Trivial answer, Richard - though my fault for not explaining myself.
Our attractions to others - why we choose them as friends or lovers - are
actually v. complex. They have to pass a whole set of tests, fit a whole set
of criteria to attract us significantly. It's loosely as complex relatively
as two big companies merging.
What is remarkable about falling in love (quickly) is this: you have next to
no idea why it happens, why your system has adjudged this person to be so
apt for you so quickly, but as you continue with that person, over days and
weeks, you will find that that initial, near snap judgment was remarkably
accurate - that this person actually does fit a whole set of your conscious
requirements. This is a great delight. Of course, they also often fit a
whole set of negative requirements too. They often have things you
particularly dislike, or that particularly get you. Often, it turns out,
that this person structurally, though not necessarily superficially is
rather like your parent in many ways. But again, that is in its way a
tribute to the unconscious judgment of your system.
Now what's remarkable from the AGI POV is how on earth did your system pick
so accurately so quickly?Well, it sure as hell didn't do it by any logical
process - "she's got right attitudes to politics/ sex/ money/ art/
etc.etc." - there wasn't time.
Your system knew by largely physical, imagistic analysis - from their face,
the thinness or thickness of their lips, the tautness or loosenss of their
jaw, their nose, their gaze, their smile - with its openness/closedness,
their posture, their talk, their tone, the music of their voice, (a symphony
of sorts) their body language, the firmness or weakness with which they
plant themselves, their touch, their warmth... If I give you such images
(in various sensory modalities) you can actually tell more or less instantly
that you like that face, that walk, that voice, that way of moving etc -
that person. But there is no available science or literature in any symbolic
form, (certainly not math/geometrical!) that can tell you to any serious or
systematic extent why. You'll be hard put to express why yourself.
Hence "the heart has its reasons" - for which "reason", i.e our present
formal, rational culture, can provide little or no explanation. But that's
not the heart of course really - that's largely the imaginative part of the
brain, the half of the brain that you guys are ignoring..
That's why human beings spend such a large amount of time looking at
photographs of people in magazines - and a simply vast amount of time
(roughly one waking day in seven) looking at dramatic movies - and such a
very little amount of time reading books of psychology, or science, or
maths, or books of logic. Strange - .given that Vlad has told us
authoritatively that there is v. little info in all those pics/movies, and
presumably all the visual arts. Strange too that the brain should spend most
of the night then creating its own movies and insists on seeing events when
according to you guys, it could just much more quickly and less effortfully
look at their symbolic forms.
You're right, this is fun.
Richard Loosemore: Mike Tintner wrote:
[snip]
How do you think a person can fall in love with another person in just a
few minutes of talking to them (or not even talking at all)? How does
their brain get them to do that - without the person having any conscious
understanding of why they're falling? By analysis of a few words that the
other person says (& what if they don't say anything at all)? Well, if
you don't know how that process works, then maybe there's a lot else here
you don't know - and it might be better to keep an open mind.
Oh, that's a fun question.
If you look at the literature (e.g. Aron, Fisher, Mashek, Strong, Li, and
Brown (2005), and the analysis that Harley and I did of their conclusions,
Loosemore & Harley (in press)) you will see that one likely possibility is
that when a person falls in love it is because there is a specialized
"slot" just waiting for the representation of the right other person to
fall into that slot, and when that happens all hell breaks loose. It
really doesn't need long for this to happen: that little slot is like a
spring-loaded trap.
Conscious of it? Heck no. The Fool could probably send the rest of their
cortex on an all-expenses-paid vacation to the moons of Jupiter - leaving
only the right ventral tegmental area and the right postero-dorsal body +
medial caudate nucleus in charge of business - and the whole
falling-in-love operation would come off without missing a beat.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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