X-Message-Number: 12630
From: 
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1999 13:59:33 EDT
Subject: Badger on feeling

Scott Badger's post #12621 has some interesting stuff. His conclusions, as I 
read him, include the following:

1. "Intelligence," including goal-directed behavior and "values" in the sense 
of criteria for choices, does not require feeling (in the sense of subjective 
experience or qualia). Of course I agree.

2. We may eventually learn to control or suppress (at least some of) our 
emotions and become mainly or fully "cognitive" creatures.

Certainly we will learn better balance and control. But we cannot become 
PURELY cognitive beings. If we use words in any reasonable and consistent 
way, I think it must be agreed that life as we know it is characterized in 
the first place by the capacity for subjective experience or feeling. Lacking 
that, we would not exist.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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