"No, I haven't," Harold replied.
"Well, in a small town in Germany there were three men so fat that they could barely walk. They spent nearly all their time sleeping. The only trouble was that every day or so someone would disturb them by singing or walking by, or some other trivial thing that is always happening in a small town, no matter how dead it is.
"One time when they were disturbed three days running they got mad and decided to go to the hills. They looked in the hills until they found a nice dry cave. There they relaxed with deep sighs of contentment and went to sleep. Day after day, week after week, they slept undisturbed.
"Then one day a dog wandered into the cave, saw the three breathing mountains of flesh and heard the din of their deep snoring; and, scared half to death, let out a shrill yip and skedaddled.
"A week later one of the three sleepers stirred, opened his eyes briefly, and muttered, 'What was that noise?' Then he promptly went back to sleep.
"Ten days later the second sleeper stirred, muttered, 'Damfino,' and went back to sleep.
"Nearly a month later the third sleeper opened his eyes suddenly, stared at the roof of the cave for a moment, and said, 'I think it was a dog.' Then he went back to sleep. The way the story goes nothing ever came near the cave again, so they are still there, fast asleep—still fat, too, I suppose."
"I see what you're driving at," Harold said, chuckling over the story. "We assume that any intelligent being whatever, if it exists, thinks at the same RATE we do; but it might not."
"That's right," Gordon admitted. "And there are even more subtle assumptions we make unconsciously. For one, we assume that a thinking creature must think in the same way we do. We might not even be able to recognize thinking when we meet it, on another planet. No—" he held up his hand to silence the question on Harold's lips, "—I don't know exactly what I mean. I'll put it this way. We have steam engines and gasoline engines. We also have electric motors. Suppose we have steam-engine thought. How would we recognize electric-motor thinking?