newnumber6 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
newnumber6) wrote2006-02-05 05:10 pm
newnumber6) wrote2006-02-05 05:10 pm
Entry tags:
Random Foo of the Week
This week, we have the '6 social interaction report', links that caught my eye, a fragment of dream foo, and some thoughts on emotion. As usual, a lack of segues.
Homeland Security is finally after the real threat to the US... vegans!. It seems odd that merely writing down the license plate of an undercover vehicle is a criminal offense. I mean, it's out in public. They can spy on you but you can't know about them? Okay, in real crime there might be a reason to avoid it, but if they're going to go out on bull$#!% stuff like this they should at least have James Bond style quick-change license plates. If the security of your operation can be threatened by a vegan with a pad of paper, something's wrong with you.
Yahoo, AOL charge fee for 'guaranteed e-mail delivery'. So if you have these and you don't get an e-mail from me, it's THEIR FAULT. They say it'll help them to reduce spam. But hey, geniuses - spam constantly gets through all your filters ALREADY. Charging companies who (theoretically, according to the terms of the agreement) who DON'T SPAM a fee to bypass spamfilters and other blocks ain't going to help a whole lot. If you use yahoo-mail, flee, flee for your lives!
The 6 social interaction report! So, today was work, of course. Aside from the people there I usually interact with just because I work with them or right in their area, there were a couple other ones of note.
Two girls who were in the staff room before the shift. Although by 'interact' I mean 'said maybe 10 words overall'. Mostly I just sat there. When there was only one there at first I didn't say anything. When the other one showed up they talked to each other and eventually made a comment about me just listening to them and thinking they were crazy (it was boyfriend related stuff. As usual I couldn't think of anything to say, although when one or the other left for a few moments I exchanged a few words of conversation (question-answering) with the one left, and then when the truck finally arrived I excused myself verbally. That counts, right? Ehh. Call it a failure.
Also cute pixie-faced work girl (not one of the two above) said hello to in passing at work, and then, surprise, while I was at the grocery store taking advantage of one day super bowl deals (I, like all good-hearted people, hate the Super Bowl and almost everything connected to it, but I will take advantage of the deals on chips and pop and such), I randomly ran into her. We said hello and talked a little... mostly _about_ work granted, but at least it wasn't 'well, we're both at work waiting for something, might as well talk'. On the minus side, I still felt awkward as I do with almost all real life conversations and probably looked like I was anxious to get away when I would have been willing to talk a lot longer. Of course, she was there to see someone who worked there, probably a boyfriend although it wasn't specified. Not that there's anything beyond an idle fancy even if she was single anyway (or of course that there'd be any chance). Anyway, I'll rate the whole interaction as 'mixed, leaning towards positive'.
Dream Foo: Nothingmuch to report in the way of details, but I believe it was Stargate-heavy.
I was thinking the other day about emotions, and specifically the fact that for the most part we can't control them. (I've mentioned before that I can turn off things like disgust and sort of put myself in a zen state and look at or think about pretty disgusting stuff without being at all bothered, but I can't do that to get rid of depression or immediately cut out anger no matter how much I try). Anyway, this lack of control, that's pretty much the only reason I can find why we so value them.
I mean, imagine for a moment a being that could control their emotions. I don't mean they can merely control their reactions, but literally control their emotions like a switch. If they don't want to be angry, they're simply not. If they want to be happy, hey, they're happy.
I should stress that I'm drawing a distinction between 'emotions' and 'intellectual likes and dislikes'. For example, if you like tacos (mmmmm, tacos), it isn't an emotion in and of itself. The eating of tacos, or thinking about tacos, will involve some emotions, and likewise emotions will influence your likes and dislikes, but they're not the same. With this emotional control power, you couldn't turn off your 'I like tacos' knowledge, you'd have to alter/suppress the emotions you get when you think about tacos repeatedly until your like disappears or changes. That is, emotions only directly affect your first order desires (I want tacos now) rather than general tendencies (I like tacos). You probably could alter your intellectual likes or dislikes by applying emotional control on your second order desires (I want to like tacos), but it's much harder and sort of pointless. Substitute 'justice' for 'tacos' at will in the above, as the two are generally interchangeable anyway. So, I don't think being able to control your emotions would necessarily lead you to doing absolutely nothing with your life (at least, not for everybody... certainly some people would merely press the pleasure button and bliss out the rest of their lives, but they'd be weeded out of the gene pool sooner or later).
Now, here's the tricky part. Complete control over emotions is functionally the same as a lack of emotions - You might have a set of goals, but they're goals in an intellectual sense, because if your goals are purely emotional, then you can either eliminate the goals or satisfy them immediately - presumably someone with this control would be happy all the time. Well, unless of course you hold to the theory that some emotions aren't emotions of their own, but the sudden lack of other emotions - that, say, happiness is the sudden lack of negative feelings, but with prolonged happiness you haven't had the negative feelings to contrast. Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent.
