On 2011-05-26 14:58, Andy Farnell wrote:
Alan Watts, and to some extent Pierre Grimes analysing Plato, gave me some good thoughts on this.
If we weren't neural networks, prone to classification, the question might be, are there different kinds of intelligence? Or is what we do, (throwing boundaries around things and concepts), intelligence by definition only?
I'm not at all sure what `intelligence' is, but I don't think that matters too much. The really tricky terms (at least for me) are things like "logical consistency", and of course the ubiquitous "truth" and "reference" (I suppose intelligence plays into it if you think that only intelligent beings can appreciate such things). Since we're trading snappy quotes, here's one:
"... there is the question which is hardest of all and most perplexing, whether unity and being, as the Pythagoreans and Plato said, are not attributes of something else but the substance of existing things, or this is not the case, but the substratum is something else"
- Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book III
marmosets, Bryan