Xref: utzoo comp.ai:2811 comp.lang.prolog:1463 comp.sys.mac:23719 comp.sys.mac.programmer:3442 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sm.unisys.com!aero!venera.isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.lang.prolog,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: Feeling and thought: which comes first? Keywords: emotions, intelligence, definitions. Message-ID: <6979@venera.isi.edu> Date: 6 Dec 88 14:47:29 GMT References: <17770@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5626@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU> Sender: news@venera.isi.edu Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar) Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 31 In article <5626@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU> pluto@beowulf.UCSD.EDU (Mark E. P. Plutowski) writes: >One net-poster remarked that emotions and feeling are a natural >by-product of thought. > >I imagine that thought is a natural by-product of feeling and emotion. > > >*************What is the consensus of the rest of you?************ > I think a quotation from Marvin Minsky might be appropriate here: In this modern era of "information processing psychology" it may seem quaint to talk of mental states; it is more fashionable to speak of representations, frames, scripts, or semantic networks. But while I find it lucid enough to speak in such terms about memories of things, sentences, or even faces, it is much harder so to deal with feelings, insights, and understandings--and all the attitudes, dispositions, and ways of seeing things that go with them. . . . We usually put such issues aside, saying that one must first understand simpler things. But what if feelings and viewpoints are the simpler things? If such dispositions are the elements of which the others are composed, then we must deal with them directly. So we shall view memories as entities that predispose the mind to deal with new situations in old, remembered ways--specifically, as entities that reset the states of parts of the nervous system. Then they can cause that nervous system to be "disposed" to behave as though it remembers. This is why I put "dispositions" ahead of "propositions." Source: Minsky, M. K-Lines: A Theory of Memory. Cognitive Science 4:117-133, 1980.