What I mean is, your behaviour would be to satisfy your intellectual goals, just like an intelligent creature without emotion at all (and just like people with normal emotions). They'd just use emotion to help satisfy the goals where it helps them. In fact, under this situation, to all outside appearances, your emotion might as well be entirely fake, a show to put on for others. If your goal is to eliminate person X, deliberately filling yourself with anger in order to accomplish it isn't really all that different from cold-bloodedly going about it and pretending to be angry to attempt to get a 'in the heat of the moment' defense. If someone's goal includes liking somebody, then Emotional Control Man likes them until liking them is detrimental to that or some other goal, whereupon Emotional Control Man doesn't like them... not much different from Emotional Faker man pretending to like them so long as it's convenient. (There is a slight difference in that there's potential that if Emotional Control Man genuinely likes you, he may be a little more hesitant to turn off that pleasant emotion in order to screw you over, even if it satisfies his goals. But when push comes to shove, it's probably about the same) So is it only real because it's not in your control? I mean, to Emotional Control Man it feels absolutely real. It is, by the definition of the situation, a 'real emotion'. Yet I think we wouldn't consider it the same, because the goal would influence the emotion rather than the emotion influencing the goal.
As I said, most intelligent people with this ability would probably wind up only with logical goals. It'd be so much easier to simply eliminate the desire for revenge than to go about and try to achieve it - you'd only take revenge if you can find some reason beyond emotion that it needs to be taken. If other people with the same abilities exist, you could cooperate to most goals fairly easily - want to procreate and raise a child? Find someone with a similar interest, simply agree, and both fall madly in love with each other and sexually attracted to each other. For all the emotion potentially flying around (and that's just assuming that people don't just shut off most of their emotions completely most of the time), it could be a remarkably sterile place.
If my thinking on this is correct, then a) in order to create emotions in AI, they'd have to be prevented from controlling them, and b) if we ever get the ability to alter our emotions on a large scale through pharmaceuticals, we may essentially rob ourselves, as a society, of 'actual' emotional behaviour.
Now, I do tend to agree that this lack of control over emotions is desirable, but I have to move beyond this and question why. We all claim to want free will, and wouldn't this be the freest sort of will at all? The best analogy I can think of is that of fiction. Nobody wants to read fiction where a character does whatever they want without any problems. I remember back in the early days of XET we had the classic bad app of the character who had the mutant power that she could do whatever she imagined she could do. Obviously it was rejected, not just because of game balance issues, but because it's boring. You can't do plots around a character who can do whatever they want, at best you can do plots around people reacting to that (and even those are likely going to suck unless you give Miss Omnipotent some restrictions). Likewise, although we want freedom, theoretically we don't want to be able to do whatever we want without restriction. (Although one might think here's where the analogy breaks down because perhaps you, like I, want phenomenal godlike power. But for me at least, I want the power to _do_ what I want and while still being fundamentally me - that is the restriction, and it's a bigger one than you'd think).
Of course, if we already _had_ this ability, we either _would_ grow to want this ability or we'd decide to use it very sparingly.
You might think I'm going towards a point. Well, you'd be wrong! It's just random mind-wandering, and I'm done now. That is the essense of Random Foo of the week. But feel free to reply and discuss if you agree/disagree with anything I've said.
Homeland Security is finally after the real threat to the US... vegans!. It seems odd that merely writing down the license plate of an undercover vehicle is a criminal offense. I mean, it's out in public. They can spy on you but you can't know about them? Okay, in real crime there might be a reason to avoid it, but if they're going to go out on bull$#!% stuff like this they should at least have James Bond style quick-change license plates. If the security of your operation can be threatened by a vegan with a pad of paper, something's wrong with you.
Yahoo, AOL charge fee for 'guaranteed e-mail delivery'. So if you have these and you don't get an e-mail from me, it's THEIR FAULT. They say it'll help them to reduce spam. But hey, geniuses - spam constantly gets through all your filters ALREADY. Charging companies who (theoretically, according to the terms of the agreement) who DON'T SPAM a fee to bypass spamfilters and other blocks ain't going to help a whole lot. If you use yahoo-mail, flee, flee for your lives!
The 6 social interaction report! So, today was work, of course. Aside from the people there I usually interact with just because I work with them or right in their area, there were a couple other ones of note.
Two girls who were in the staff room before the shift. Although by 'interact' I mean 'said maybe 10 words overall'. Mostly I just sat there. When there was only one there at first I didn't say anything. When the other one showed up they talked to each other and eventually made a comment about me just listening to them and thinking they were crazy (it was boyfriend related stuff. As usual I couldn't think of anything to say, although when one or the other left for a few moments I exchanged a few words of conversation (question-answering) with the one left, and then when the truck finally arrived I excused myself verbally. That counts, right? Ehh. Call it a failure.
