The Fear of "Intelligent Beings"
I've just finished watching a documentary on youtube titled How Neural Networks Learned to Talk | ChatGPT: A 30 Year History . I could say that I am quite amused on how there are people get pissed at how, ok let me just quote:
Douglas Hostader, 2023:
"If I were to take an hour in doing something, ChatGPT 4 might take 1 second. It's quite terrifying it felt as if not only are my belief systems collapsing but it feels as if the entire human race is going to be eclipsed and left in the dust
Noam Chomsky, 2023:
Well this is glorified. These systems are designed in such a way that in principle they can tell us nothing about language, about learning, about intelligence, about thought, nothing.
Yann LeCun, 2023 (known as the Godfathers of deep learning):
So linguistic abilities and fluency are not related to the ability to think. Those are two different things.
And some quotes on how the AI community has become fragmented.
Andrew Ng, 2023:
I've never seen the AI community become fragmented the way it's trending right now.
From my standpoint, it's amusing how people get their ego so hurt. It is true that when we use ChatGPT, it shows life-like responses, I mean I even sometimes use it to craft this website and add more functionalities for it, for example icons, sorting and hiding of articles, and putting read time on the cards. It cuts my time coding and I can write more instead of putting in 6 hours of coding that can take 3 hours.
I see the root of the problem is a philosophical problem. They are afraid and it's understandable that it is something to make sense to be afraid of, they are eerily smart. The most somewhat widespread idea is that "Oh fuck, if AI is going to get smarter and smarter they will outsmart us! They will rule the world and AI will kill humanity as we know it!" iRobot film all over again, where AI becomes sentient.
This is where I propose a line. A line that must be embraced, to ponder the nature of our feelings, fear, thought, and ability to reason. And where to put "intelligence" as a crown above all words (earth).
Between Emotions and Intelligence
I will now ask you, why did you choose to wake up this morning? Why do you have things to look forward to? Why do you choose to go to work? Why do you choose to talk with the people you talked to? Because with every one of those actions come emotions, the essence of those activities. Because with every of those actions that were undone and lived in the realm of "intentions" lives emotions. Emotions give meaning to your activities.
Now where does "intelligence" come into play or some would say "The ability to reason" or "rational thought"? When you walk by the kitchen table and see a potato chip unopened, do you just impulsively eat it every time you see it? Some can think of the "trade-off" that comes with eating chips every day and choose to exercise awareness of the consequences of it and walk by. To numb the "instinctual emotions" of cravings under "reasoning". Emotions are instinctual and impulsive in nature. Thought is "Getting a grip through reasoning".
Now when you are about to leave from work, your golden retriever dog chases you with its tail wagging around. You hugged her and you think to yourself "Please don't be sad, I'll come home by nine today." Your dog shows a wide smile on her face and her smile dilutes the further you walk away from her to the door. Her smile disappears synchronously with the waging of her tail. In the car you cursed some words and wished you could play with your dog for the day but you remember you have bills to pay. Now again, emotions are impulsive and thought is getting a grip through reasoning. As you justify going to work and see the message from your Boss asking where you are. Now you can't help but to be double pissed.
As you arrive from work, your Boss shouted at you (impolitely) and told you that you were thirty minutes late and complained about your smell as he reminded you of how much he hates the smell of dogs. Now you can't help but to be triple pissed! He asked you if you've done the report he asked you to do by friday night but no one wants to fucking do work at friday night and now you reached your tipping point based on how you feel at friday night. You cursed words at your boss impulsively out of spite and disrespect you have towards him that you want to be appreciated as a human being not as a cog of a machine that works on Friday night consecutively for as long as you've worked at the company. Your boss shouted back at you as you can see from the coffee stain he has on his shirt when he lifted up his shirt that turns out he is also having a terrible day. You cut his shouting and say "I'm sorry, I'll do it today, the first thing in the morning." Your boss raises his eyebrows out of disgust or rather impression of sleaziness of yours and shouts back "TODAY?! Newsflash asshole, it was supposed to be done by friday!" Your boss flipped you and tell you that you're fired and with the last icing on the cake he told you to fuck your dog and he is going to replace you with AI and further vented how he ended up doing the report with AI on his own.
