X-Message-Number: 12544
From: "John Clark" <>
References: <>
Subject: Intelligence is hard, emotion is not 
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:24:31 -0400

In  #12538 Thomas Donaldson <> Wrote:

    >The issue is whether or not machines which have intelligence and
    >ONLY intelligence could ever be more than slaves

No, the issue is whether something that has intelligence and only
intelligence is even possible. The answer is clearly no, that's why
evolution never came up with such a thing.

The fact is that the emotion creating mechanism must be much simpler
than the intelligence creating one, that's why lots of drugs can make
you feel almost any emotion you care to name but no known drug will
make you smarter, you'd need more than one small molecule to do
something that complex. The fossil record tells us the same thing,
animals have had emotion for about 500 million years but intelligence
for only about one million.

It would make an interesting exercise in sociology to figure out how
the myth got started that emotions are what distinguish humans
from everything else and are almost mystical, certainly much more
difficult to produce than intelligence. Although it existed before TV
I think Star Trek and the entire MR. Spock unemotional nonsense
had a lot to do with popularizing this silly idea.

                   John K Clark      

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