[ExI] cool article by shostak

[William Flynn Wallace]

 It's intelligence that distinguishes us from the other animals and makes
us human.   John

It's a very fine line.  I like this analogy:  suppose a frog whose ability
to jump is limited to 5 inches, vertically.  Then that frog is put at the
bottom of a staircase in which each step is 6 inches.  Another frog who can
jump 6 inches can go all the way to the top.

So what looks like a huge qualitative difference between these two frogs is
really a very small quantitative difference.

Very fine line between us and apes.

Is intelligence really just a quantitative thing, or are dozens of
qualitative processes there too?  Emotions can vary quantitatively but the
biggest feature of them is qualitative - anger is different from anxiety,
for example.

I wish I knew enough about AI to understand how they are going to program
qualitative states into a computer.

I wish someone knew enough about animal emotions for us to compare us to
them.

It would seem that emotions are a much more fuzzy topic than intelligence,
but perhaps our definitions of intelligence just are too limited to
appreciate the nonquantitative aspects of it.

I am not trying to define what a human is, or just how we differ from lower
animals.  I don't think we know enough for that yet.

bill w

On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 7:30 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ​> ​
>> I agree with the logic of this article, but there's something
>> missing.Yeah - it's the rest of what it means to be human: emotions and
>> feelings and smells and tastes
>
>
> ​That's not what makes us human, other creatures on this planet have been
> able to feel and smell and taste for at least ​500 million years, they've
> behaved as if they had emotions too. It's intelligence that distinguishes
> us from the other animals and makes us human.
>
>
>> ​> ​
>> Would I give up those things for a higher IQ?  What do you think?
>>
>
> ​I see no reason you couldn't have both.​
>
>
>
>> ​> ​
>> If you would, you are as cold as the machines referred to in the article.
>
>
> ​I think it would be easier, far easier, for us to make a emotional
> machine ​that a intelligent, certainly Evolution found that to be the case.
>
>
> ​John K Clark​
>
>
>
>
>
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