emotions.. to a) provide goals.. b) provide pre-programmed constraints, and
c) enforce urgency.
Our AI = our tool = should work for us = will get high level goals (+
urgency info and constraints) from us. Allowing other sources of high level
goals = potentially asking for conflicts. For sub-goals, AI can go with
reasoning.
Pure reason is a disease
For humans - yes, for our artificial problem solvers - emotion is a disease.
Jiri Jelinek
On 5/1/07, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> My point, in that essay, is that the nature of human emotions is
rooted in the human brain architecture,
I'll agree that human emotions are rooted in human brain architecture
but there is also the question -- is there something analogous to emotion
which is generally necessary for *effective* intelligence? My answer is a
qualified but definite yes since emotion clearly serves a number of purposes
that apparently aren't otherwise served (in our brains) by our pure logical
reasoning mechanisms (although, potentially, there may be something else
that serves those purposes equally well). In particular, emotions seem
necessary (in humans) to a) provide goals, b) provide pre-programmed
constraints (for when logical reasoning doesn't have enough information),
and c) enforce urgency.
Without looking at these things that emotions provide, I'm not sure
that you can create an *effective* general intelligence (since these roles
need to be filled by *something*).
>> Because of the difference mentioned in the prior paragraph, the rigid
distinction between emotion and reason that exists in the human brain will
not exist in a well-design AI.
Which is exactly why I was arguing that emotions and reason (or
feeling and thinking) were a spectrum rather than a dichotomy.
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Benjamin Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*To:* [email protected]
*Sent:* Tuesday, May 01, 2007 1:05 PM
*Subject:* Re: [agi] Pure reason is a disease.
On 5/1/07, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >> Well, this tells you something interesting about the human cognitive
> architecture, but not too much about intelligence in general...
>
> How do you know that it doesn't tell you much about intelligence in
> general? That was an incredibly dismissive statement. Can you justify it?
>
Well I tried to in the essay that I pointed to in my response.
My point, in that essay, is that the nature of human emotions is rooted in
the human brain architecture, according to which our systemic physiological
responses to cognitive phenomena ("emotions") are rooted in primitive parts
of the brain that we don't have much conscious introspection into. So, we
actually can't reason about the intermediate conclusions that go into our
emotional reactions very easily, because the "conscious, reasoning" parts of
our brains don't have the ability to look into the intermediate results
stored and manipulated within the more primitive "emotionally reacting"
parts of the brain. So our deliberative consciousness has choice of either
-- accepting not-very-thoroughly-analyzable outputs from the emotional
parts of the brain
or
-- rejecting them
and doesn't have the choice to focus deliberative attention on the
intermediate steps used by the emotional brain to arrive at its conclusions.
Of course, through years of practice one can learn to bring more and more
of the emotional brain's operations into the scope of conscious
deliberation, but one can never do this completely due to the structure of
the human brain.
On the other hand, an AI need not have the same restrictions. An AI
should be able to introspect into the intermediary conclusions and
manipulations used to arrive at its "feeling responses". Yes there are
restrictions on the amount of introspection possible, imposed by
computational resource limitations; but this is different than the blatant
and severe architectural restrictions imposed by the design of the human
brain.
Because of the difference mentioned in the prior paragraph, the rigid
distinction between emotion and reason that exists in the human brain will
not exist in a well-design AI.
Sorry for not giving references regarding my analysis of the human
cognitive/neural system -- I have read them but don't have the reference
list at hand. Some (but not a thorough list) are given in the article I
referenced before.
-- Ben G
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