Out of sheer disbelief and sheer disrespect you sucker punch your boss on the neck to oblivion and leave your office building knowing that you've bit more than you can ever chew. At your car you know that you're unbelievably pissed. You stopped by the nearest seven eleven and purchased a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. The cashier stares at you with slight discomfort and asked you "Terrible day huh?" You couldn't help but the desire to just sucker punch the sucker out to oblivion too but you just say "Ah yeah, whatever, here's the money." You walk out and light your cigarette and inhale a deep hit. Now as the nicotine is circulating to your brain within 10 seconds after inhalation (Le Houezec 2003), you feel quite relaxed now and say "Fuck, funny on how a cigarette can calm me down and make me feel less pissed regardless everything that has happened today."
You drive your way back home and from the window you can see Ellie, your golden retriever is as happy as ever that you've just gone home. As you click on the door keys, you can hear Ellie footsteps rushing towards the door. You opened the door and Ellie threw her body to you as you almost fell backwards. You laughed at the ridiculousness of her behaviour and petted her while carrying her. You can't help but say "Oh Ellie, I wish I could say I'm equally happy as you."
You are too bothered by the bad things that have happened today that you can't quite play frisbee with Ellie. There are small thoughts yet come at you at a very fast pace out of realisation that you are now unemployed. You think to yourself "Who should I call first? How would she react to this?" You wanted to call your girlfriend but unsure of her reaction towards it, will it just bring more stress or will it actually calm me down? "How do I even tell her? Aaahh too much thinking." You proceed to cut the thinking and just dial her.
"Hi, yeah, Hi Mark, whatsup?" Your girlfriend answered the call. "Uh, So listen Beth, uh you got 15 minutes?" you asked her back with slight nervousness ringing from your throat. "Yeah, uh hold on... Yeah I have 15, whatsup you don't sound very well." Beth asked. "I got fired this morning. I got in the office late this morning, and I didn't do the work I'm supposed to do last friday. Turns out it's a really important client work that I dismissed, it's the distribution payment financial report, I knew it took at least 3 hours to do and I obviously couldn't do it friday night. David (my boss), rubbed it on my face this morning and shouted on how unreliable I was. Though, I always know he has the intention to fire me, it's just today that has a good reason to. Your girlfriend cut your talking and asked "Oh wait Mark, what's your purpose of this call? You know friday night was our anniversary." Mark knows this but it was never his intention to put the blame on what happened at friday night, instead he just wanted to explain how the demise of the departure of his job come to being. Beth on the other hand, is still at work and only has 15 minutes before continuing to her job, she phrased mark's call to be a problem to be solved by default so she can continue her work that is "labour demanding". Mark startled and say "No no that's not what I mean." Beth now escalates the heat with now with a more emotional tone from her voice, though with an gesture of confusion, "Mark uh yeah, I just don't understand that you need to put friday night on blame, you know we agree on that." Mark is now confused than ever, he must put friday night but without putting the blame on the decisions that he has made on friday night. Now at the heat of the moment, mark rational thinking to find the right words are estranged. An awkward pause comes unintentionally as Mark is thinking without speaking a word. "Mark? Hello? What do you want me to do now?" Mark is now even more confused, does Mark call her with the intent of being listened to or want the problem to be solved? Mark does have a problem after all. But does the problem matter? or does Mark suffer more in his mind than in reality? Mark is indeed troubled with his unemployment and out of his emotions of frustrations he wanted to call his girlfriend to unbottle his emotions, but now Mark just realized it appears to be counter productive as he initially thought of. "Beth I was hoping that you can listen to my story without cutting me short, I know you may be frustrated as well with the unemployment and about friday night, I didn't come to you to solve all of my problems, I was just hoping that you listened." Mark explained with his best assumption of what to say out of his honesty. "Oh, I'm sorry Mark, I just realized that was very rude of me, sorry I didn't have the best day today myself, work is overwhelming today, I don't think I can add more emotional strain today, are you okay if we talk about this deeper just after work?" Out of Mark's sense of clarity of what he desires, Beth comes to an agreement that is a matter of no joke to talk about and to be talked about very seriously as the emotional strains that come within. Mark complies with Beth's request and Beth ends the phone call.
