> In other words, all life thinks
Only for a hyper-inclusive definition of "think" that loses any communicative value.
Only for a hyper-inclusive definition of "think" that loses any communicative value.
What’s wrong with that? We’re just a bunch of talking animals. A huge bunch with complicated tools but technically still wild animals.
As for sun tracking in plants I do agree with you it’s probably not a sign of intelligence. If that’s your point, you can just point out that part.
You can just say humans and plants think in different ways, or through different mechanisms.
Communication efficiency. I'd like to have one short term for this so that I don't need to make elaborate differentiations every time I need to use it.
Good example of ppl who make up new words to "simplify" things as their world gets more and more complex every year are Lawyers and Accountants. But even so sometimes you end up requiring buildings full of them to decipher what one sentence they came up with last year actually means this year.
The problem is not the Lawyer or the Accountant but Human Language itself.
Korzybski, "Manhood of Humanity"
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25457/25457-pdf.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
IIRC, he meant that plant life binds and manipulates chemicals in the immediate environment; animals move matter over the surface of the earth (at a much higher rate than plants); humans shift information through time via culture (and later writing, et. al.)
One way that I like to think about it is that there's a spectrum of "sophistication". Even within the human population, there's gradation: not everyone is great at critical thinking, forecasting, imagining, reasoning, meta cognition, etc.
When I look to the stars, I wonder what levels exist above the human mind.
Looking "downward", are there "thinking processes" that we could assimilate through technology into our own minds?
It's pretty thought-provoking, I don't think you'll be disappointed by it.
Youtube video playback speed is configurable.
This is some pretty strong language.
We all use words to abstract concepts. It's not clear what "thinking" even means from a scientific standpoint. We can be pretty broad on the definition if this is a philosophical discussion.
> suddenly an automatic door is thinking
It is certainly performing an action in response to stimuli. And, given that more electronics are shifting to microcontrollers, a modern automatic door might as well have the machinery required to 'think', or at least, it will have a computer.
There's no evidence that our brain is any different from an automatic door – or more specifically, from an enormous collection of automatic doors.
"specifically" is key here. People want to differentiate between one tree and whole forest. Maybe you don't, but there is a reason why those two words exist. The same is with one door and enormous collection of doors acting as a whole big brain. The same is with intelligence of automatic doors and of humans. They live on continuum like light and dark, but we still have words for light and dark.
in various traditions
Cheers! Thank you.
> I still say that using the word "thinking" for non-macro-scale biomechanical processes is charlatanism.
Fair enough. (FWIW, Galileo turned the charlatans' toys into telescopes.)
> We don't know how we get from molecules to thoughts, but saying "therefore thoughts" is a bridge too far. If you start doing that, the words we reserve for discussing the leap from mechanism to self lose their meaning because suddenly an automatic door is thinking, which is just...not...necessary.
Meaning no disrespect, this sounds like a philosophical rather than a scientific objection to me. Which is fine, but I want to ask, necessary for what?
I actually don't know if I think cells are robots or tiny people.
It seems to me that slime molds think, and already must have some kind of "self", but do they count as a person? Or the lowly trichoplax[1], a kind of tribe of cells, is it a person?
Cybernetics has a result that says that any efficient self-regulating system must contain an image of itself to function.
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[1] > There are no neurons present, but in the absence of a nervous system the animal use short chains of amino acids known as peptides for cell communication, in a way that resembles how animals with neurons use neuropeptides for the same purpose. Individual cells contain and secrete a variety of small peptides, made up of between four and 20 amino acids, which are detected by neighbouring cells. Each peptide can be used individually to send a signal to other cells, but also sequentially or together in different combinations, creating a huge number a different types of signals. This allows for a relatively complex behavior such as crinkling, turning, flattening, and internal churning.