>> 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
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
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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