Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!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: <47166@sun.uucp>
Date: 26 Mar 88 20:00:28 GMT
References: <44@gollum.Columbia.NCR.COM> <2894@pbhyf.UUCP> <935@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Lines: 49
Keywords: thought modalities
Summary: consciousness, control, and thought

Cliff Joslyn (vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu) writes -

  Please answer my question:  what is the difference between thought and
  complex reflex?

I would say that complex reflex is a kind of thought.

Also, as part of a comment that Cliff defines thought as "consciously
controlled human activity", I wrote:

  Yet these two criteria leave out so much behavior that they seem to me
  limiting.  Nor is it well understood behavior.  Clinical psychology is
  largely the long slow study of methods of changing unconscious behavior; an
  artificial intelligence researcher would be delighted to be able to produce
  the behaviors you disparage as "unconscious".

Cliff writes;

  Hey, you're getting me upset! I don't understand the above, perhaps you
  could give some examples? Behavior is not thought.  I disparage nothing. 
  I seek truth. 

Hmm.  I guess that was a bit terse.  Ok, here's a longer explanation.

"Clinical psychology is largely the long slow study of methods of changing
unconscious behavior."  A client who voluntarily visits a psychologist does so
be cause he has mental behaviors ("thoughts") which he can't consciously
control.  If the client was aware and in control of his behavior, he could
have solved his problem without assistance!  Thus, a large interest of
clinical psychologists is the changing of unconscious, uncontrollable
mental behavior ("thought").

"an artificial intelligence researcher would be delighted to be able to
produce the behaviors you disparage as 'unconscious'".  If I could build a
machine that could, from the sensation of reflected light from a page,
construct a representation of the words on the page (the "meaning" of the text
on the page), I'd have achieved something that would awe an AI researcher.  It
would turn the world upside down!  And yet, in a skilled human reader, reading
is unconscious mental behavior ("thought").

The transformation of sensation to representation, the operation on
representation, the transformation of representation to action (I'm tempted to
write sensation, but that would cause more confusion), all of these are
unconscious.  And, so far as I know, humans are better at them than any other
creature; we have more options in our behavior, we can create a broader range
of representations, we do more things with them.  Not thought?  This is most
of what minds do!

__Randolph Fritz (sun!randolph; randolph@sun.com)