On Wednesday 23 May 2007 06:34:29 pm Mike Tintner wrote: > My underlying argument, though, is that your (or any) computational model > of emotions, if it does not also include a body, will be fundamentally > flawed both physically AND computationally.
Does everyone here know what an ICE is in the EE sense? (In-Circuit Emulator -- it's a gadget that plugs into a circuit and simulates a given chip, but has all sorts of debugging readouts on the back end that allow the engineer to figure out why it's screwing up.) Now pretend that there is a body and a brain and we have removed the brain and plugged in a BrainICE instead. There's this fat cable running from the body to the ICE (just as there is in electronic debugging) that carries all the signals that the brain would be getting from the body. Most of the cable's bandwidth is external sensation (and indeed most of that is vision). Motor control is most of the outgoing bandwidth. There is some extra portion of the bandwidth that can be counted as internal affective signals. (These are very real -- the body takes part in quite a few feedback loops with such mechanisms as hormone release and its attendant physiological effects.) Let us call these internal feedback loop closure mechanisms "the affect effect." Now here is ***************** Hall's Conjecture: The computational resources necessary to simulate the affect effect are less than 1% of that necessary to implement the computational mechanism of the brain. ***************** I think that people have this notion that because emotions are so unignorable and compelling subjectively, that they must be complex. In fact the body's contribution, in an information theoretic sense, is tiny -- I'm sure I way overestimate it with the 1%. Josh ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
