Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!quiche!utility
From: utility@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ronald BODKIN)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Do dogs love their humans (was: Can machines think....)
Message-ID: <2368@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: 6 Mar 90 22:40:24 GMT
References: <2313@ritcsh.cs.rit.edu> <1990Feb19.165835.9673@pcsbst.pcs.com> <2348@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca> <4073@cbnewsj.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: utility@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ronald BODKIN)
Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Lines: 24

In article <4073@cbnewsj.ATT.COM> jwi@cbnewsj.ATT.COM (Jim Winer @ AT&T, Middletown, NJ) writes:
>Western culture has been built, like all surviving modern cultures, on 
>superior weapons of war -- you may choose to consider this as superior
>thinking ability. If our weapons weren't better than the German and
>Japanese weapons, German and Japanese would be the dominant languages.
>As the Japanese seem to have better economic weapons, Japanese may soon
>be the dominant language.
	Our weapons were a by-product of that intelligence.  But the fact
that we have an advanced culture is due to our thinking.  The Japanese
learned much from Western Civilization (they are currently a combination
of predominantly western ideas with Eastern irrationalism -- in my view).
The question of economic systems, I don't really think belongs in comp.ai
(if you want to follow up to somewhere else on this topic, I'll talk more
about Japanese and Western economics/culture, anyhow I said currently).

>If you think [sic] that thinking is a large part of our culture, I suggest
>you examine any protohuman between the ages of 14 and 65. Unless the gonads
>are organs of thinking, what drives our world is not thinking.
	I don't think the average mediocrity is what defines a culture.
Our culture has had (at its highest point to date) and still retains a great
deal of respect and use of intelligence.  More specifically, I challenge
you to find a culture with greater emphasis on thinking than that of
Western Civilization.
		Ron