Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!oliveb!sun!cognito!randolph
From: randolph%cognito@Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Animal Thought (was Re: language, thought, and culture)
Message-ID: <45232@sun.uucp>
Date: 12 Mar 88 08:58:37 GMT
References: <44@gollum.Columbia.NCR.COM> <2894@pbhyf.UUCP> <927@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
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Keywords: thought modalities
Summary: dreams and thought

In response to an article of mine, Cliff Joslyn
(vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu) writes:

    I wouldn't want to call dreaming a kind of thinking.  The difference is
    that dreams are uncontrolled.

and later,

    [the qualitative difference between human and non-human animal
    intelligence] is the ability to control the generation and manipulation of
    representations.

In many senses thinking is not controlled.  Can you stop yourself from
visualising a color when you hear "red" in the appropriate context?  Change
the way you feel when you greet your lover?  Change the meanings you use for
the symbols of C, if you know the language?  [To step briefly to an unrelated
discussion, this is part of making an effective advertisement -- choosing
symbols to which a large group of people respond uncontrollably in some
desired way.]

Humans can plan strategies which result in changes in their own responses
(learning).  Yet we do not control that which make us want to learn nor
that which makes us choose particular subjects.  I wonder .  .  .  is the
distinctive quality of human intelligence simply that we want to learn?  Or is
that, too, something we share with other animals?

__Randolph Fritz
randolph@sun.com
sun!randolph