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From: hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey)
Subject: Re: I lie therefore I am?
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Date: Sat, 8 Oct 1994 18:03:54 GMT
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alexmi@cogs.susx.ac.uk (Alexander Miller) writes:

>H. M. Hubey <hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu> wrote
>>Even such lowly life forms as birds are capable of lying --some might say
>>instinct as usual to avoid having to impute intelligence to anything other
>>than humans -- since they are capable of putting on ~broken wing" tricks
>>to lead predators away from their young.  And they can even count--up to
>>3 or 4 or so.

>A bird pretending to have a broken wing is not a case of an intelligent agent lying. Birds are genetically predisposed to such behaviour. 


Are we predisposed to being intelligent and animals predisposed to
having instincts?

The dividing line between intelligence (as in humans) and instinct (whatever
it means) in animals and artificial intelligence (in machines, if such
a thing can exist) is foggy and seems to be based on predetermined
definitions. 


>I think the important difference between chimps, birds and insects (in this respect) is that the chimps set out to lie to members of their own species, whereas the birds are deceiving birds-eaters, the insects are deceiving insect-eaters, etc.. My hunch is that this makes it likely that chimp-lying is not a genetic behaviour trait, but the result of goal directed planning. 

It's merely a difference in "degree" of a thing and not a difference
in "kind". "Difference in kind" is an illusion or at best something
that we produce when we take fuzzy boundaries and degrees of differences
and produce classes, sets and crisp boundaries.




--
						-- Mark---
....we must realize that the infinite in the sense of an infinite totality, 
where we still find it used in deductive methods, is an illusion. Hilbert,1925
