X-Message-Number: 12547
From: 
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 11:33:08 EDT
Subject: feeling/intelligence

John Clark (#12544) wrote:

> the issue is whether something that has intelligence and only
 >intelligence is even possible. The answer is clearly no, 

The answer is clearly yes, since machines with (some degree of) intelligence, 
but no feeling, already exist.

>that's why evolution never came up with such a thing.
 
Whether "evolution" came up with it would be quibbling over words. Evolution 
came up with us, and we came up with (so far, somewhat ) "intelligent" 
machines without feelings. Ordinary organic evolution may also have come up 
with slightly intelligent animals without subjective experiences, since we 
don't know whether some of the lower orders have any subjective lives.  

> The fossil record tells us the same thing,
> animals have had emotion for about 500 million years but intelligence
 >for only about one million.
 
How do you know that animals have had emotion for 500 million years? Survival 
responses and goal-directed programming etc do not require emotion.

> 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. 
                  
Mr. Clark is saying it is a myth that emotion is more difficult to produce 
than intelligence. But the fact is that--so far, for us--it has been possible 
to produce some degree of intelligence in machines, but we have not (as far 
as I know) succeeded in producing the capacity for subjective experiences in 
our artifacts.

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

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