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From: alasdt@aisb.ed.ac.uk (Paf Turner)
Subject: Re: [Q]: Cognition theory
Message-ID: <CvK9v9.LCH@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Sender: news@aisb.ed.ac.uk (Network News Administrator)
Reply-To: alasdt@aisb.ed.ac.uk (Paf Turner)
Organization: Dept of AI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
References:  <ABTJtOk8BV@kievzem.kiev.ua>
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 1994 16:01:56 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai.philosophy:20267 comp.ai:24065

In article <ABTJtOk8BV@kievzem.kiev.ua>, "Nick A. Sakharov" <nick@kievzem.kiev.ua> writes:
> [...]
> I'd appreciate any idea about following questions:
> 
> 1. How human intellect begins to process received information having no
> previous experience in this field or even any memory at all?
>     For example, a monkey (vs human) seeing a new kind of tree never tries
> to classify it. Why?
> [...]

I know very little about monkeys.  However, my scant knowledge of
monkeys suggests that they live in trees.  Maybe I'm wrong.  

Therefore it would seem very strange to me if monkeys *didn't*
classify trees.  e.g. if a new tree is nice to live in, too difficult
to climb, etc. then put it in some class of nice to live in or
difficult to climb trees respectively.

From a monkey's point of view: why not store the fact that you can't
climb a tree that has, say, orange leaves and blue fruit.  Perhaps
this is too anthropomorphic, perhaps monkeys don't have nuggets of
info stored like this (see related thread of Implicit vs Explicit),
perhaps all manner of things...  I still don't believe you.

(I'm sure my cat only eats certain plants and not others [stupid cat,
I know...]; has anybody tried giving a similarly stupid cat a new type
of plant to eat and observed it's behaviour?)

Cheers,

Paf