"Aaah, I need to get a new job now and it probably takes at least 3 months to be officially recruited, if I'm lucky even in this economy." Mark vented in frustration to Ellie. Mark is now thinking whether he should find a new job right at that moment but he felt too distressed to think about work. He's not even sure he wants to continue working but he has bills and Ellie's food to pay. Ellie walks in a circle perpendicular to Mark's seat. Mark smiles out of her ridiculous behaviour, he pats Ellie and grabs the frisbee located near the television and both walk to the park to play frisbee.
End story.
It's a parable, of sorts. Showing very human problems and very human emotions. I know I jumped from initially asking you as the reader very simple questions then to become a third point of view story. Slowly but steadily, the relevance of the cases I asked you separate itself to the point it's nicer to bring up a fiction story and help you resonate on how emotions constantly wires your actions, at least instinctively or at least responsively. Through mark's bad day, must we conclude that there's no correlation on mark's emotions that life gives and the decisions that he made in his life? Mark dismissed his boss orders to work for another friday night comes because as much as he needs to pay the bills, he values his time with his girlfriend and his anniversary more than his payment distribution report in which he forgot how important it was presumably overlapped with his excitement towards his relationship anniversary, and he deemed it to be immoral to work at friday night to begin with. His emotions that life gives wire the decisions that he made in his life.
Through the parable, it shows that Mark always hated his job and his boss but he needs bills to pay, his emotions of happiness comes after the bills are paid, then with Ellie and his girlfriend. It's a common story on how one works to make ends meet. Working for one's fulfilment is debatably a rare asset in the modern world. The strain that comes with this, one can feel the overflowing emotions that comes within the meaninglessness of life when one can't find emotions of happiness. Or rather the correlation between one's emotions that life gives to oneself and the decision that oneself made in one's life is profoundly negative to the point that when life only gives oneself negative emotions, one would justify the departure from life.
Mark still justifies working through reasoning, as much as it is stated he wished to play with his dog that morning, he let go of his whim and proceeded to drive to work. He understands that it is necessary for him to work to sustain his living as that's just how it is in this world.
His whim to play with his dog is reflexive in nature, he plays with his dog because it's fun. The activity does not need to serve a higher sense of meaning that lives on a different plane of existence. What even is life if you're not having fun?
Now through this parable, do you understand how crucial are emotions in the fruition of one's decision and opinion about life?
When we compare ourselves to AI or the likes of ChatGPT. In front of the curtain, we talk to ChatGPT and it appears that it understands the meaning of our words. It appears in that sense because it really does understand. From the data and the prompts, it figures out how to extract the meaning of the sentence and it uses the meaning of the sentence to predict the next word to talk with you. The only thing that it lacks at is emotions. It feels indifferent when it says the words that it says to you.
Some humans are still unsatisfied with this answer. In which I propose to hold them by the hand and go to the next rabbithole of intelligence and sentience.
Ego. Human ego is quite strong. They want to feel special. Reasoning, thought, and intelligence are unique traits of human beings. Now they find " something that takes an hour to do, ChatGPT 4 might take 1 second." is terrifying.
This is where I propose, intelligence may not be something unique to a human being, but emotions are, at least including all animals as well, like my dogs.
