unbent@ecsvax.UUCP (11/02/83)
Just two quick remarks from a philosopher: 1. It ain't just what you do; it's how you do it. Chameleons *adapt* to changing environments very quickly--in a way that furthers their goal of eating lots of flies. But what they're doing isn't manifesting *intelligence*. 2. There's adapting and adapting. I would have thought that one of the best evidences of *our* intelligence is not our ability to adapt to new environments, but rather our ability to adapt new environments to *us*. We don't change when our environment changes. We build little portable environments which suit *us* (houses, spaceships), and take them along.
ruffwork@ihuxn.UUCP (Ruffwork) (11/04/83)
I would tend to agree that it's not how a being adapts to its environment, but how it changes the local environment to better suit itself. Also, I would say have to say that adapting the environment would only aid in ranking the intelligence of a being if that action was a voluntary decision. There are many instances of creatures that alter their surroundings (water spiders come to mind), but could the decide not to ??? I doubt it. ...!iham1!ruffwork
mat@hou5d.UUCP (11/05/83)
Man is the toolmaker and the principle tooluser of all the living things that we know of. What does this mean? Consider driving a car or skating. When I do this, I have managed to icorporate an external system into my own control system with its myriad of pathways bot forward and backward. This takes place at a level below that which usually is considered to constitute intelligent thought. On the other hand, we can adopt external things into our thought-model of the world in a way which no other creature seems to be capable of. Is there any causal relationship here? Mark Terribile DOdN
dinitz@uicsl.UUCP (11/09/83)
#R:ihuxn:-40000:uicsl:15500015:000:109 uicsl!dinitz Nov 8 09:20:00 1983 Actually, SHRDLU had neither hand nor eye -- only simulations of them. That's a far cry from the real thing.
jsol@bbncca.ARPA (Jon Solomon) (12/02/83)
I don't think we can safely say that adaptability is unique to the human
race. Certainly animals would not have survived on evolution alone.
Let's take an example. I step on an anthill. What do the ants do? They build
it right back up. What if I build a house on their hill? What will they do?
Why, they will attempt to find *SOME* way out of their bind. I call that
adaptability.
Another example. Cockroaches exist in almost every part of the country,
under almost every sort of environment. I recently moved from the New York
area, to the Los Angeles area, and then to the Boston/Cambridge area. I took
some New York roaches to LA and some LA roaches to Boston. At no point did
they have any trouble adapting to the world around them.
I postulate therefore that adaptability is part of the low level "animal
instinct" part of the being.
That doesn't mean that adaptability skills don't play a role in intelligent
thought. They most certainly do. We humans just have more adapting to do
than most of the lower animals do.
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