From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Sep 23 2002 - 22:28:45 MDT
At 09:12 PM 9/23/02 -0700, spike, a fine fish-fancying feller, wrote:
>I am another one who has been totally baffled
>most of my life by the human emotional operating
>system.
This is another way of saying that you (and many here) have trouble
negotiating your own emotions and those of other people, and as a result
perhaps tend to edit out or mute those aspects of human life. Of course you
can't do that successfully without being autistic. This is NOT meant as an
aspersion (an Aspergersion) on our pal the Spikester.
>as an exercise, let us try
>(I dont even know if it is possible) to switch off
>the emotions.
But why would you wish to do such a system-degrading thing? What madness is
this? Hey, gang, let us think about the world from the position of a
logical device with no *understanding*? While you're at it, let's do some
aesthetic analysis by asking blind people about visual art, the deaf about
music, the castrated about sex.
This is a sad category mistake. The usual scientist to cite at this point
is Damasio, and one could do worse.
>An AI would not know or
>care what pain is, for instance, other than to
>observe that sentients avoid it, like a mathematical
>function appears to avoid an asymptote.
Oh me oh my. This is almost the exact parody that critics of transhumanism
would come up with.
Damien Broderick
[it hurts me to read it; Fourier-analyze *that* :)]
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