Hi again, A few additional random comments . . . . :-)
>> Intelligence is meaningless without discomfort. I would rephrase this as (or subsume this under) "intelligence is meaningless without goals" -- because discomfort is simply something that sets up a goal of "avoid me". But then, there is the question of how giving a goal of "avoid x" is truly *different* from discomfort (other than the fact that discomfort is normally envisioned as always "spreading out" to have a global effect -- even when not appropriate -- while goals are generally envisioned to have only logical effects -- which is, of course, a very dangerous assumption). ----- Original Message ----- From: Jiri Jelinek To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 6:21 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Pure reason is a disease. Mark, >I understand your point but have an emotional/ethical problem with it. I'll have to ponder that for a while. Try to view our AI as an extension of our intelligence rather than purely-its-own-kind. >> For humans - yes, for our artificial problem solvers - emotion is a disease. >What if the emotion is solely there to enforce our goals? >Or maybe better ==> Not violate our constraints = comfortable, violate our constraints = feel discomfort/sick/pain. Intelligence is meaningless without discomfort. Unless your PC gets some sort of "feel card", it cannot really prefer, cannot set goal(s), and cannot have "hard feelings" about working extremely hard for you. You can a) spend time figuring out how to build the card, build it, plug it in, and (with potential risks) tune it to make it friendly enough so it will actually come up with goals that are compatible enough with your goals *OR* b) you can "simply" tell your "feeling-free" AI what problems you want it to work on. Your choice.. I hope we are eventually not gonna end up asking the "b)" solutions how to clean up a great mess caused by the "a)" solutions. Best, Jiri Jelinek On 5/1/07, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> 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. Hmmm. I understand your point but have an emotional/ethical problem with it. I'll have to ponder that for a while. > For humans - yes, for our artificial problem solvers - emotion is a disease. What if the emotion is solely there to enforce our goals? Fulfill our goals = be happy, fail at our goals = be *very* sad. Or maybe better ==> Not violate our constraints = comfortable, violate our constraints = feel discomfort/sick/pain. ----- Original Message ----- From: Jiri Jelinek To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 2:29 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Pure reason is a disease. >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 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/?& ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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/?& -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/?& ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/?& ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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/?& ----- 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=fabd7936