To get back on topic...

I'm sorry Michael but I didn't see anything in your posts that I couldn't find fault with. I must have missed those.

For whatever it's worth I'm not the least bit offended by your total dismissal of my response to the question you asked. I fully understand that you were never about to consider other people's views from the get go. I don't take it personally.

I just thought that after you dismissed me (and my hero Richard Feynman) as kidding ourselves, I'd give you a hard time.

I guess I was defending Feynman more than anything.

I'll let you get back to presenting your case for others. I don't see anything in your presentation worthy of anymore of my time anyway. As far as I'm concerned your house of cards was never built on anything but semantics to begin with.

But that makes perfect sense if your view is that all thought is based on language. I wonder how that works into the concept of falling in love? Could we not have thoughts of love if not for language?

All you'll do is claim that to have any meaningful feelings at all is defined as language. It's a word that you'll simply continue to redefine to cover whatever needs to be covered to make language = thought.

How is that insightful? All you're doing is demanding that one label means precisely the same thing as another label. When all the excitment dies down you'll finally realize that all you've accomplished is to demand that the word language be redefined to mean thought.

Where's there any understanding in that?

I think I understand what you are doing perfectly. To listen to anymore would be a total waste of my time. I already see what you are attempting to do. It's just semantic hand-waving.

Thank you for your misunderstandings.

James, I am sorry that I hurt your feelings... it was not the goal.

I'm sorry Michael but I just can't help it.

You've seen through my lame ideas and recognized that I'm just kidding myself.

I'll never get over it.

















j/k

Carry on.

But in all honesty I don't see where you are doing anything other than attempting to redefine the word language just to satisfy a ridiculous semantic assertion (that was ORIGINALLY POSED as a question)

Now you're just out to prove it as an assertion rather than merely asking for people's views on it. Good luck with that.

thats why i stopped posting in this thread and jumped over to the "coffee bar"

Yes I think the attempts at discussion and questions here are simply veiled assertions.

Completely off topic, but necessary from my point of view...



I am reminded of a interpersonal situation concerning a 'quiet-type' and talented new employee at a small company. The consideration of the story applies here.

So the person is very adept, has good confidence, and feels they can be of value to the company through the realization and the implementation of those skill sets. However, as a result of previously knowing(through understanding of prior experience) about insecurity factors which often exist in many common workers regarding new ones - especially in a tight market - the new employee consciously refrains from showing too much of what they know at first for a few reasons. One being because they did not want to make it seem as though they were too 'full of themselves' because of the existing confidence level. Another being that s/he was aware of the fact that learning new techniques sometimes requires that the old be 'placed in storage' for a while. Another knowing that it is extremely important to be able to find common ground without further supporting the first reason. Getting along with co-workers is absolutely necessary.

So, with these thoughts and considerations being in the front of the employee's mind upon starting, the head was kept down and the ears open while getting a 'feel' for the shop dynamic. It is much better to let another recognize the value within oneself, rather than to go around showing it in ways that others may take offense to. Now, since character labels are assigned through individual personal perception, it is imperative that that perception be as positive as possible because of the difficulty that goes along with the attached stigma of a negative one.

One important thing to know about this situation is the fact that this particular employee was from a different cultural background as well - which happened to be one of which that the shop employees often hold in a negative light. The employees thick accent was a dead give away to their origin. One 'mark' already available for erasure... the opportunity was recognized through correlation between elements of observation.

With all that in mind, one particular employee felt threatened by the new employee in some way which could not be articulated into language as a result of his inability to separate himself from his ego. He did not understand why he felt the way that he did. I personally feel like he was made to feel inferior by the the new workers skills being shown, and he could not acknowledge his own insecurities were stemming from this, because of his inability to recognize the correlation. That employee's opinion also held some weight within the important people's perception at the company. So, the threatened employee, whom we shall call 'Ego' for brevity, began making fun of the new employee - to all of the others - every chance that he had. It took a while, but eventually the 'new guy' began to recognize this.

The new worker just kept their head down and worked as diligantly as possible knowing the entire time - through awareness of personal nuances - that their character and skill level were being undermined by 'Ego'. They were also acutely aware of what is commonly called 'projection' during everyday conversations with people who are unaware of that concept, and 'Ego' projected his own insecurity rather clearly - unbeknownst to himself. So the decision was consciously made by the new employee to allow all of it to unfold by itself, without forcing things.

Surely - they thought - someone else also sees this for what it is.

