Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!sunybcs!bingvaxu!vu0112
From: vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Animal Thought (was Re: language, thought, and culture)
Message-ID: <929@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu>
Date: 12 Mar 88 18:01:19 GMT
References: <44@gollum.Columbia.NCR.COM> <2894@pbhyf.UUCP> <927@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <45232@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn)
Organization: SUNY Binghamton, NY
Lines: 46
Keywords: thought modalities

In article <45232@sun.uucp> randolph%cognito@Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz) writes:
>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?  

These are all examples of "unconscious thought", i.e., these things just
"happen" to you, these representations "appear" in your mind, sometimes
we know why, sometimes not.  *IS THIS THINKING?* If so, then what is the
difference between thinking and complex reflex?  Again, *IS DREAMING
THINKING?* I think you'd be hard-pressed to say so.

>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?

It has been often said (no, I can't quote!) that the distinctive aspect
of human mentality, perhaps a definition of intelligence, is our ability
to meta-learn, that is, learn how to learn, change our learning
strategy, etc. Presumably learning *per se* is an instinct in both
humans and non-humans (of course, *what is learned* is not instinctive).
 The theory says that in humans, we can *control* learning, just as we
can control (some of) our other instincts (e.g.  fasting, biofeedback,
football :-)).  If this is so, then I would say that *imagination* is
the mechanism by which we control learning, in the ways I've outlined
before, e.g. generation and testing of representations, etc.

O---------------------------------------------------------------------->
| Cliff Joslyn, Professional Cybernetician 
| Systems Science Department, SUNY Binghamton, New York, but my opinions
| vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu
V All the world is biscuit shaped. . .