My dogs may not be smart, but sure as hell, through their faces of happiness, excitement, and waggy tails, their emotions are what makes them special, even without the need of intelligence. Dogs are undeniably comes from evolution as we can quite literally fucking breed a new species by blending two species together and do speciation. We done speciation to the point that we breed "imperfect beings" in a sense imperfection is defined by well quite literally the pugs inability to fucking breathe sometimes. To quote an explanation from the smithsonian about the difficulty of breathing of pugs and bulldogs:
Many dogs in these breeds suffer from a disease called Brachycephalic Obstructive Airway Syndrome (BOAS). The compact architecture of their skull results in deformation, which makes their nostrils or soft palate too small, obstructing airflow and leaving the pups gasping for breath.
Out of all their imperfections, we still love our dogs. Why do we love our dogs? Because our dogs love us.
Though, there is another problem with sentience-y. Debater could say "Ah ok, so how do we know that AI doesn't have feelings?"
In which I would say, "Ah umm, because they are unlike us. They don't have feelings, at least if we see our feelings come from and how to numb our feelings like with cigarettes ah uHm ah, I meant sometimes people use antidepressant to inhibit the reuptake of dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline so it stays in the brain longer(Andrade C, 2010), though sometimes it can lead desensitisation of receptors for the dopamine neurotransmitter(Mnie-Filali, 2012), leaving the patient to feel numb for emotions.
The regulation of neurotransmitter levels, including dopamine, is finely tuned in the brain to maintain a balance. A continuous and excessive elevation of neurotransmitter levels or a flatline could potentially lead to desensitisation of receptors or other adaptive changes in the neural circuits.
Regardless of one's opinion, it shows that emotions are indeed factually, chemical. AND THAT'S OKAY, THAT'S REALLY OKAY. IF ANYTHING IT WHAT MAKES US SPECIAL. It's the line that really differentiates us between humans and AI. Though it begs the argument, what really happens when one gives a way for AI to feel emotions? Because how I see transformer model architecture (The Deep Learning model that ChatGPT is built upon), it is pure reasoning, and thought, and the ability to understand meaning of words, but without any emotions attached to the words. It does not have any "intent" layering the words it says.
Ok actually I must confess, why can't humans just find that it's okay if our brain is chemical? If the intent of our thoughts, words that have meaning, decisions that we make are chemical? I have habits because I have a positive feedback mechanism that embraces the habit. Through knowing and understanding that I can cut off bad habits and replace bad habits with better ones. Like writing instead of nagging my friend that says "Sorry mate, can't have the time for that" when I have thoughts inside my head as the cue and I have so many thoughts inside my head. I mean, after a series of actions from the habit, I come to see higher value in writing as it can be immortalised but I can't have 100% vivid memory if I choose just to talk about it with a friend.
Emergence Property of Intelligence.
I will start by quoting Quanta Magazine's video Computer Science: 2023's Biggest Breakthroughs on 7:14:
Narrator:
Which movie do these emojis represent? When researchers asked three different large language models, they got very different answers. The simplest AI struggled to come up with a coherent answer. A somewhat more complex model, spit out something reasonable but still wrong. But the most complex system nailed it in just one try. This impressive result can be explained by a range of exciting new abilities. AI researchers are calling emergent behaviours
Deep Ganguli, Deep Learning Scientist | Anthropic:
Something that is not present in a small language model that becomes present in a larger model can be said to have emerged. We don't think that it will be there and then we scale it up and all of a sudden this phenomenon is already there. So it's not necessarily a predictable phenomenon
Narrator:
Emergence happens when a system behaves in ways its individual units don't on their own. This phenomenon can be seen across nature, such as when lifeless atoms give rise to living cells, water molecules create waves and starlings swarm and swoop as one. Researchers are seeing if enough digital nodes combine in large language models, surprising new behaviors can emerge. These behaviors are a distinct departure from older neural networks. Which processes language words by painstaking words. In 2017, a key pieece of code known as a transformer was introduced to LLM, enabling networks to analyze words in parallel. Now, LLMs can process strings of text in an instant.
[...]
This year, researchers have reported a range of emergent behaviors that enable LLMs to solve problems they've never seen before. [...] The true source of the tipping point into emergence remains a mystery.
