Our attractions to others - why we choose them as friends or lovers - are
actually v. complex.
The example of "Love at first sight" proves that your statement is not
universally true.
You seem to have an awful lot of unfounded beliefs that you persist in
believing as facts.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Tintner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 3:21 PM
Subject: **SPAM** Re: [agi] Why do fools fall in love? [WAS Re: Common Sense
Consciousness ]
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.
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agi
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