Panel Summary: Think About This: is Thinking Necessary to do Actions?

When Virginio Cantoni, Vito Di Gesù, and one of the authors (JDB), in a very creative meeting in Palermo, decided about the title of this panel discussion, the original formulation simply was: Is thinking necessary?Jean Beaudrillard has argued that in the future thinking will be a useless luxury. Josef Lechner has stated that there is a complementarity between thinking and happiness. Niko Tinbergen has conjectured that intelligence in man has developed for the ability to predict the actions of other people to a higher degree (so here we already have a connection between thinking and action), and that thinking about general relativity or artificial intelligence is an abuse of the brain. All these statements are not very encouraging.