I look at this from a functional point of view. If I were designing an AGI, what role would emotions play in its design? In other words, my concern is to design in emotions, not wait for them to emerge from my AGI. This implies that my AGI needs emotions in order to function more competently. I am NOT designing in emotions in order to better simulate a human, though that might be a design goal for some AGI projects.
So what are emotions and why would an AGI need them? In humans and other animals, emotions are a global mechanism for changing the creature’s behavior for some high priority task. Fear, for example, readies a human for a fight or flight response, sacrificing some things (energy usage) for others (speed of response, focused attention). Such things may be needed in an AGI I’m designing. A battlefield AGI or robot, for example, might need an analogous fear emotion to respond to a perceived threat (or instructed to do so by a controlling human).
Obviously, the change brought about by “fear” in my AGI will be different from the 6 qualities you describe here. For example, my battlefield robot would temporarily suspend any ongoing maintenance activities. This is analogous to a change in its attention. It might rev up its engines in preparation for a fight or flight response. Depending on the nature of the threat, it might change the configuration of its sensors. For example, it may turn on a high-resolution radar that is normally off to save energy. Generally, as in humans, emotion is a widespread reallocation of the AGI’s resources for a particular perceived purpose.
If you assume that emotions are type of evaluation that cause fast task switching, then it makes sense to say your battlefield AI has a fear emotion. But if emotion is NOT a type of computational task, then it is ONLY by analogy that your battlefield AI has “fear.”
This matters because if emotions like fear are not identifiable with a specific subjective experience, then the brain state of fear is not equivalent to the feeling of fear, which seems bizarre to say (Cf. Kripke “Naming and Necessity” p.126).
I look at this from a functional point of view. If I were designing an AGI, what role would emotions play in its design? In other words, my concern is to design in emotions, not wait for them to emerge from my AGI. This implies that my AGI needs emotions in order to function more competently. I am NOT designing in emotions in order to better simulate a human, though that might be a design goal for some AGI projects.
So what are emotions and why would an AGI need them? In humans and other animals, emotions are a global mechanism for changing the creature’s behavior for some high priority task. Fear, for example, readies a human for a fight or flight response, sacrificing some things (energy usage) for others (speed of response, focused attention). Such things may be needed in an AGI I’m designing. A battlefield AGI or robot, for example, might need an analogous fear emotion to respond to a perceived threat (or instructed to do so by a controlling human).
Obviously, the change brought about by “fear” in my AGI will be different from the 6 qualities you describe here. For example, my battlefield robot would temporarily suspend any ongoing maintenance activities. This is analogous to a change in its attention. It might rev up its engines in preparation for a fight or flight response. Depending on the nature of the threat, it might change the configuration of its sensors. For example, it may turn on a high-resolution radar that is normally off to save energy. Generally, as in humans, emotion is a widespread reallocation of the AGI’s resources for a particular perceived purpose.
If you assume that emotions are type of evaluation that cause fast task switching, then it makes sense to say your battlefield AI has a fear emotion. But if emotion is NOT a type of computational task, then it is ONLY by analogy that your battlefield AI has “fear.”
This matters because if emotions like fear are not identifiable with a specific subjective experience, then the brain state of fear is not equivalent to the feeling of fear, which seems bizarre to say (Cf. Kripke “Naming and Necessity” p.126).