From owner-cse575-fa08-list@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU Sun Oct 19 10:34:11 2008 Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 10:34:02 -0400 From: "William J. Rapaport" Subject: 575: What Makes Humans Uniquely Smart? To: CSE575-FA08-LIST@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: What Makes Humans Uniquely Smart? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The following very short essay, here reprinted in its entirety from: Brockman, John (ed.), What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the age of Certainty (New York: HarperCollins): 167-168. ...is a very nice statement by a leading cognitive scientist on what computational cognitive science is all about. ======================================================================== What makes humans uniquely smart? Here's my best guess: We alone evolved a simple computational trick with far-reaching implications for every aspect of our life, from language and mathematics to art, music, and morality. The trick: the ability to take as input any set of discrete entities and recombine them into an infinite variety of meaningful expressions. Thus we take meaningless phonemes and combine them into words, words into phrases, and phrases into Shakespeare. We take meaningless strokes of paint and combine them into shapes, shapes into flowers, and flowers into Monet's water lilies. And we take meaningless actions and combine them into action sequences, sequences into events, and events into homicide and heroic rescues. I'll go one step further: I bet that when we discover (intelligent) life on other planets, we'll find that although the materials may be different for running the computation, they will create open-ended systems of expression by means of the same trick, thereby giving birth to the process of universal computation.