Ellie Pavlick, Computer Scientist | Brown University:
The models get better as they get bigger and people are releasing bigger models at a pretty rapid clip. Meanwhile, the science of understanding what's happening under the hood progresses more slowly than that.
An article from Busines Insider: A list of difficult exams GPT-4 have passed, shows that:
OpenAI's buzzy chatbot, ChatGPT, has already passed medical, law, and business school exams. And its newest model, GPT-4 can ace the bar and has a reasonable chance of passing the CFA exam.
Ok now, so can we really understand and acknowledge that intelligence is an emergent property? Doesn't it just ironically speaks to us how fucking ironic we are with our egos, how special we want us to be that the image of our own ego has collapsed the point our fingers asked ChatGPT for help? It's okay guys come on...
"Intelligence" if we were to measure from our fellow friends, it's not fair to measure an artist's "intelligence" to one with an engineering degree, that is that and the other is the other. But somehow now this fucking AI is "General Intelligence" both the artist and the engineer unequivocally bows under ChatGPT. (Ok don't mistake me with AGI or Artificial General Intelligence, I'm just saying general in a sense of broad intelligence.)
Now if we were to really admit and acknowledge the existence, the significance of our being and the essence of our dog's happiness, we must travel to the understanding of the property of emotions.
The Mind (Intelligence) - Body (Emotions) Problem.
Walking further and further from dogs, I would like to introduce another animal that has brought us deeper understanding about the nature of our world. From Thomas Hunt Morgan experiment after beeding millions of fruit flies and through generations he observed that a specific trait, eye color, was associated with the gender of the fruit flies. He noticed that a white-eyed mutation occurred only in male flies and never in females. This led Morgan to propose that the gene responsible for eye color was located on the sex chromosome, specifically the X chromosome.
Morgan's work demonstrated the connection between genes and chromosomes and provided crucial evidence supporting the chromosome theory of inheritance. Morgan's contributions earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933. His work laid the groundwork for modern genetics and our understanding of how genes are inherited on chromosomes.
And through research that shows the nature of "emotions" that appears in again--fruit flies. An uncanny story yet interesting. As I directly quote from relatively recent research by David J. Anderson article that is Published on Caltech, Chen Institute for Neuroscience, Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
A fruit fly starts buzzing around food at a picnic, so you wave your hand over the insect and shoo it away. But when the insect flees the scene, is it doing so because it is actually afraid? Using fruit flies to study the basic components of emotion, a new Caltech study reports that a fly's response to a shadowy overhead stimulus might be analogous to a negative emotional state such as fear—a finding that could one day help us understand the neural circuitry involved in human emotion.
"There has been ongoing debate for decades about what 'emotion' means, and there is no generally accepted definition. In an article that Ralph Adolphs and I recently wrote, we put forth the view that emotions are a type of internal brain state with certain general properties that can exist independently of subjective, conscious feelings, which can only be studied in humans," Anderson says. "That means we can study such brain states in animal models like flies or mice without worrying about whether they have 'feelings' or not. We use the behaviors that express those states as a readout."
The emotion primitives analyzed in the fly study can be understood in the context of a stimulus associated with human fear: the sound of a gunshot. If you hear a gun fire, the sound may trigger a negative feeling. This feeling, a primitive called valence, will probably cause you to behave differently for several minutes afterward. This is a primitive called persistence. Repeated exposure to the stimulus should also produce a greater emotional response—a primitive called scalability; for example, the sound of 10 gunshots would make you more afraid than the sound of one shot.
Gibson says that another primitive of fear is that it is generalized to different contexts, meaning that if you were eating lunch or were otherwise occupied when the gun fired, the fear would take over, distracting you from your lunch.
The researchers analyzed the flies' responses to the stimulus and found that the insects displayed all of these emotion primitives. For example, responses were scalable: when the paddle passed overhead, the flies would either freeze, or jump away from the stimulus, or enter a state of elevated arousal, and each response increased with the number of times the stimulus was delivered. And when hungry flies were gathered around food, the stimulus would cause them to leave the food for several seconds and run around the arena until their state of elevated arousal decayed and they returned to the food—exhibiting the primitives of context generalization and persistence.
