X-Message-Number: 4322 Date: 30 Apr 95 22:28:44 EDT From: Michael Riskin <> Subject: If it acts intelligent.... Your partner fakes an orgasm. You believe it is real. S(he) experiences it as an "as if"; to you it is an "is". If it acts like an orgasm, moves like an orgasm, moans like an orgasm....? There is an experiential sex therapy exercise, (when treating preorgasmia and other similiar situations), in which the patient is instructed to act "as if" the desired experience is occuring (with full knowledge of this "as if" by the partner). The patient gets a chance to try a variety of responses without having to or trying to, make it really happen. This tends to reduce or eliminate performance pressure, adds some fun, and frequently turns into an authentic and spontaneous sexual response. Will the real orgasm please stand up...the "as iffed" one, or the biologically authentic one released by the "faked" one. One cryonet contributor stated that if something acts intelligent, it is intelligent... and then says, by way of proof by example, if something is large it is big. That does'nt entirely make sense to me. While a thing is itself (A=A) as Ayn Rand often pointed out as if this was a huge revelation, behaviour is not the same as being. A usable subset perhaps ...but not the same. Take "To be or not to be....." for example. Try substituting "to act" for only one one of those "to be's". It seems to lose something. This same contributor refers to Hitler. While it may be true that Hitler acted bad and was also bad, one's child may act bad but not be bad. It seems that "being" is a global term, the forest if you will, while acting is a detail, a tree. Obviously part of the problem is having an agreed upon definition of intelligence. It can include the ability to perform computations, the possesion of information, the perception of the intelligence by an observer/ interactor, and the intelligent understanding, by the intelligence itself, that it is being intelligent as compared to making believe and deceiving. Does intelligence mean choices? Free will? Or is that irrelevant? Does it merely require any stimulus-response capability? Once again, just like a duck, it seems necessary to define what it is to decide if it is what it looks like. It is easier to discuss what something seems like than what it really is. The former is therefore far more popular. Michael Riskin Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4322