ROGER: On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 05:55:03AM -0500, Roger Clough wrote: > Hi Russell Standish > > No, rational beings have to decide which truths they need to apply > to what and how to apply them. These are all relational acts, > which require choice, hence intelligence. >
RUSS: I will insist that this is incorrect. The very first line of the Wikipedia page states: In philosophy, rationality is the characteristic of any action, belief, or desire, that makes their choice a necessity.[1] ROGER: My mistake. Just omit "rational" from my statement. SNIP> to all that below: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reference [1] is the Cambridge dictionary of philosophy, which is presumably a more authorative source on the use of the word than Wikipedia, but I don't have a copy. The operative word here is _necessity_: namely the choice is not free, which is what you claimed earlier: "In my discussions of intelligence, I define intelligence as the ability to (fairly freely) make one's own choices." BTW - rational beings can encounter situations where they're unable to make the choice - for example because they have insufficient resources to compute the optimum of the utility, or because their utility is too ill-defined on the choices at hand. I have even seen occasions of quite intelligent people, more rational than most, though certainly not perfectly rational, being struck by a kind of paralysis when faced with a choice they cannot compute. Like when asked what restaurant they'd like to go to for dinner :). -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