The negative groundwork being layed by 'Ego' included deliberate dishonesty in testimony regarding any project that the new employee was involved in. The individual steps to each project were divided into the shop on a whole, so each person held a shared responsibility to the success of each production aspect. That made it easy to point fingers and place blame, because no one was completely responsible for any single operation. All mistakes were being blamed on the 'new guy' by 'Ego' - behind the scenes.

The new employee also began to make the correlation between conversations that they had had with 'Ego' regarding other workers, and those other workers themselves suddenly giving a 'cold shoulder'. The most interesting aspect lay in the fact that whomever 'Ego' had talked about in a negative way - and it was always in a negative way - those same people shunned the 'new guy' as if they had actually said what 'Ego' did, even though most of their time was spent just listening.

The recognition of that correlation constituted warrant for the 'new guy' to believe that 'Ego' may have been spreading deliberate falsehoods about them in a conscious attempt to resolve his own unconscious insecurity. 'Ego' needed to feel safe in his job, and could not with his current unrecognized feelings regarding the presence of the 'new guy'. Add to this - the fact that the quality of the 'new guys' work was beginning to raise heads and quietly display a high level of ability and skill. At that time the 'new guy' thought that they may be the only one aware of this unfolding dynamic.

In their mind, the solution was evasive, in the sense that it directly involved the need to absolve themself from the incorrect and negative presupposition of character that had grown out of the seeds which 'Ego' had been planting.

How to do this?

How, they thought, can I add to the situation in such a way that the company and the fellow employees know that I am a good addition and of value regarding technical and people skills? How to show that I am not responsible for the things which are being blamed. How to find a way to get along with 'Ego' while simultaneuosly helping his insecurity without making it known. How to change a negative assessment based upon perceptual falsehoods.

The new worker, after enough time passed to 'naturally' allow for it, defended the accuser - stood up in his defense. Found subtle ways to make friends, which in and of itself, removed some of the stigma attached. Asked for complete responsibility for some of the tasks which had been previously involved in the blame game, and performed those tasks successfully - without mistake. Began to get further involved in breaktime conversations and used those as an opportunity to carefully remove some of the prior misconceptions.

In the end, 'Ego' never intellectually understood his own feelings, but the products of them were effectively overcome through the 'new guys' actions alone. It was all individually revealed in due time(meaning within each employee's individual perception) that what had been being said about the 'new guy' was, in fact, mistaken.

It was never openly talked about.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Just a 'real life example' employed for the addition to the consideration of why and how correlation constitutes understanding/thought.



Take it as you may.

A computer can 'correlate' all manner of data (in some cases much faster than I).

I however, can think, can change the way I see input, and can choose actions that are not within the framework of the data or its correlation.

how than does correlation have any thing to do with thought.

Correlation absent of conscious recognition is not thought.



You can think about things(consciously recognize correlations between things), change the correlations being focused upon, or recognize some other possibility by inferring from that which has been previously recognized through exposure to some other relevent piece of information... and draw a new conclusion.

I agree.

That conclusion always exists with grounds(prior conscious recognition of correlations).



I hope I have answered your question. Thank you for that opportunity.

Machines do not think... that parallel(which was used as supporting evidence) cannot be drawn.

Abra wrote:


Abra, I agree with you that emotion and intuition are completely different things. In my previous post I was attempting to explain how emotion can be misinterpreted and MISTAKEN for intuition.

The point I was making, which Creative caught on to, what the fact that our thought processes can often be guided by, what Creative calls, (the unspoken language) and which I call emotion.

Emotional thought supports qualitative action or responses, while analytical thought supports quantitative action or responses.

Creative – yes you have feminine language inside you, it is emotion. A male’s emotional language is typically underdeveloped because it is not supported in formal language structures. Formal language developed under the rule of males who viewed females as secondary.

Languages (today) still consist of predominantly gender specific contexts which socially separate males and females into the dominant and dominated roles. That’s a big part of the reason why males are not socialized in the same manner in which females are.

It is through the socialization process that females learn to think with emotion while males are socialized to think analytically. Our language is such that the only way to describe this dichotomy is by calling it feminine and masculine, though it has nothing to do with the actual natural characteristics we assign to male and female.

Look around you.

Most humans do not 'think' either. and humans are capable of 'thinking' outside of the correlated data.

Haven't you ever been working on one thing and had a flash of 'insight' into something totally unrelated to either your current work or the data assembled for that work?