"These experiments provide objective evidence that visual stimuli designed to mimic an overhead predator can induce a persistent and scalable internal state of defensive arousal in flies, which can influence their subsequent behavior for minutes after the threat has passed," Anderson says. "For us, that's a big step beyond just casually intuiting that a fly fleeing a visual threat must be 'afraid,' based on our anthropomorphic assumptions. It suggests that the flies' response to the threat is richer and more complicated than a robotic-like avoidance reflex."
On their published research paper (Behavioral Responses to a Repetitive Visual Threat Stimulus Express a Persistent State of Defensive Arousal in Drosophila), they state in more detail of their arguments based on the result of their experiements. As I cite:
What is the adaptive value of a system that integrates multiple threat stimuli to produce a scalable defensive response? Isn't it safer for the fly simply to jump away as soon as it sees an overhead shadow? That may be the case for a well-fed fly, but starved flies engaged in feeding must make a cost-benefit decision: premature flight from a resource deprives the animals of food and consumes energy; conversely, delayed escape renders the animals increasingly vulnerable to predation. The ability to encode an integrated, scalable internal representation of the history of recent threats (which may share some features with working memory [PubMed]), and to use that representation to select behavioral responses and to tune their intensity, may be adaptive in uncertain environments. Whether this depends on the predictability of the shadow remains to be investigated. In addition, our data suggest that these integrated responses may be reinforced or “sharpened” by social interactions: flies feeding in groups are less readily dispersed by the first shadow than are single flies and return to food following dispersal is faster than for single flies, suggestive of cooperativity.
If you think that is interesting, I have another one to show you that will make you trip balls.
A conversation that took place between emotions enthusiast (as in researchers), David Anderson and Leonard Mlodinow written on a book by Lenoard, Emotional: The New Thinking about Feelings:
I queostioned how much you could learn about human emotion by studying tiny creatures [...] Anderson chuckled--yes, fruit flies, l ike many humans, enjoy wine, and sometimes pay with their lives. Somehow, that started us talking about bars. I told him of a time recently when, late at night, I was walking the streets of Manhattan, and attracted by the music, I wandered into one. As I entered, what struck me most was the very large number of occupants [...]. Also the music, loud on the outside, was unpleasantly loud inside. [...]
I told my son Nicolai about the scene. It's pretty standard, he told me. You go with a friend or two, get a drink, and talk as you scan the room. When a target has been identified, you walk over and chat her or him up. If after you exchange a few words there seems to be a connection, you graduate to the dance floor, where you try out the physical. If that works out, you leave together and mate (though he used a different term). Or, sometimes you don't [...] "What happens then?" I asked. "You feel rejected and go have a drink," he told me.
The specifics of this ritual are a mix of old and new and through the ages have been driven by human emotions like lust and love. Can we really learn anything about such human passions, I asked Anderson, by studying fruit flies? [...] Fruit flies, it turns out, follow a mating ritual that has surprising similarities to that of Nicolai and his friends.
In the fruit fly world, the male initiates the ritual by approaching the female. There are no pick up lines, of course. Instead he taps her with his foreleg. There is also music; he generates it by vibrating his wing (Grosjean Y, 2008). If the female accepts the advance, she will do nothing, and the male will take over from there. But not all female fruit flies are receptive; if a female already has a boyfriend--that is, if she has mated with a different male--she'll turn down the advance. She does that either by striking him with her wings or legs or running away. And now the punch line: as I said, fruit flies favor alcohol, and if a male is rejected, and a source of alcohol is available, the male will be likely to respond, like Nicolai, by having a drink (Sexual deprivation increases ethanol intake in Drosophila, Shohat-Ophir G, 2012)
It's so funny. It's so fucking hilarious. I remember just reading this passage and just burst out laughing. So much for the human ego! It just appears in my head the people I would like to tell this story about so I can surface an inside joke "Haha, you are certainly going to engage in fruit fly courtship activities aren't you?"
