> I guess we call emotions 'feelings' because we feel them - ie. we can > feel the effect they trigger in our whole body, detected via our internal > monitoring of physical body condition. > > Given this, unless AGIs are also programmed for thoughts or goal > satisfactions to trigger 'physical' and/or other forms of systemic > reaction, I suppose their emotions will have a lot less 'feeling' depth to > them than humans and other biological species experience. >
That's not the entirety of the difference between emotions and other types of thoughts. A reasoning entity can detect that their thoughts are under the influence of an emotion. For example, consider being in a road rage situation, which I'm sure we can all relate to. You know full well that your reaction of anger towards someone who's unwittingly committed a minor offense to you is wildly irrational and yet you can't help but feel a flash of extreme animosity towards someone else (or maybe your steering wheel :)). The fact that you know it's an emotional reaction doesn't prevent you from feeling its effects on your thoughts, it just lets you handle it without acting on it. So any entity capable of remembering their thought processes would be able to detect the influence of an emotion (at least the human variety) on the current flow of their thoughts even without body-state markers. -Brad ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