Some previously contemplated correlation or the prior attempt to solve a prior problem which is currently not in conscious thought but lies buried in the unconscious until some unconscious perception brings it into conscious thought...

An epiphany?

Intuitive understanding?

Well every single idea is filtered through our subconscious, so since certain elements of these thoughts are not fundamentally conscious how can we know that any idea regardless of how novel is not within the set of data?

From a first person perspective WE CANNOT. Our minds are designed to keep much of the data away from the consciousness to avoid overload.

I doubt that any choice is outside the given data set.

I have seen no objective definition for the word think.

So I cannot yet agree that machines do not think.

This thread has done a terrible job of nailing down anything. IMHO.

That makes me happy in a silly kind of way.

In fact in 20 posts you have only made some minor characterization for analytical thought, which begs the question what other types of thinking are there . . .


Most folks who try to create a distinction between data processing and thought mention conscious thought, as if adding a poorly defined word can help define another poorly defined word.

OK - let me start with a definition of 'think' and let others amend it for the purpose of this discussion.

My defintion considers that thinking is basically useless unless it corrusponds to an action - even if the action is only to change, in some way, the previous state of mind. By changing a previous state of mind, future actions will ensue based on the altered state of mind, making the action differnt than what might have taken place before the 'thinking' which affected the state of mind.


Think - an internal process through which a being considers all possible data related to an issue, problem, or event in an effort to determine a course of action.

Truly.

And I'm in total agreement that this thread has indeed caused me to consider interesting ideas. Although, like you have suggested the ideas it have been spawned have been pondering of my own on the question of what other types of thinking there can be.

I think this drives home AB's perspective:



I totally indenfiy with this. Having worked in the field of research and development I would have been in a bad way had I not been for the mystery of totally unrealted 'insight'.

Michael responds to AB with the following:



I don't buy this because of the simple observation that this would imply that we could generate a new thought that wasn't already in our brain to begin with or brought to us it via a sensory experience. I find that to be quite limiting and basically unrealistic.

Morever this whole approach seems to fly in the face of Michael's own intutitive demands.

Micheal demands that awareness be present before thought can even occur. In spite of the fact that he totally dismissed this notion when I brought it up pages ago saying that awareness is something other than thought. Yet now he demands that awareness is required for thought.



What is conscious recognition but awareness?

This is what I shared concerning the recent course I just listened to. The man made it clear that to give our conscious attention to something means to become aware of it, and thefore to be aware is to conscious recognize something.

It keeps boiling down to awareness. Even Creative himself demands this.

But as Jeremy conciously recognizes this ultimately means that any awareness must be some form of thought, and that analytical thought would only be one aspect of thought.

This was my view all along.

I'm in total agreement with Jeremy when he says:

[uquote]Jeremy wrote:

I have seen no objective definition for the word think.

So I cannot yet agree that machines do not think.

This thread has done a terrible job of nailing down anything. IMHO.


Michael just makes assertions of the top of his head without any resoning to back them up. Either either attempting to simply assert definitions for terms, or he's attepting to assert some sort of beliefs he holds. But in either case his assertions seems to be in conflict.

He asserts that machines do not think AND he asserts that awarenes is not thought.

Seems to me he's got a conflict here. If awareness is not thought then why would machines not think by that definition?

On the other hand if awareness is the essence of thought, then why was this totally dismissed when I attempting to express this idea?

I still hold that awarenss is the key. And as far as I can see Michael seems to be demanding both that it is and that it isn't, which could ultiamtely only be resolved though some restrictive precise semantic demand.

In fact, I even ASKED if he was making such a semantic demand that thought refer only to analytical thinking way back and the beginning of this thread. But he rejected that notion.

As far as I'm concerned he's painted himself into a semantic corner from which there is no escape.

If he accepts the restriction that thought only refers to analyticaly thinking he'd have no justification to claim that computers don't think (by that definition of thought).

On the other hand, if he accepts that non-analytical awareness qualifies as thought then he owes me an apology because that has been my view all along.

I even tried to communicate this on several occassions using Descartes famous quote, "I think, therefore I am."

I suggested that what Descartes actually meant was, "I am aware, therefore I am." I believe that Descrates recognized, that at its root, our ability to think ultimately comes from the fact that we are consciously aware.

Otherwise, what sense would it make to make a statement such as "I think, therefore I am"?

If we couldn't think analytically, but we could still sense things and be aware of them, then we'd still BE! I'm sure that THOUGHT didn't escape Descarte.

