5 ms·

Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can.

Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.

fragmede 5mo ago
What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.
- daseiner1 5mo ago
  bingo
  - card_zero 5mo ago
    Bingo what? "The human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotion[s] and memory" was an explanation. "Ooh individual experience, it's freaky, let's all say how freaky it is" is not.
    - daseiner1 5mo ago
      even saying that our senses are "tied" together with/into our memory and emotions is expressing a dualism. that's the challenge and that's the gap to leap.
- card_zero 5mo ago
  Is that so trippy? They can also lie about other things. Where they were in 2013, what's in their pockets, whether they've been eating vegetables. You may never feel sure, but you can form a theory from clues eventually.
- gilleain 5mo ago
  More than that - I think that people who are grieving may not know how they "should" be grieving. Consider that some cultures (literally) perform grief by - for example - wailing at the grave. Others may wear a particular colour of clothing, etc. You can say to yourself "I am grieving" but still have the nagging suspicion that you are not doing it 'right' in some sense. Similarly (I think) for many emotions - how happy should I be in this moment? How excited? On the flip side, there are people who (seemingly) over-dramatize every event - but are they pretending, or do they really feel things that keenly? I suspect that most emotion is some combination of raw/organic emotion, and the more cultural/performative/learned emotional response. It gets complicated, is what I'm saying.
- 47282847 5mo ago
  What are emotions, really? It’s a bit easier than consciousness to research but still many theories exist. A popular one is that emotions always appear because the work(ed) to one’s benefit. They are always meant to manipulate the environment. With sociopaths, do they simulate, generate, push away, ignore, control, their emotions, more or less than others? Also psychopathy/sociopathy is difficult to research because it’s hard to measure anything; even if you trust what they may be claiming, how do you know how they experience them. One perspective is that some may not feel emotions because emotions did not successfully manipulate their environment in childhood. So why develop them. If anger worked to manipulate your environment, you may become angry easily later on, in an attempt to replicate the successful manipulation. If grief worked, you will experience grief. If “coldness” worked, you will react coldly. If “empathy” worked to manipulate to your benefit, you will be tuned to try empathy. “Normal” only shows what typically works in a society, not what is “healthy” or “natural”. We’re all highly adaptive individuals, learning how to survive in whatever environment we grow up in. We all become master manipulators, because that’s how we survive. Some forms of manipulation may be more socially accepted than others, within a given culture, others less so. Sociopathy doesn’t exist outside of a culture’s value system. It is a disorder only once you define what order is. In a society of narcissists, the empath is the sick one. We really only have our own experience, and the words of others to compare it to.
  - SamPatt 5mo ago
    Emotions do seem to act as signaling, but is that the same as an attempt at manipulation for the benefit of the individual? It seems conceivable in social groups that having an honest accounting of how people are feeling (via emotions) available to the group might benefit the group in achieving their goals while not always benefiting the individual.
    - 47282847 5mo ago
      I don’t see how this is in contradiction. To give one perspective of many, Marshall Rosenberg spent his life researching emotions and violence, and from his point of view, anything you do can ultimately be traced back to your own goals. In his view, it’s more useful to allow this idea and explore it, without judging it as negative. Survival/benefit of the group can be your very own personal (long term) goal. For example, a typical tradeoff is your (very own) need to belong, since your survival literally depends on it. No need to see it as either-or; to resolve the inner conflict, one can own both sides of the argument. Making your emotional state transparent to the group can in that sense again benefit yourself (and the group), but to think that is always the case and that everybody will comply (or even be able to) will lead to disappointment (disillusion), out of principle, since you are installing a moral rule that doesn’t match reality. The verbal sharing of your emotions might successfully (and openly) manipulate the group to include your own goals, and/or the actions you take (taking your emotions into account or not) might. Note how I am using “manipulation” in its original/neutral form, which means “to move”/influence. Typically, we use the word to convey a judgement - some forms of attempted influence we see as good/acceptable, others we see as negative. But that judgement is based on our own values, and somebody else will have different values. We can see this in how our cultures judge lying (and how that judgement changes over time). Is not sharing all you know a lie (of omission)? Is it acceptable to not always share all your thoughts? In many cultures (families), it is deemed offensive to tell certain truths; there is an expectation to lie! Once there is an expectation, it is not considered manipulation. In some hacker communities, sharing your emotions is considered offensive and an unacceptable attempt of manipulation! A simplistic perspective which you can check for yourself and compare with others: Anger means you experience something you judge as wrong and possible to influence. Sadness means you experience something you judge as wrong but outside of your sphere of influence. Fear is a judgement of danger. The judgement is real; the situation itself may not actually be dangerous (today). It’s a signal, but it’s not based on reality/facts but your own judgement of it. You can tune the signal and thus your experience by investigating and changing your judgments - without sacrificing any of your needs or goals. Emotional reprogramming takes time, but it’s not outside of your control, nor is it driven by some higher truth than your own judgments, based on your prior experiences.
justonceokay 5mo ago
I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust. Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”. If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?
- daseiner1 5mo ago
  nicely done and well put. one of the better intros to the “hard problem” i’ve read, truly
  - justonceokay 5mo ago
    Thanks. It’s mostly a distillation of thoughts I have had from reading the various spats through the years between Chalmers and Dennett. I think Dennett is much more convincing to me. My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.
- card_zero 5mo ago
  How does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.

