> Well, of course they can be explained by me -- but the acronym for
> that sort of explanation is "BS"
I take your point with important caveats (that you allude to). Yes, nearly
all decisions are made as reflexes or pattern-matchings on what is
effectively compiled knowledge; however, it is the structuring of future
actions that make us the learning, intelligent entities that we are.
...
Explaining our actions is the reflective part of our minds evaluating the
reflexive part of our mind. The reflexive part of our minds, though,
operates analogously to a machine running on compiled code with the
compilation of code being largely *not* under the control of our conscious
mind (though some degree of this *can* be changed by our conscious minds).
The more we can correctly interpret and affect/program the reflexive part of
our mind with the reflective part, the more intelligent we are.
Mark, let me try to summarize in a nutshell the source of our disagreement.
You partition intelligence into
* explanatory, declarative reasoning
* reflexive pattern-matching (simplistic and statistical)
Whereas I think that most of what happens in cognition fits into
neither of these categories.
I think that most unconscious thinking is far more complex than
"reflexive pattern-matching" --- and in fact has more in common with
explanatory, deductive reasoning than with simple pattern-matching;
the difference being that it deals with large masses of (often highly
uncertain) knowledge rather than smaller amounts of "guessed to be
highly important" knowledge...
-- Ben G
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