From: Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jan 21 1997 - 12:47:26 MST
[Saith Lee Daniel Crocker:]
> ...And which is still nonsense. There is no "balance" any more than
> one can balance "green" with "loud". Reason and emotion are simply
> distinct things. They do not exist on the same scale to be balanced.
> They are incommensurable. Disjoints sets. Emotion exists, just as
> dice exist, LSD exists, and reason exists. But for the purpose of
> discovering the nature of reality, one must use reason /only/. Not
> "balanced" with emotion, dice, hallucinations or anything else. Of
> course, I like using dice for playing games, and I like using emotion
> for making life interesting. But not for discovering truth and making
> progress.
Just a gentle reminder that some emotions trigger specific cognitive
abilities, such as frustration->flaw-finding.
Also, goal and subgoal are cognitive mechanisms as well as survival
mechanisms. When thinking, you set out to solve a specific problem and
may even spin off sub-problems to be solved first. Since emotions are
the affective aspects of our goal systems, there may be ground for
thinking that a reasoning AI would require something recognizable as
emotional substrate, if none of the *specific* emotions we bear. I
don't know whether suppressing, repressing, mastering, understanding,
switching off, flexing, or ignoring one's emotions would affect
goal-oriented analysis. It seems to me that the mental systems for
evaluating the *value* of goals may well be intricately intertwined with
our evolved emotional sets.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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