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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>
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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.