Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!nprdc!bickel
From: bickel@nprdc.arpa (Steven Bickel)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Thought/Emotion/Feeling
Message-ID: <1182@arctic.nprdc.arpa>
Date: 15 Dec 88 19:17:20 GMT
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Reply-To: bickel@nprdc.arpa (Steven Bickel)
Organization: Navy Personnel R&D Center, San Diego
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In article <862@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>I think you will find very few professional archaeologists claiming that
                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                   Did you mean anthropologists?

>they can distinguish any changes in human cognitive capacities since the
>first appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens.  Which is not to say that
>there _were_ no such changes, only that archaeology provides us with
>radically incomplete information about what people _did_ and _made_,
>and essentially no information about what they were _capable_ of. 

   Anthropology always will be speculative because it relies as much
   on the lack of artifactual evidence as on the discovered.  This
   is simply the nature of the beast.  When studying human beings it
   seems entirely appropriate to include all sources of information
   including current psychological theories which in themselves are
   widely debated. Integration of the parts and pieces of many 
   revelant theories is the leading edge of any science.

>If I
>had lived 100 years ago, I would never have used a computer, never have
>sung in a choir performing with a couple of other choirs by satellite
>linkup, never have driven a car.  I would almost certainly have been an
>uneducated servant.  The kind of traces such a person leaves in the
>archaeological record would give no shadow of a clue that I _am_ able
>to do these things given the right context.

   You probably would have been an intelligent servent with with well
   developed logical and rhetorical analysis capabilities.  Whether
   anyone could have determined this would be hard to say but because
   you would have been part of a culture, generalization is easier.

Steve Bickel