fragmede 5mo ago

What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.

daseiner1 5mo ago
bingo
- card_zero 5mo ago
  Bingo what? "The human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotion[s] and memory" was an explanation. "Ooh individual experience, it's freaky, let's all say how freaky it is" is not.
  - daseiner1 5mo ago
    even saying that our senses are "tied" together with/into our memory and emotions is expressing a dualism. that's the challenge and that's the gap to leap.
card_zero 5mo ago
Is that so trippy? They can also lie about other things. Where they were in 2013, what's in their pockets, whether they've been eating vegetables. You may never feel sure, but you can form a theory from clues eventually.
gilleain 5mo ago
More than that - I think that people who are grieving may not know how they "should" be grieving. Consider that some cultures (literally) perform grief by - for example - wailing at the grave. Others may wear a particular colour of clothing, etc. You can say to yourself "I am grieving" but still have the nagging suspicion that you are not doing it 'right' in some sense. Similarly (I think) for many emotions - how happy should I be in this moment? How excited? On the flip side, there are people who (seemingly) over-dramatize every event - but are they pretending, or do they really feel things that keenly? I suspect that most emotion is some combination of raw/organic emotion, and the more cultural/performative/learned emotional response. It gets complicated, is what I'm saying.
47282847 5mo ago
What are emotions, really? It’s a bit easier than consciousness to research but still many theories exist. A popular one is that emotions always appear because the work(ed) to one’s benefit. They are always meant to manipulate the environment. With sociopaths, do they simulate, generate, push away, ignore, control, their emotions, more or less than others? Also psychopathy/sociopathy is difficult to research because it’s hard to measure anything; even if you trust what they may be claiming, how do you know how they experience them. One perspective is that some may not feel emotions because emotions did not successfully manipulate their environment in childhood. So why develop them. If anger worked to manipulate your environment, you may become angry easily later on, in an attempt to replicate the successful manipulation. If grief worked, you will experience grief. If “coldness” worked, you will react coldly. If “empathy” worked to manipulate to your benefit, you will be tuned to try empathy. “Normal” only shows what typically works in a society, not what is “healthy” or “natural”. We’re all highly adaptive individuals, learning how to survive in whatever environment we grow up in. We all become master manipulators, because that’s how we survive. Some forms of manipulation may be more socially accepted than others, within a given culture, others less so. Sociopathy doesn’t exist outside of a culture’s value system. It is a disorder only once you define what order is. In a society of narcissists, the empath is the sick one. We really only have our own experience, and the words of others to compare it to.
- SamPatt 5mo ago
  Emotions do seem to act as signaling, but is that the same as an attempt at manipulation for the benefit of the individual? It seems conceivable in social groups that having an honest accounting of how people are feeling (via emotions) available to the group might benefit the group in achieving their goals while not always benefiting the individual.
  - 47282847 5mo ago
    I don’t see how this is in contradiction. To give one perspective of many, Marshall Rosenberg spent his life researching emotions and violence, and from his point of view, anything you do can ultimately be traced back to your own goals. In his view, it’s more useful to allow this idea and explore it, without judging it as negative. Survival/benefit of the group can be your very own personal (long term) goal. For example, a typical tradeoff is your (very own) need to belong, since your survival literally depends on it. No need to see it as either-or; to resolve the inner conflict, one can own both sides of the argument. Making your emotional state transparent to the group can in that sense again benefit yourself (and the group), but to think that is always the case and that everybody will comply (or even be able to) will lead to disappointment (disillusion), out of principle, since you are installing a moral rule that doesn’t match reality. The verbal sharing of your emotions might successfully (and openly) manipulate the group to include your own goals, and/or the actions you take (taking your emotions into account or not) might. Note how I am using “manipulation” in its original/neutral form, which means “to move”/influence. Typically, we use the word to convey a judgement - some forms of attempted influence we see as good/acceptable, others we see as negative. But that judgement is based on our own values, and somebody else will have different values. We can see this in how our cultures judge lying (and how that judgement changes over time). Is not sharing all you know a lie (of omission)? Is it acceptable to not always share all your thoughts? In many cultures (families), it is deemed offensive to tell certain truths; there is an expectation to lie! Once there is an expectation, it is not considered manipulation. In some hacker communities, sharing your emotions is considered offensive and an unacceptable attempt of manipulation! A simplistic perspective which you can check for yourself and compare with others: Anger means you experience something you judge as wrong and possible to influence. Sadness means you experience something you judge as wrong but outside of your sphere of influence. Fear is a judgement of danger. The judgement is real; the situation itself may not actually be dangerous (today). It’s a signal, but it’s not based on reality/facts but your own judgement of it. You can tune the signal and thus your experience by investigating and changing your judgments - without sacrificing any of your needs or goals. Emotional reprogramming takes time, but it’s not outside of your control, nor is it driven by some higher truth than your own judgments, based on your prior experiences.

justonceokay 5mo ago

I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust. Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”. If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?

daseiner1 5mo ago
nicely done and well put. one of the better intros to the “hard problem” i’ve read, truly
- justonceokay 5mo ago
  Thanks. It’s mostly a distillation of thoughts I have had from reading the various spats through the years between Chalmers and Dennett. I think Dennett is much more convincing to me. My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.
card_zero 5mo ago
How does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.