Though, I know some people whose Ego can be absolutely damaged by this simple fact. Their ego is much bigger than that of a fruit fly. They do not want any resemblance or even near to a fruit fly, yet embracing the fact and making fun of the fact should be okay. I mean, so what if it's a fruit fly courtship behavior? You have your feelings and fruit flies have their own depressive rejection of a feeling and craving for alcohol too and that's the end of that. It's all the properties of emotions that we share among all animals. A fact is just a fact and that's the end of it. If anything, it is nice to know, it helps us understand ourselves even more. In the next chapter I will tell you the mesh between "computing power of an intelligence" and "key" role in emotions on how emotions enriches our life.
Embracing Emotions.
A bit roundabout but it briefly explains the "nature" of parental love and how it's literally a must to do and how feelings of "affection" appear outwardly not only within humans but also in again--DOGS! As I quote from the book, Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow:
Consider the feelings we have about that by-product of mating that we call babies. About two million years ago our ancestor Homo Erectus evolved a much larger skull, which allowed for expansion of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes of the brain. That gave us, like a new smartphone model, a great boost in our computing power. But it also caused problems, because unlike a smartphone, a brand-new human has to slide down the birth canal of an older human, and it has to be supported by the mother's own metabolic activity until that blissful moment. As a result of such challenges, human babies make their exit earlier than is normal primates--a human pregnancy would have to last eighteen months to allow the brain of a human child to be as developed as that of a chimpanzee when it is born, by which time the baby would be too large to exit the birth canal. The earlier exit solves some problems, but it causes others. Because the human brain at birth is not very well developed (only 25 percent of adult size, as opposed to 40-50 percent for an infant chimp), human parents are burdened with a child who will remain helpless for many years--about twice as many years as a baby chimp.
Caring for that helpless child is a major life challenge. [...] Why do we get up three times a night to feed our kids? Why do we take pains to wipe up their poop, and remind ourselves to lock the cabinet that contains the silver polish that looks like a bottle of Gatorade? Evolution has provided a motivating emotion for all that work: parental love
Each of our emotions, when it occurs, alters our thinking in a manner that fulfils some evolutionary purposes. Our parental love is as surely a cog in the machine of human life as is mating anxiety in the life of the ruddy duck. That we love our children because evolution has manipulated us to do so doesn't diminish that love. It merely reveals the origin of that gift that so enriches our lives.
Darwin, trying to puzzle out the role of emotion [...], believing that he could glean insight into the purpose of emotions by focusing on the outward signs--those muscle movements and configurations, especially in the face, that had inspired the coining of the term itself--he took copious notes on animals' seeming humanlike expressions of feeling. He became convinced that animals "are excited by the same emotions as ourselves" and that the outward signs of emotion served to communicate those feelings, enabling a kind of mind reading among animals lacked the capacity for language. [...] In his dog's gaze Darwin believed he saw the emotion of love.
Ah FUCK! What an amazing piece. Ok I can't stop here, I must also insert Paul Dirac story on how much the greatest physicist of the twentieth century emphasised the role of his emotions in his life.
Paul Dirac playxed a key role in shaping our modern world, for the electronics, computer, communications, and internet technologies that dominate our societies are all based on his theories. [...]
Dirac's genius at matters of logic and rational thought made him one of the century's greatest thinkers, but equally striking was, as a young man, his utter lack of affinity or emotion in his interactions with his fellow human beings. Regarding people and their feelings, he proclaimed no interest. "I never knew love or affection when I was a child," Dirac told a friend, and he did not seek it as an adult. "My life is mainly concerned with facts, not feelings," he said.
