Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tdatirv!sarima
From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: What AI is exactly. - uh oh, a Mad Genius convert in the making!
Message-ID: <158@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 26 Sep 90 20:20:25 GMT
References: <15@c3pe.C3.COM>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 36

In article <15@c3pe.C3.COM> brat@c3pe.C3.COM (John Whitten) writes:
>
>>As I see it, emotions are an emergent property of any learning system.  To 
>>put it poetically, emotions are the expression of vanishing ignorance.
>>... Thus any learning system, be it made of silicon or made of meat, will 
>>exhibit emotions indicative of its progress or lack of progress in 
>>acquiring significant new knowledge.
 
>This is the part I don't agree with.... 
>Dunno 'bout you, but I don't agree that emotions are ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY
>for intelligence nor do I think they are a natural BYPRODUCT of learning
>(neural or otherwise) but I *DO* agree with you that in HUMAN oriented
>systems (though not necessarily human), emotions play a large part in
>developing personalities.

Quite right, I was going to say something about this myself.

From a biological perspective, emotions appear *far* earlier than any form of
reasoning.  Indeed they may be almost as old as primitive learning.  The
biological purpose of emotion appears to be a mechanism for prioritizing
sets of survival needs, combined with an emergency alert system.  That is
it provides a framework within which alternate response strategies can be
selected depending on current needs.

In 'lower' animals the behavior seems to be entirely determined by the
current emotional state and the current set of stimuli.  We generally call
this sort of behavior pattern "instinct".  Thus emotion is a major component
of what is usually called instinct.

In humans the basic, primitive emotions are thus a remnant of the older
instinct-based behavior pattern of our ancestors.  They remain critical,
since they remind us of our basic needs.  In addition we have a complex set
of meta-emotions based on high level abstraction from the basic emotions.
These more complex emotions could be said to be emergent properties of a
reasoning system, at least given the existance of primary emotions.
(Note that it may be difficult to distinguish basic and derived emotions)