Of Emotions and Machines Part 1

Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes emotion  as – the affective aspect of consciousness : FEELING b : a state of feeling c : a conscious mental reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.

A concept we use daily regarding ourselves and the people surrounding us.

This concept has been a cause of discussion amongst many great minds.

Books and lengthy articles have been written about the subject explaining the difference between the opinions, periods and the effect of the modern age with the ability of brain scanning to see inside our heads. Therefore I have no interest in going into the concepts themselves, rather bring my own ideas of how I see emotion.

 In order to understand emotion one must understand reasoning or as M-W Dictionary describes it – the drawing of inferences or conclusions through the use of reason.Basically, it is our ability to take a series of events and break them up into smaller ideas in order them to be used later in a multitude of ways.

So essentially we are information processing machines, we take in information process it in a variety of ways and output it – a computer.

What than is emotion and how it can possibly relate to reason, since there is this common opinion that when one is emotional they are not reasonable and vise versa. 

Let’s take a moment and ask ourselves, what do we consider to be emotions?

What probably comes to mind varies from Fear to Love to Suspicion, occurrences we cannot really explain, for lack of words besides that global definition – emotion. Though that’s what they all have in common, what we are not doing is giving a more detailed explanation of these occurrences what happens when they happen. Lets pause for a moment here. I think that in order for us to understand the series of events we call emotion we must put them in context, in ourselves, and not ask what happens but rather WHY they happen. As a matter of fact, forget about emotions as a concept. Think of any event any simple event that you do and ask yourself why. Why do you get up from bed in the morning? Why don’t you just lie there staring at the ceiling?

Is it because you have an obligation to your family? Is it because you want to save up to go on a trip?

Why anything else? What causes you to do anything at all?

  

It is something internal that you can not explain something that drives you to do the things that you do. It is your existence, your innate need to exist. Though don’t accidentally confuse the need to exist with selfishness – the act of lack of consideration for others existence while bettering my own.

  

Think about it for a moment.

   

Once working on this premise lets look at a list of common emotions.

Love – We experience this emotion towards our mothers, dogs, inanimate objects and when we lose a thing we love we feel something has perished though if someone else’s exact object would have been obliterated we could care less.

Why? What causes us to care about our things? Or rather what about them makes them evoke the emotion?

They better our lives, cause us joy. So actually it is the way they affect our existence.

  

Anger- When we are used to a certain occurrence taking place and it doesn’t, we are angry at that which caused the change. When your computers don’t perform as supposed to, when your 10-year-old breaks your antique vase which you loved because it belonged to your grandmother and when you see it you are reminded of her and now she is lost.

Fear – the lack of knowledge of what is to come though the situation being similar to that experienced on a previous occasion, and on that previous occasion there was an event which hurt or tried to hurt your existence. 

Hatred – When an object worsens or tries to in relation to our existence.

  

This breakdown of emotion in relation to the way they affect our live can go on as it is the framework to our thought process, which brings me back to how emotions are connected to rational. If rational is the processing of information emotion takes that information and makes it subjective to each and every one of our own existences. So essentially I first have a series of experiences from which I choose the ones which are best for me.

  

In the next post I will talk about Emotions in Machines; How, What, Why and are emotions in machines even necessary.

Consciousness in Machines

The question of the possibility of consciousness in machines is not a new one, and has discussed thoroughly throughout the ages. During the development of my idea, the problem of consciousness has come up numerous times, and since my objective was to create a thinking entity from scratch I wanted to deduce my conclusion on my own, here are my opinions.
The first questions that came to mind were,
What is consciousness?
How does it manifest itself?
Consciousness, as Dictionary.com describes it, is “the state of being conscious; awareness of one’s own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings etc”. So essentially, consciousness is our ability to store and retrieve information at the correct time.
This vital ability of human existence to comprehend and utilize information is based on our ability to create and store experiences.
In order for me to delve deeper into the subject and make sure I cover it thoroughly I will look into ideas of naysayers. I believe Jaron Lanier is creditable enough to put my arguments to the test.
In his article he writes “I argue that computers are not conscious because they cannot recognize each other.”
Well now the question of how do I get to know what I know comes up or epistemology. Essentially what Jaron is arguing is that in order for us to be able to recognize information we must recognize our own species. But based on what are we supposed to recognize (or be able to know that you have experienced that experience before) information?
And when they will be able to recognize each other what then? Will they then be conscious?
And when we are conscious, based on what do we organize the information? How do we create the ability to provide names for objects, or mental representatives of objects which are summed not only when they represent a single idea but as well as when dependant on other information (which we call context).
The implication of my idea is that not only humans are conscious but so are animals, and in order to create conscious machines it is not only obligatory to enable them to store information , as they can today, but to retrieve it at the right time.
What is the right time and what does it mean “right time?
And maybe more importantly, how is information stored and why in such a way?

First post and Introduction

I think I should start out with who I am before I begin explaining what this blog this will discuss.

My name is Shmuel , 18 from Israel but all that is irrelevant, what makes this situation unique is the single fact that for the past year I have been working on a new Artificial Intelligence program using new techniques I have been developing.

Which brings us to the reason for the creation of this blog;  Sooner if not later there will be change in the way we do things, be it interacting with others or with our own computers, hopefully I will be part of that change. Though the reason for this blog is to discuss those scenarios, how they will affect our every day lives and maybe come up with some insight into current ideas and problems with current artificial Intelligence.