Lester Zick
Guest
|
 Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2003 8:48 pm Post subject: Re: What are the fundamental emotions? |
 |
|
On Fri, 5 Sep 2003 07:23:51 +0100, David Longley
<David@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
[quote]In article <fa69ae35.0309041500.74bb2855@posting.google.com>, Eray
Ozkural exa <erayo@bilkent.edu.tr> writes
Patty Cutman <pattycutman@excite.net> wrote in message news:<G0L
5b.355343$uu5.69966@sccrnsc04>...
Now can it be said that such an *evolved* bot would actually feel the
emotional state in which it finds itself? I don>t know .. it>s a bit
philosophical for me to consider. Do we care?
Per strong AI, I do care because they seem to be necessary. I don>t
think we could say an AI is conscious if it couldn>t experience
emotions!
I>m not really thinking of those bodily sensations... There seem to be
quite a lot of emotions that do not seem to be based on those
physiological aspects, ie they seem to be purely mental. Can you guys
make a list of human emotions? It>s a long and interesting list.
But of course, I would more or less agree that the fundamental
emotions must be related to requirements of the organism, now that I
called some "motions" in prokaryotes "primordial emotions". That seems
a little silly now: how could a single-celled organism have emotions?
But it>s so hard to draw a line: maybe it>s not possible to draw one!
The reason there was saying that primordial emotions consisted of a
few reflex motions, there isn>t really a mind like the kind we enjoy
talking about.
As you can see, I>m pretty skeptical of any assumed position on the
nature of emotions and it was my intent to provoke some thought about
this issue. I expect the outcome to be more or less "thought=emotion",
maybe we will have to say "we can>t really talk about fundamental
emotions but we>ll have to consider something like the ortogonal basis
of cognition". Then, we>d be in trouble ;)
Cheers,
__
Eray Ozkural
With this language, you risk appearing to be one of those "crackpots",
or at least, one of those who take a metaphysically realist position
with respect to "AI"s being potentially "conscious" and experiencing
"emotion".
[/quote]
Without trying to be unnecessarily contentious or combative over the
issue, I don>t consider one needs to be a crackpot to be dissatisfied
with academic approaches to these kinds of problems in general.
What occurs to me in this connection is that the brief summaries you
include below illustrate a problem endemic to academic analyses. First
the problem is defined in very specific ways. Second, the problem is
analyzed only in those terms because that>s the way the problem is
defined. Third the analysis fails to yield significant conceptual
insights. That is it yields reams of data regarding the analysis in
whatever terms the problem is defined. But it fails to explain or
answer the problem itself.
And finally having failed to shed any conclusive light on the problem,
the authors conclude that there is no problem or that the problem to
be analyzed just doesn>t exist and is imaginary. Then they just assign
interpretation of whatever was to be addressed to the nether regions
of inexact folk psychology. Then they set out to prove this contention
by showing that different folk psychologies exist without any common
interpretation of the problem. Ergo the problem is vacuuous.
Recently I had discussions with someone who contended that the faculty
of consciousness was useless for conscious organisms and was of no
help in aiding genetic viability - a not uncommon appraisal as I
understand it.
However what I strongly suspect is that far from being of little or no
help, what motivates such an absurd conclusion is nothing more than a
massive attack of intellectual sour grapes. In other words being
absolutely convinced of the value of the faculty of consciousness in
aiding genetic viability, numerous philosophers, neuroscientists, and
psychologists set out to analyze that faculty to determine how and why
it operates. And they failed. So they just concluded it wasn>t there
or if it were there it was of no value.
I want you to understand my perspective on this and similar kinds of
problems in the realm of cognition because I>m sick and tired of
hearing the hue and cry raised of "Crackpot!" - with its implied
threat of intellectual excommunication - every time someone attempts
to deconstruct and rethink conventional academic approaches to the
analysis of cognition.
The fact is that we wouldn>t be here talking about it this way if the
philosophers, neuroscientists, and psychologists had gotten it right
in the first place. They possess enormous erudition and yet have
produced no significant analytical insight into the nature of the
faculty of consciousness much less cognition in general terms. So
they>ve decided these things aren>t there or if they are there they>re
nugatory in value.
[quote]
Here, again, are some views which might make provoke yet more thoughts:
'In his recent critique of realism, Putnam extends the
insight behind his Twin Earth examples. In "The Meaning
of 'Meaning'" he showed that nothing in the mind
determines meaning; his later work demonstrates that
nothing outside it does either. It follows from the
Lowenheim-Skolem Theorem that the axioms of a first-
order theory have multiple models in a given domain....
...Translation is not determinate.
