X-Message-Number: 12683 From: "Scott Badger" <> References: <> Subject: still more on feelings and goals Date: Sun, 31 Oct 1999 10:10:44 -0600 Thomas Donaldson concludes that there are exceptions (in the form of pathologies) but maintains that, by in large, all feelings are associated with goals even if those goals are unconcious. That's a difficult argument to counter. If you want to say that an amoeba moving away from a noxious stimulus or a robot with a simple program that allows it to seek an electrical outlet is experiencing an emotion, then we're just using different definitions. For another perspective on this issue I refer to a recent review of Rosalind Picard's Affective Computing (1997, MIT Press) at about.com. ****** "A computer," she says, "can be said to have emotion if it has the following five components that are present in healthy human emotional systems:" [my interpretation is in square brackets] 1. System has behavior that appears to arise from emotions. [i.e., we will say "It must be feeling happy/sad/etc. because it just did X," where X cannot be explained on the basis of simple rationality.] 2. System has fast "primary" emotional responses to certain inputs. [i.e., it will duck if it suddenly senses an object hurtling toward it, without first analyzing the object.] 3. System can cognitively generate emotions , , , , [i.e., it can assess a situation as happy/sad/etc., and then put itself in a state of feeling happy/sad/etc.] 4. System can have an emotional experience . . . [i.e., it must be able to detect the presence of emotion in a situation, give the emotion a name, and then feel the emotion itself.] 5. The system's emotions interact with other processes that imitate human cognitive and physical functions [i.e., its emotion processing circuits must be connected to and interact with its sensors and its memory banks, just as our emotions are linked to our memories and sensory perceptions.] Noting that children acquire and learn to control emotions over time and through social interaction, and the consequent likelihood that we will need to give machines the same innate tools to acquire and learn to control their own emotions, she appears to implicitly recognize that emotion will emerge given the right conditions; that we do not need to program in every smile and every teardrop. She acknowledges that if a designer were to let a computer evolve its own emotions, it is possible that non-human emotions could emerge, which we would be unable to recognize. In the same vein (but this is a different point) because of the different physiology of the machine from the human, it is unlikely that a machine could ever "feel" emotions the way we do. It does not have a gut, for instance, and is therefore unlikely to experience the feeling of being hit in the stomach on receipt of really bad news. Complete article at: http://ai.miningco.com/compute/software/ai/library/weekly/aa070598.htm?iam=m t ... Dr. Doug Lenat's Cyc project, aims to imbue an AI system (Cyc) with rational, knowledge-based, intellectual powers-but no emotion. In a chapter he contributed to Hal's Legacy, Dr. Lenat wrote: "[E]motions . . . are not useful for integrating information, making decisions . . . ." Excerpts from Hal's Legacy available at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/Hal/contents.html *********** Back to me... Picard argues that emotions are an essential element to intelligence and truly intelligent robots will require them as well. She brings up some interesting points about emotional computers. Not only can we expect them to better understand (be in touch with) their emotions, we can expect them to be in better control of them and this will enhance their decision-making systems relative to ours. In addition we can expect them to be better at identifying our emotional states, and that could make it relatively easy to manipulate us. She suggests that it may be impossible to program robots to have only positive emotions toward humans since emotions, like conciousness, may be emergent phenomena. In response to Kennita's question regarding relevance, I guess I would suggest that it is unlikely that we will be able to live indefinitely in our current biological form. Eventually, we're going to need a more durable system and it's important to know whether we're going to want or need to take our emotional systems along with us since they seem to be more tied to our bodies than our cognitive systems are. Also, if AI isn't developed by the time we deanimate, I think we can expect them to be around when we are reanimated. Aren't some of the opinion that successful reanimation is a problem that AI is likely to solve before humans do? Best regards, Scott Badger Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12683