[ExI] Unfrendly AI is a mistaken idea.

[A B]

Stathis wrote:

> "However, it isn't so
> surprising if we sometimes make good decisions based
> on emotions, since the
> evolution of emotions predates intelligence, as John
> Clark reminds us."

The evolution of emotions **doesn't** predate
intelligence, it's the other way around. An insect
isn't as intelligent as a person, but that doesn't
mean it has no intelligence. I know that's
counter-intuitive, but with evolutionary progression
you can't have emotions if you don't have
consciousness, and you can't have consciousness if you
don't have intelligence. Take for example the visual
cortex. First a stimulus must be *intelligently*
processed within the visual cortex, using intelligent
algorithms. Then the visual subject "emerges" into
consciousness after sufficient intelligent processing.
Then and only then can a person begin to form an
emotional reaction to whatever is consciously seen; a
loved-one for instance. Then the forming emotional
experience feeds back into consciousness so that a
person becomes aware of the emotion in addition to the
visual subject. There's only *one* direction in which
emotion could possibly have naturally evolved:

1)Intelligence
2)Consciousness
3)Emotion

Best,

Jeffrey Herrlich  



--- Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 08/06/07, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
> 
> Formerly, I had agreed with John because at
> > least for human beings, emotion sometimes
> > plays an important part in what one would
> > think of as purely intellectual functioning. I was
> > working off the Damasio card experiments,
> > which seem to show that humans require---for
> > full intellectual power---some emotion.
> 
> 
> Here is an excerpt from the relevant paper:
> 
> 
> ###
> 
> Science Volume 275(5304), 28 February 1997, pp
> 1293-1295
> 
> Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the
> Advantageous Strategy
> [Report]
> 
> Bechara, Antoine; Damasio, Hanna; Tranel, Daniel;
> Damasio, Antonio R.
> 
> In a gambling task that simulates real-life
> decision-making in the way it
> factors uncertainty, rewards, and penalties, the
> players are given four
> decks of cards, a loan of $2000 facsimile U.S.
> bills, and asked to play so
> that they can lose the least amount of money and win
> the most
>
[1]<file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Desktop/Damasio%20Article%20-%20Science.htm#19>.
> Turning each card carries an immediate reward ($100
> in decks A and B and $50
> in decks C and D). Unpredictably, however, the
> turning of some cards also
> carries a penalty (which is large in decks A and B
> and small in decks C and
> D). Playing mostly from the disadvantageous decks (A
> and B) leads to an
> overall loss. Playing from the advantageous decks (C
> and D) leads to an
> overall gain. The players have no way of predicting
> when a penalty will
> arise in a given deck, no way to calculate with
> precision the net gain or
> loss from each deck, and no knowledge of how many
> cards they must turn to
> end the game (the game is stopped after 100 card
> selections). After
> encountering a few losses, normal participants begin
> to generate SCRs before
> selecting a card from the bad decks
>
[2]<file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Desktop/Damasio%20Article%20-%20Science.htm#20>and
> also begin to avoid the decks with large losses
>
[1]<file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Desktop/Damasio%20Article%20-%20Science.htm#19>.
> Patients with bilateral damage to the ventromedial
> prefrontal cortices do
> neither
>
[1,2]<file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Desktop/Damasio%20Article%20-%20Science.htm#19>
> .
> 
> To investigate whether subjects choose correctly
> only after or before
> conceptualizing the nature of the game and reasoning
> over the pertinent
> knowledge, we continuously assessed, during their
> performance of the task,
> three lines of processing in 10 normal participants
> and in 6 patients
>
[3]<file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Desktop/Damasio%20Article%20-%20Science.htm#21>with
> bilateral damage of the ventromedial sector of the
> prefrontal cortex
> and decision-making defects. These included (i)
> behavioral performance, that
> is, the number of cards selected from the good decks
> versus the bad decks;
> (ii) SCRs generated before the selection of each
> card
>
[2]<file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Desktop/Damasio%20Article%20-%20Science.htm#20>;
> and (iii) the subject's account of how they
> conceptualized the game and of
> the strategy they were using. The latter was
> assessed by interrupting the
> game briefly after each subject had made 20 card
> turns and had already
> encountered penalties, and asking the subject two
> questions: (i) "Tell me
> all you know about what is going on in this game."
> (ii) "Tell me how you
> feel about this game." The questions were repeated
> at 10-card intervals and
> the responses audiotaped.
> 
> After sampling all four decks, and before
> encountering any losses, subjects
> preferred decks A and B and did not generate
> significant anticipatory SCRs.
> We called this period pre-punishment. After
> encountering a few losses in
> decks A or B (usually by card 10), normal
> participants began to generate
> anticipatory SCRs to decks A and B. Yet by card 20,
> all indicated that they
> did not have a clue about what was going on. We
> called this period pre-hunch
> (Figure
>
1<file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Desktop/Damasio%20Article%20-%20Science.htm#FF1>).
> By about card 50, all normal participants began to
> express a "hunch" that
> decks A and B were riskier and all generated
> anticipatory SCRs whenever they
> pondered a choice from deck A or B. We called this
> period hunch. None of the
> patients generated anticipatory SCRs or expressed a
> "hunch" (Figure
>
1<file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Desktop/Damasio%20Article%20-%20Science.htm#FF1>).
> By card 80, many normal participants expressed
> knowledge about why, in the
> long run, decks A and B were bad and decks C and D
> were good. We called this
> period conceptual. Seven of the 10 normal
> participants reached the
> conceptual period, during which they continued to
> avoid the bad decks, and
> continued to generate SCRs whenever they considered
> sampling again from the
> bad decks. Remarkably, the three normal participants
> who did not reach the
> conceptual period still made advantageous choices
>
[4]<file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Desktop/Damasio%20Article%20-%20Science.htm#22>.
> Just as remarkably, the three patients with
> prefrontal damage who reached
> the conceptual period and correctly described which
> were the bad and good
> decks chose disadvantageously. None of the patients
> generated anticipatory
> SCRs (Figure
>
1<file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Desktop/Damasio%20Article%20-%20Science.htm#FF1>).
> Thus, despite an accurate account of the task and of
> the correct strategy,
> these patients failed to generate autonomic
> responses and continued to
> select cards from the bad decks. The patients failed
> to act according to
> their correct conceptual knowledge.
> ###
> 
> Some of these findings have been disputed, eg. the
> authors of the following
> paper repeated the experiment and claim that the
> subjects who decided
> advantageously actually were consciously aware of
> the good decks:
>
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/101/45/16075.
> However, it isn't so
> surprising if we sometimes make good decisions based
> on emotions, since the
> evolution of emotions predates intelligence, as John
> Clark reminds us. And
> when you pull your hand from a painful stimulus, not
> only does emotion beat
> cognition, but reflex, being older still, beats
> emotion.
> 
> It also isn't surprising if people with neurological
> lesions affecting
> emotion don't function as well as normal people.
> Emotion is needed for
> motivation, otherwise why do anything, and gradients
> of emotion are needed
> for judgement, otherwise why do one thing over
> another? It is precisely in
> matters of judgement and motivation that patients
> with prefrontal lesions
> and schizophrenia don't do so well, even though
> their general IQ may be
> normal, and the science of neuropsychological
> testing tries to tease out
> these deficits.
> 
> Still, the fact that human brains may work this way
> does not mean that an AI
> has to work in the same way to solve similar
> problems. No programmer would
> go around writing a program that worked out the best
> strategy in the above
> card sorting game by first inventing a computer
> equivalent of "emotional
> learning", except perhaps as an academic exercise.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Stathis Papaioannou
> > _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
> 



       
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