It follows that the introduction of a 'language of
thought' or a 'deep structure', far from alleviating the
problem of radical translation, simply provides another
instance of it. For the prelinguistic child>s task is
then the same as the field linguist>s. Each seeks to map
initially alien utterances onto a language he already
has - the linguist, onto his home language; the child,
onto his innate language of thought. And as we have
seen, the same evidence is available to both. So the
child, endowed with a language of thought, is no better
off than the linguist. A spoken language admits of
multiple models in such a psychological structure, each
with an equal claim to be the determinant of meaning.
Moreover, none can be singled out as causally
responsible for the generation of surface locutions,
since 'cause>is not univocal. The term 'gavagai' no more
has a unique mental counterpart that it has a unique
English one. Translation, whether into the language of
thought or by means of the language of thought from one
spoken language to another, remains indeterminate.
Linguistic competence is not the ability to articulate
antecedently determinate ideas, intensions, or meanings;
nor is it the ability to reproduce the world in words.
We have no such abilities. It consists, rather, in
mastery of a complex social practice, and acquired
capacity to conform to the mores of a linguistic
community. It is neither more nor less than good
linguistic behavior.
Catherine Z. Elgin (1990)
FACTS THAT DON>T MATTER
Meaning and method - Essays in Honor of Hilary Putnam
'As soon as you get to interesting concepts, things go
poorly. You may find that hoping or expressions of anger
or joy don>t have a place in that culture, thanks to the
lack of the same array of practices that we have in
ours. Likewise for THEIR important concepts. Moreover,
having grasped "hope", the other people needn>t by
analogy grasp our "joy" or "anger", for each is embedded
in its own web. This may even be true for speech acts,
like promising or even stating, that are sometimes held
out as neutral between cultures.
What Hacking reports about joy, anger, and hope is also
apparently true of belief and its conceptual cousins.
Needham gives a painstaking analysis of various more or
less belief-like mental states recognised by a variety
of societies and concludes that in many cases there just
is nothing that matches up with our own notion of
belief. The practices of stating, reporting, avowing,
defending, and so on, which form the backdrop for our
own notion of belief, are unrecognizable in those
societies. Thus to the extent that these practices
constitute a necessary prerequisite for belief, persons
in these societies simply do not have any beliefs.
All of this poses some obvious difficulties for the
cognitive scientist who tries to press the folk notion
of belief into service in his theory.'
S. Stich (1983)
Will the Concepts of Folk Psychology Find a Place in Cognitive
Science? From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science:
The Case Against Belief p 217-8
'This argument was part of a larger project. Influenced
by Quine, I have long been suspicious about the
integrity and scientific utility of the commonsense
notions of meaning and intentional content. This is not,
of course, to deny that the intentional idioms of
ordinary discourse have their uses, nor that the uses
are important. But, like Quine, I view ordinary
intentional locutions as projective, context sensitive,
observer relative, and essentially dramatic. They are
not the sorts of locutions we should welcome in serious
scientific discourse. For those who share this Quinean
skepticism, the sudden flourishing of cognitive
psychology in the 1970s posed something of a problem. On
the account offered by Fodor and other observers, the
cognitive psychology of that period was exploiting both
the ontology and the explanatory strategy of commonsense
psychology. It proposed to explain cognition and certain
aspects of behavior by positing beliefs, desires, and
other psychological states with intentional content, and
by couching generalisations about the interactions among
those states in terms of their intentional content. If
this was right, then those of us who would banish talk
of content in scientific settings would be throwing out
the cognitive psychological baby with the intentional
bath water. On my view, however, this account of
cognitive psychology was seriously mistaken. The
cognitive psychology of the 1970s and early 1980s was
not positing contentful intentional states, nor was it
adverting to content in its generalisations. Rather, I
maintained, the cognitive psychology of the day was
"really a kind of logical syntax (only psychologized).
Moreover, it seemed to me that there were good reasons
why cognitive psychology not only did not but SHOULD not
traffic in intentional states. One of these reasons was
provided by the Autonomy argument.
Stephen P. Stich (1991)
Narrow Content meets Fat Syntax
in MEANING IN MIND - Fodor And His Critics
'The thesis we have been defending in this essay is that
connectionist models of a certain sort are incompatible
with the propositional modularity embedded in
commonsense psychology. The connectionist models in
question are those that are offered as models at the
COGNITIVE level, and in which the encoding of
information is widely distributed and subsymbolic. In
such models, we have argued, there are no DISCRETE,
SEMANTICALLY INTERPRETABLE states that play a CAUSAL
ROLE in some cognitive episodes but not others. Thus
there is, in these models, nothing with which the
propositional attitudes of commonsense psychology can
plausibly be identified. If these models turn out to
offer the best accounts of human belief and memory, we
shall be confronting an ONTOLOGICALLY RADICAL theory
change - the sort of theory change that will sustain the
conclusion that propositional attitudes, like caloric
and phlogiston, do not exist.'
Ramsey, Stich and Garon (1991)
Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk psychology
--
David Longley
[/quote]
Regards - Lester |
|
