Emotion in Society of Mind

"Our earliest emotions are built-in processes in which inborn proto-specialists control what happens in our brains. Soon we learn to overrule those schemes, as our surroundings teach us what we ought to feel. Parents, teachers, friends, and finally our self-ideals impose upon us new rules for how to use the remnants of those early states: they teach us how and when to feel and show each kind of emotion sign. By the time we've passed through all those stages of development, our grown-up minds have been rebuilt too many times to remember or understand much of how it felt to be an infant."

Emotion

The above quote from Minsky's book, Society of Mind, shows that already twenty years ago when he wrote that book, he was considering seriously the role that these psychic states play in the mind. Emotional states seem older than rational states and processes. We see irrational animals getting angry under adequate circumstances, but we don't see them writing a philosophy book. It seems then that the first machines that show intelligence also must show emotions.

One problem I see with this approach, is that a theory of mind that takes into account emotions has to define emotions in an operational way, so we can implement them in a robot. Maybe Stanley Kubrick's AI, hit the right spot when the machine in the movie longed to find the mother that had abandoned him (it?).

I will read carefully what Prof. Minsky has to say about emotions in AI. Last night I saw Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg, and was brought to tears even though I had seen the movie many years ago already.

Love

One reason I have not considered emotions in my meditations on Information, is that even though I recognize the existence of Love, I think that this is a harder problem than the elucidation of the nature of Information. Since I do not have a theory to my satisfaction of what Information is, I have not considered seriously the question of , what is love? nevertheless I do have a definition of Love:

Love is communication through a noiseless channel.