Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!decwrl!sun!quintus!ok From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Thought/Emotion/Feeling Message-ID: <881@quintus.UUCP> Date: 16 Dec 88 12:10:02 GMT References: <569@epicb.UUCP> <1146@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <1152@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <496@uceng.UC.EDU> <1154@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <4349@Portia.Stanford.EDU> <1159@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <854@quintus.UUCP> <1169@arctic.nprdc.arpa> <862@quintus.UUCP> <1182@arctic.nprdc.arpa> Sender: news@quintus.UUCP Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 66 In article <1182@arctic.nprdc.arpa> bickel@nprdc.arpa (Steven Bickel) writes: >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? > No, I meant archaeologists. Anthropologists study living societies. They have informants. Archaeologists study dead societies. They have shovels. Archaeologists may appeal to anthropological data for models of what the past might have been like, but that doesn't make them anthropologists any more than their appeal to medical data for explanations of lesions in skeletons makes them doctors. > 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. Archaeology, in contrast, does *not* rely on lack of artefactual evidence, only on its presence. If an archaeologist doesn't find anything he recognises as the remains of a house, he won't say "these people didn't have houses", he'll say "we don't know what kind of dwellings these people lived in". There are cases where you can be reasonably confident that a particular group of people didn't have writing at some time, but not _just_ because you don't find writing then, but because you _do_ find a crude form of writing later and more sophisticated forms after that. >>If I >had lived 100 years ago ... > You probably would have been an intelligent servent with with well > developed logical and rhetorical analysis capabilities. The probability is that I would not have survived childhood. If I had survived childhood, I would not have had the education which is necessary to develop logical thinking (it isn't natural). My point is that we cannot determine what my great-grandfather's _capabilities_ were (would he have been able to understand the Spinor calculus had he been taught it?), how much more absurd it is to claim that radical changes in the physical basis of human mental capacity have taken place recently without definite evidence. The basic hypothesis behind AI is that there is a level above which cognition is independent of its substrate. The range of brain size in modern adult human males is something like 900-2200 cc, and within this range the size doesn't seem to make much difference [source: Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man", from (unreliable) memory]. It seems to be pretty solidly established that two things can substantially influence the IQ of an adult: nutrition as a child, and education. (I am _not_ saying that IQ is a satisfactory measure.) Have there been substantial changes in human nutrition throughout history? Too right there have! (One boundary between two culture periods in my home country is marked quite clearly by a difference in tooth & jaw wear in skeletons; and there is a well known sequence of population booms in Britain following the introduction of better plows & new food-stuffs.) Is that likely to have had an effect on how smart the adults were? Certainly it is! Have there been substantial changes in the amount of education available to children and the content of that education? Definitely! Are some conceptual structures more effective than others? Sure! Has the course of human history been shaped by disease? Read "Rats, Lice, and History"! Is there any evidence of some cognitive development since the appearance of homo sapiens sapiens which cannot be adequately accounted for by known "environmental" factors like these? Let's hear of it! The time to go looking for speculative theories is when the theory you already have is breaking down.