Xref: utzoo comp.ai:2772 talk.philosophy.misc:1665 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!sgi!arisia!quintus!ok From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Message-ID: <792@quintus.UUCP> Date: 2 Dec 88 07:59:10 GMT References: <1976@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <2717@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu><3ffb7cfc.14c3d@gtephx.UUCP> Sender: news@quintus.UUCP Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) Distribution: comp.ai Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 53 In article <3ffb7cfc.14c3d@gtephx.UUCP> gibsong@gtephx.UUCP (Greggo) writes: >Don't emotions enter into intelligence at all, or >do they just "get in the way"? Emotions have often been discussed in the AI literature. See, for example, Aaron Sloman's "You don't need a soft skin to have a warm hear." Emotions have a large cognitive component; they aren't just physiological. (C.S.Lewis in his essay "Transposition" pointed out that Samuel Pepys reported the same phsyical sensations when seasick, when in love with his wife, and on hearing some wind music, and in the latter case promptly decided to practice the instrument.) Considering the range of human temperaments, the experience and expression of emotion probably isn't necessary for "intelligence". I wonder, though. I have seen programs which nauseated me, and they were bad programs, and I have seen programs which brought tears of pleasure to my eyes, and they were good programs. If emotions can be aroused by such "mathematical" things as programs, and aroused *appropriately*, perhaps they are more important than I think. Such emotions certainly motivate me to write better programs. >One of the prime foundations for >intelligence would surely be "an awareness of self". "Foundation" in what sense? Let's be science fictional for a moment, and imagine a sessile species, which every spring buds off a mobile ramet. The mobile ramet sends sense data to the sessile ramet, and the sessile ramet sends commands to the mobile one. The sessile ramets live in a colony, and the mobile ones gather food and bring it back, and otherwise tend the colony. Every winter the mobile ramets die and the sessile ones hibernate. The mobile ramets are "cheap" to make because they have just enough brain to maintain their bodies and communicate with the sessile ones, which means that they can be quite a bit smaller than a human being and still function intelligently, because the brain is back in the sessile ramet. Is it necessary for the sessile ramet to know which of the ones in the colony is itself? No, provided all the sessiles are maintained, it doesn't much matter. (It helps if physiological states of the sessiles such as hunger and illness are obvious from the outside, wilting leaves or something like that.) These creatures would presumably be aware of themselves *as*mobiles*. I was about to write that an intelligent entity would need access to its own plans in order to critise them before carrying them out, but even that may not be so. Imagine a humanoid robot which is *not* aware of its own mental processes, but where information about those processes is visible on a debugging panel at the back. Two such robots could check each other without being able to check themselves. "An awareness of self" might be important to an intelligent organism, but it might be a *consequence* of intelligence rather than a *precondition* for it. It is usually claimed that human babies have to learn to distinguish self from non-self. (How anyone can _know_ this I've often wondered.)