“I laughed so hard, I cried.”
Guess what? We don’t always have distinct emotional responses. We’re a mix of feelings. Anything new here? Well, maybe not, but now there’s evidence for what we all know. Emotions can grade one into another. Feelings aren’t simple. There is gray.
Here’s the Science News headline: “Psychologists Identify Twenty-Seven Distinct Categories of Emotion.”* The senior author of the study, Professor Dacher Keltner, notes, “...in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an island, we found that there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration.” Feel justified and proud that you knew this and that you were so happy at the last wedding that you cried? That at the last funeral you felt both remorse and release or peace and despair?
We’re complex. Maybe too complex to ever quantify, regardless of the number of studies we perform on ourselves to identify our emotional states. That’s one of the reasons that I personally doubt that AI will ever reach human status. How does one program artificial intelligence for an infinity of gray shades? Maybe the best we can hope for is a robot that is stuck in a variant of Rain Man.
Think of an infinity you can understand, such as the number of fractions between two whole numbers, as Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor explained. There you are, sliding from one-sixth to one six-hundred-millionth or from 2 to 2.11 to 2.11111112323..... And there I am, sliding with you, close to feeling what you feel, though I might be a billionth of an emotion different.
That’s us. Sliding on a scale that robots might never “understand” or “feel.” Program as many variants of “feeling happy while feeling sad” into a machine, and still you might not get to a particular fractional feeling or shade of emotional gray experienced by a human.
Do you simultaneously feel elated, perplexed, proud, humble, and confident because you are human? Anytime you concern yourself with your finite existence, think of those infinite fractions of feelings you have had and can have. Want infinity? Feel it.
* http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/psychology/27-categories-emotion-05212.html
Guess what? We don’t always have distinct emotional responses. We’re a mix of feelings. Anything new here? Well, maybe not, but now there’s evidence for what we all know. Emotions can grade one into another. Feelings aren’t simple. There is gray.
Here’s the Science News headline: “Psychologists Identify Twenty-Seven Distinct Categories of Emotion.”* The senior author of the study, Professor Dacher Keltner, notes, “...in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an island, we found that there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration.” Feel justified and proud that you knew this and that you were so happy at the last wedding that you cried? That at the last funeral you felt both remorse and release or peace and despair?
We’re complex. Maybe too complex to ever quantify, regardless of the number of studies we perform on ourselves to identify our emotional states. That’s one of the reasons that I personally doubt that AI will ever reach human status. How does one program artificial intelligence for an infinity of gray shades? Maybe the best we can hope for is a robot that is stuck in a variant of Rain Man.
Think of an infinity you can understand, such as the number of fractions between two whole numbers, as Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor explained. There you are, sliding from one-sixth to one six-hundred-millionth or from 2 to 2.11 to 2.11111112323..... And there I am, sliding with you, close to feeling what you feel, though I might be a billionth of an emotion different.
That’s us. Sliding on a scale that robots might never “understand” or “feel.” Program as many variants of “feeling happy while feeling sad” into a machine, and still you might not get to a particular fractional feeling or shade of emotional gray experienced by a human.
Do you simultaneously feel elated, perplexed, proud, humble, and confident because you are human? Anytime you concern yourself with your finite existence, think of those infinite fractions of feelings you have had and can have. Want infinity? Feel it.
* http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/psychology/27-categories-emotion-05212.html
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