Thursday, January 18, 2007

A cat may look at a printer

So here is the dilemma. Is the cat showing some genuinely creative intelligence here - interest in printers, or maps perhaps?

Or is this the application of an evolutionarily-ancient module - Kitty believes the printer is a bush or something, and the emerging paper is some kind of small prey animal?

Nature or nurture? ... The dilemma of modern evolutionary psychology ...

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Roy Simpson writes: "The cat may just be applying the principle that as the paper is a moving object, there must be some unseen force involved. A hidden mouse perhaps?"

Nigel Seel replies: "It could be applying a hidden variable theory ... or maybe it's just accepted an intrinsic indeterminacy in the printer's actions. Given it's all down to Windows XP, we will never know..."