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Article 1309 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Animal Intelligence vs Human Intelligence
Message-ID: <1991Nov14.131622.6078@nntp.hut.fi>
Date: 14 Nov 91 13:16:22 GMT
References: <37311@shamash.cdc.com> <1991Oct24.234823.7560@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com> <37443@shamash.cdc.com> <1991Oct31.235402.12739@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com> <37658@shamash.cdc.com> <1991Nov02.075827.27740kmc@netcom.COM> <37713@shamash.cdc.com> <1991Nov05.08
4137.29880km
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In-Reply-To: kmc@netcom.COM (Kevin McCarty)
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In article <1991Nov05.084137.29880kmc@netcom.COM>, kmc@netcom (Kevin McCarty) writes:
>People usually tell the truth because that's
>what comes naturally.

Yes, I agree.

>To lie requires significant mental effort of
>imagination and calculation.

Well, not necessarily.  I think people very often lie (do not tell the
truth as it is) without making big calculations and without knowingly
creating images, using their imagination.

Take for example children, any animals, or any adults.  Most of them
do lie in a sense when they find themselves in a situation in which
they have experience that telling the truth has harmed or embarrased
them in one way or other.  Still, often it's unconscious - the person
doesn't imagine a situation and deduce by logical thought that it is
useful to lie, but rather lies `by instinct' (based on associations to
earlier experience, something called `learned behaviour'), isn't aware
of it and won't believe that he has lied until it shown to him by
logic (if even then).

We had a dog which didn't like being left alone at home.  Once we came
home and it first played glad to see us, then seemed to be in quite a
hurry to go out and do something very important.  We quickly found out
what had happened - it had eaten something from a table which wasn't
allowed to it.  I'd say it lied by going quickly out and pretending to
have something very important to do, and perhaps it would also be
reasonable to say that it `made a plan' and imagined the situation of
us coming home, though I don't think it's `conceptual' in the sense
that it thought about honesty, ethical values, epistemologies, logic
and such.

>And I don't have any reason to believe that all these sophisticated
>philosophical underpinnings are prerequisites to lying.

I agree.

>If animals can be stimulated to exhibit apparent lying behavior,
>if you will, by such simple mechanisms as perceptual pain avoidance,
>how on earth did similar behavior in humans get to be so complicated?

I don't think it is as complicated - we just like to make up some
`logical' and `resonable' (often formal) systems like ethics,
religions, sensibility, science, laws, economics etc. and then will
claim that these systems are what our thoughs are based on.  But it is
not so - our thoughts work basically pretty much the same as any other
animal's thoughts - the main difference at least as much as we know
about other animals is that we have imagined these complex systems and
perhaps more importantly that we are at least in some degree able to
communicate them to most of humans.

We are better at communicating concepts (like ethics, feelings, values
etc.) and by the way still very lousy at it on any kind of common
sense scale - we've thought up a system of `western science' which is
based on formalisms, logic and such which is not the same system our
minds work.  It's something and it is useful in communication, but I
wouldn't say that this is any kind of a qualitative difference when
comparing to other species.

//Jyrki


