X-Message-Number: 4374
Date: Mon, 8 May 1995 10:14:40 -0700
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONET Thinking about Thinking

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In #4370   (Thomas Donaldson) Wrote:
	  
		>no one I know uses "intelligence" as an expletive:it is 
		>always a form of praise. 
		 
Don't be such a WISE guy. You're being too CLEVER by half. Think
you pretty SMART, don't you, well, BOOK LEARNING  don't mean
nothing, just read The Bible. You  EGGHEADS are too SLICK,
you're just a bunch of NERDS, the common man should take over. 
		 
For reasons I don't understand, in much (most?) of our society
stupidity is considered a badge of honor, how else can you
explain the popularity of Forest Gump?
		 
		>As for INTELLIGENCE, the fact that no one has a good
		>definition is important.
		
As bad as our definitions of intelligence are, they're much better than our 
definitions of consciousness.
				
		>does the presence of one or another mental/computational
		>ability necessarily relate at all to such traits as
		>consciousness. Why should it?
				
With intelligence, even without a definition, there are objects
we can point to that unambiguously have that property, and we
don't need to make use of even more nebulous concepts to do it.
With consciousness the only such object we could point to is ourselves 
because we must first recognize intelligence before we can hope to 
recognize consciousness.
				
		>if we wish to acquire more mental/computational abilities,
		>thinking about  "intelligence" is not the way to go.
		
Thinking about thinking is the only way we can go, if that's not good enough 
then we're sunk. 


				    John K Clark         

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