E. Carroll's message of 24 Oct 90 21:57:48 GMT In article <10097@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> Larry E. Carroll writes: In fact, most thinking is done unconsicously. For instance, someone asks me to go dancing at Marcela's. Immediately several processes are initiated that seem to operate in parallel: my energy level is checked & it is high, my emotions are checked & I'm a little depressed, I've been wanting to practice my Salsa & it's Salsa night, knockout Joan said last week she was going to start Salsa & she'll probably be there, Berta may be there & I don't want to see her, I just paid my auto insurance & my money's a bit low, I really should go see Gwynn & see how she & her girls are doing, Sherwin & Bonita want me to go to Norah's to do the Argentine tango & I owe them for giving me the birthday party, I should stay late & get that Motif menu fixed, I really want to reply to the emergence thread, ... Each of these processes delivers a positive or negative motive, some of them with large weights, some of them small. These are summed together & I decide yes or no. Then I come up with a reason for my decision: Joan sounded very friendly the last time I danced with her; I can't let this opportunity go by. Larry Carroll "Takes-us" (correct pronunciation of Texas) Dancin' Fool I wouldn't agree that your sample set of thoughts is done "unconsciously", based on the fact that you are so able to elucidate them. They may not be entirely conscious, either: if you are accustomed to being asked questions at all, what probably is unconscious is some categorization (object matching and refinement, if you want to look at things from an inheritance point of view) that allows you to (perhaps still unconsciously) identify the question "Do you want to go dancing at Marcella's?" as something you've been asked before and which therefore has a previously established set of considerations to examine. Examining these considerations is rapid and does not require you to recreate them and think about them so carefully; in particular, I suspect any "final architecture" of the brain, if it can be discovered, will show that a large part of the unconscious thinking you do in response to a question like that, aside from categorizing the question, is determining that the weighing of predetermined considerations may be done with so little consideration to one's own safety that the desire to provide a correct answer quickly outweighs the need to carefully think through all the considerations. By providing a correct answer to such rather innocuous (i.e. not safety-related) questions, one can avoid embarrassing pauses that might trouble one's friends, for example. As far as how the considerations are weighed, perhaps it is true that you do assign "weights" to them and effectively sum them as you describe them: I know I do for certain similar situations (which I offhand identify as not safety-related but commitment-related, i.e. worthy of some thought since my answer will govern whether I make a commitment of my time for a period). However, I (again) suspect that the weight-assignment-summing process is not encoded in your brain's neural nets, at least not yet. I rather doubt one is able to reasonably think through the activities of one's own components to that level of detail. So I would guess that, again in a "final architecture", we would find that such decisions are themselves made in a fashion we would consider "emergent" from the relevant portions of the brain involved in those decisions, i.e. they won't be directly encoded. If you have to repeatedly tap your knee to determine your inevitable reaction, then I'd say you've discovered a NN-level reaction. But when you can make a quick decision based on previously considered information and situations, and then, "offline" as it were, review that decision and reasonably construct how you came upon it, then I'd say it was rooted in processes built on one or two layers of abstraction above the lowest "logic" (NN) level of the brain. Note that whether you are capable of performing such a review may be dependent on intelligence, in that if you are a sufficiently low life form you would lack the ability to perform such a conscious review even though your perception of the question and your resulting quick decision could be described as conscious. (If that were so, I'd guess you were a dog, horse, or cat -- in terms of intelligence level, but I'd guess a dolphin or even a chimp might be able to perform such a conscious review, and perhaps a pig as well.) But it also might be that a previous fear or "higher-intelligent" form of thought prevents you from correctly analyzing your ability to accurately review the thoughts that went into your decision. For example, many people are unwilling to admit to themselves that they didn't choose to go dancing because they thought they danced goofy. (I don't have this problem; I readily admit this to myself.) Or some other example (fear of public places, and so on.) Intelligence may permit them the capability to override the decision after further thought, and perhaps the set of considerations used to make future quick decisions, but they might not ever choose to use that capability in this fashion. James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson burley@world.std.com "He -- ven" (even more correct pronunciation of "Texas")