Without getting into both the philosophy and science of defining “thinking”, I believe most people would agree that it is associated with a minimum ability to take a variety of inputs and produce an output that has higher order than the individual inputs. My question is “What is it called when an organism always produces the same output no matter what the inputs?”
Evolution has seen that there is no such organism surviving in nature. But human institutions with that characteristic abound. They are very inappropriately called “think tanks.” You can identify them by the descriptor, which follows their name-- The Heritage Foundation “a conservative think tank”, The Brookings Institution, “a liberal think tank”, The Cato Institute, “a libertarian think tank” and so on...
It appears that someone incorrectly installed their analytical engine. They do not carefully process all available inputs to produce a logical output. They start with the always-predictable output and simply ignore the existence of any input that might support a different conclusion.
Unfortunately, shouting matches between representatives of institutions of this type have become the TV standard for so-called “balanced discussion”. When was the last time you witnessed objective reasoning by a thoughtful analyst? You remember the type-people who actually consider all of the facts before reaching their conclusions.
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