Dirac was born in Bristol, England in 1902. [...] Dirac, his siblings, and his mother were all bullied by his father, who insisted that three children speak to him in his native French and never in English. [...] Dirac had trouble with that language, and his father punished him for every mistake. He soon learned to talk as little as possible, a reticence that continued into his early adulthood. [...] We humans evolved to exercise not purely rational thought but rational thought guided and inspired by emotion. Yet joy, hope, and love were largely missing from Dirac's coldly intellectual existence.
Then, in September 1934, Dirac travelled to Princeton to visit the Institute for Advanced Study. The day after he arrived, he walked to a restaurant called the Baltimore Dairy Lunch. There, he saw his fellow physicist Eugne Wigner sitting at a table with a well-groomed woman who was smoking a cigarette. She was Wigner's divorced sister, Margit, a lively woman with two young children with no aptitude for science. She was known as Manci. As she would later recount, Dirac, thin and gaunt, looked lost, sad, and disconcerted, and vulnerable. She felt bad for him and asked her brother to invite Dirac over to join them.
Manci was Dirac's antiparticle--talkative, emotional, artsy, and impulsive, while he was quiet, objective, and measured. Still, after that lunch, Dirac and Manci occasionally dined together. Eventually [...] their friendship deepened [...] And then, a few months later, Manci returned to her native Budapest, while Dirac returned to London.
Back home, Manci wrote to Dirac every few days. Long letters full of news, gossip, and most of all, feelings. Dirac answered with just a handful of sentences every few weeks. "I am afraid I cannot write such nice letters to you," he said, "perhaps because my feelings are so weak."
The lack of communication frustrated Manci, but Dirac didn't understand what was bothering her. [...] They continued to write and occasionally see each other. [...] After returning from one visit with Manci in Budapest, Dirac wrote, "I felt very sad leaving you and still feel that I miss you very much. I don't understand why this should be, as I do not usually miss people when I leave them." Soon after that, in January 1937, they were married, and Dirac adopted Manci's two children. In his marriage Dirac achieved a level of happiness he had never thought possible. [...]
In a letter to Manci, Dirac wrote, "Manci, my darling, you are very dear to me. You have made a wonderful alteration in my life. You have made me human." Dirac's feelings for Manci awakened him. Being out of touch with his feelings, Dirac had been living half a life. After finding Manci--and his emotional self--he looked at the world differently, related to others differently, made different decisions in life. He became, according to his colleagues, a different person.
Once he discovered emotion, Dirac grew to love the company of others, and--more important for our discussion here--he realised the beneficial effect of emotion on his professional thinking. In his mental life, this was Dirac's great epiphany. And so, as over the decades the most famous physicists of their generation approached the master for the secret to success in physics, what did he tell them? Farmello ended his 438-page biography of Dirac on just that topic. Be guided, he reported Dirac on just that topic. Be guided, he reported Dirac advising, "Above all, by your emotions."
Aaahhh, I remember by the time I finished reading those passages I was literally fangirling to Paul Dirac and was like "FUUUUUUUCKKKK, HE'S SO COOOOOLLLLL." Especially the part of "Manci, my darling, you are very dear to me. You have made a wonderful alteration in my life. You have made me human." Ah!
I think I'm quite an emotional person for sure, through the severity of the good and bad emotions, and with another tint of philosophical and intense desire to search for the "truth", I have become the writer of this article.
This article has surely helped me navigate the meaning between artificial intelligence, intelligence prior to AI, ego, and emotions, and how the Ego wanted to diminish the meaning of the word "intelligence" and held up high "emotions". Though I really believe, through understanding we can make peace of the absurdity of this world. As Schrödinger said: "Life is matter that actively counters nature's tendency toward increasing entropy.
There are obviously more than what we don't know about the world than what we know. And the world and our understanding about the world grows more absurd over time as metaphorically equally as entropy increases. The debate between what being "intelligent" really means as some people grow weary and frustrated about the rise of AIs that frighteningly seemingly want to "eclipse" humans civilization, it is of our best diligence to understand ourselves what does it mean to be human and differentiate what AI currently is. Even if it means acknowledging the properties that make us human are less "special"/unique than what some wish to be.