From: HARNAD Stevan (harnad@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Mar 20 2001 - 22:53:46 GMT
On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Walker Michael wrote:
> Michael:
> An interviewer asks "What makes a good Alien?"
> Answer: "One, they have to have intelligent but impenetrable
> responses to situations. You have to be able to abserve the
> aliens behaviour and say 'I don't understand the rules by
> which the alien is making its decisions, but the alien is
> acting rationally by some set of rules.'...The second
> requirement is that they have to care about something. They
> have to want something and pursue it in the face of obstacles."
>
> So humans have this amazing ability to sense rule governed
> 'rational' behaviour (in writing), without even having to really understand
> what is being said, whatever that means.
> (...We can detect higher level argument structures which are
> characteristic of intelligence... ?)
Well, first, there is not much evidence about how much of this
"amazing ability" we have, but we do have some: We are good at a kind
of intuitive mind-reading: It's not really telepathy, but a
combination of learned and inborn inferences. This helps us in
Turing-Testing too...
Stevan Harnad
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