Clearly he mean, 'aware' when he said 'think'.

In a very real sense by making his statement he was basically proclaiming that an ability to be aware and an ability to think are one in the same thing.

Michael even seems to be demanding this as well when he demands that "Machines do not think!"

Clearly awareness is the key.

And that's all I've been saying all along.

Like Jeremy points out, this thread has done a terrible job of nailing down anything.

I think Billy has the right idea to go over to Starbucks.

Well, take away the word being and replace it with the word entity and then this definition would require that computers think.

Otherwise this definition is just demanding by definition that only beings can think.

It's not easy to just define a concept.

Moreover, when you define a concept all you are truly doing is suggesting that it must be however you've definied it.

This becomes circular if you're real goal is to determine precisely what a concept actually refers to.

This is why philosophy has gotten NOWHERE.

There is no firm footing upon which to stand.

All we can do is create semantics.

But semantics must always end up in self-conflict.

In fact this is the root of Kurt Godel's Incompletelness Theorem.

Any self-contained system must necessarily be circular and thus redundant.

Spirituality offers a solution. We can appeal to the undefinable and by its very property of being undefinable and thus infinite, it is not self-contained because it is not finite.

In a sense, Godel proved that spirit necessarily must exist.

Although keep in mind that I said, "in a sense".

Actually he didn't prove that. What he might have proven though is that we are redundant and self-referenced beings.

We can take our choice. We are either spiritual beings, or we are redundant.

It is not a light switch... off or on.

It is a matter a varying degree, based upon the number of correlation.

In my view - conscious perception is the most basic degree of awareness, and requires no language or understanding to be realized. This is shown in varying degrees throughout the animal 'kingdom', and it - in no way - can be equated to 'higher' degrees of awareness, such as conscious recognition.

So, just basic awareness does not - in any way - constitute some form of understanding... however,

Conscious recognition is not just being 'aware' of another thing, as is conscious perception. It is to have perceived and to have registered this perception into conscious memory via some form of representational understanding. Thus... RE - COGNITION!!!

THAT constitutes thought, and is completely dependent upon the ability to make those correlations. It requires the objects to be considered in relation to one another. There is no thought without this element. The more correlations one recognizes, the greater the depth of the understanding.

Language facilitates that correlation, and not necessarily through words alone.

Hello everyone! I wanted to share something I stumbled upon that I thought may add more on discussion or perhaps even bring additional contemplations on the topic in hand.

I wanted to talk about the philosopher Jerry Fodor and his knowledge touching on the subject on conscious and unconscious thinking.

This particular philosopher developed a controversial theory of the mind. He theorizes that there is an innate language of thoughts that he calls "Mentalese." He posited Mentalese in order to explain the nature of thinking (and other mental abilities), and to account for learning of natural languages.

Perception, memories, and intentions all involve tokens of Mentalese sentences. So, when you think the thought that Kermit is green, a Mentalese sentence that means "Kermit is green" occurs in your brain. Thoughts can be about objects, and can be true or falce because sentences are the kinds of things that can be about objects and be true or false.

Mentalese sentences are like natural language sentences, in that they have grammatical structure, but they are different in that they are not used to cmmunciate, but to think. Mentalese occurs prior to natural language such as English presuppoes an existing ability to think in Mentalese. When we learn the meaning of a word, we learn to assoicate it with a Mentalese word. Mentalese is itself innate, although the ability to employ a Mentalese term may be triggerd by having certian experiences.

Jerry Fodor goes on to liken both conscious and unconscious mental activities to the operations of a computer. Thinking, perceiving, and the rest involve computations with Mentalese sentences.

So unknown to most of us we are expert users (though not speakers) of the language Mentalese.

Recent research on the psychology of infants has made a compelling case for the view that newborns come into the world already equipped with a lot of innate knowledge.

For example, they know the difference between living and non-living things.

So my question is - Can it be that an infant already has the term in Mentalese that means "elephant," before he ever sees an elephant?

Jerry Fodor claims that there are words of Mentalese that are primed to refer to elephants when appropiate conditions are satisfied, and these conditions might involve seeing elephants or pictures of elephants.

What do you think is possible?

I think at least 3 or 4 of us have developed a similar family of concepts much earlier in this conversation. One danger is assuming that the so-called, hypothetical 'mentalese' has some particular quality of known human languages, just because someone thinks of 'mentalese' as a 'language'.