Also cute pixie-faced work girl (not one of the two above) said hello to in passing at work, and then, surprise, while I was at the grocery store taking advantage of one day super bowl deals (I, like all good-hearted people, hate the Super Bowl and almost everything connected to it, but I will take advantage of the deals on chips and pop and such), I randomly ran into her. We said hello and talked a little... mostly _about_ work granted, but at least it wasn't 'well, we're both at work waiting for something, might as well talk'. On the minus side, I still felt awkward as I do with almost all real life conversations and probably looked like I was anxious to get away when I would have been willing to talk a lot longer. Of course, she was there to see someone who worked there, probably a boyfriend although it wasn't specified. Not that there's anything beyond an idle fancy even if she was single anyway (or of course that there'd be any chance). Anyway, I'll rate the whole interaction as 'mixed, leaning towards positive'.
Dream Foo: Nothingmuch to report in the way of details, but I believe it was Stargate-heavy.
I was thinking the other day about emotions, and specifically the fact that for the most part we can't control them. (I've mentioned before that I can turn off things like disgust and sort of put myself in a zen state and look at or think about pretty disgusting stuff without being at all bothered, but I can't do that to get rid of depression or immediately cut out anger no matter how much I try). Anyway, this lack of control, that's pretty much the only reason I can find why we so value them.
I mean, imagine for a moment a being that could control their emotions. I don't mean they can merely control their reactions, but literally control their emotions like a switch. If they don't want to be angry, they're simply not. If they want to be happy, hey, they're happy.
I should stress that I'm drawing a distinction between 'emotions' and 'intellectual likes and dislikes'. For example, if you like tacos (mmmmm, tacos), it isn't an emotion in and of itself. The eating of tacos, or thinking about tacos, will involve some emotions, and likewise emotions will influence your likes and dislikes, but they're not the same. With this emotional control power, you couldn't turn off your 'I like tacos' knowledge, you'd have to alter/suppress the emotions you get when you think about tacos repeatedly until your like disappears or changes. That is, emotions only directly affect your first order desires (I want tacos now) rather than general tendencies (I like tacos). You probably could alter your intellectual likes or dislikes by applying emotional control on your second order desires (I want to like tacos), but it's much harder and sort of pointless. Substitute 'justice' for 'tacos' at will in the above, as the two are generally interchangeable anyway. So, I don't think being able to control your emotions would necessarily lead you to doing absolutely nothing with your life (at least, not for everybody... certainly some people would merely press the pleasure button and bliss out the rest of their lives, but they'd be weeded out of the gene pool sooner or later).
Now, here's the tricky part. Complete control over emotions is functionally the same as a lack of emotions - You might have a set of goals, but they're goals in an intellectual sense, because if your goals are purely emotional, then you can either eliminate the goals or satisfy them immediately - presumably someone with this control would be happy all the time. Well, unless of course you hold to the theory that some emotions aren't emotions of their own, but the sudden lack of other emotions - that, say, happiness is the sudden lack of negative feelings, but with prolonged happiness you haven't had the negative feelings to contrast. Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent.
What I mean is, your behaviour would be to satisfy your intellectual goals, just like an intelligent creature without emotion at all (and just like people with normal emotions). They'd just use emotion to help satisfy the goals where it helps them. In fact, under this situation, to all outside appearances, your emotion might as well be entirely fake, a show to put on for others. If your goal is to eliminate person X, deliberately filling yourself with anger in order to accomplish it isn't really all that different from cold-bloodedly going about it and pretending to be angry to attempt to get a 'in the heat of the moment' defense. If someone's goal includes liking somebody, then Emotional Control Man likes them until liking them is detrimental to that or some other goal, whereupon Emotional Control Man doesn't like them... not much different from Emotional Faker man pretending to like them so long as it's convenient. (There is a slight difference in that there's potential that if Emotional Control Man genuinely likes you, he may be a little more hesitant to turn off that pleasant emotion in order to screw you over, even if it satisfies his goals. But when push comes to shove, it's probably about the same) So is it only real because it's not in your control? I mean, to Emotional Control Man it feels absolutely real. It is, by the definition of the situation, a 'real emotion'. Yet I think we wouldn't consider it the same, because the goal would influence the emotion rather than the emotion influencing the goal.
As I said, most intelligent people with this ability would probably wind up only with logical goals. It'd be so much easier to simply eliminate the desire for revenge than to go about and try to achieve it - you'd only take revenge if you can find some reason beyond emotion that it needs to be taken. If other people with the same abilities exist, you could cooperate to most goals fairly easily - want to procreate and raise a child? Find someone with a similar interest, simply agree, and both fall madly in love with each other and sexually attracted to each other. For all the emotion potentially flying around (and that's just assuming that people don't just shut off most of their emotions completely most of the time), it could be a remarkably sterile place.
If my thinking on this is correct, then a) in order to create emotions in AI, they'd have to be prevented from controlling them, and b) if we ever get the ability to alter our emotions on a large scale through pharmaceuticals, we may essentially rob ourselves, as a society, of 'actual' emotional behaviour.
Now, I do tend to agree that this lack of control over emotions is desirable, but I have to move beyond this and question why. We all claim to want free will, and wouldn't this be the freest sort of will at all? The best analogy I can think of is that of fiction. Nobody wants to read fiction where a character does whatever they want without any problems. I remember back in the early days of XET we had the classic bad app of the character who had the mutant power that she could do whatever she imagined she could do. Obviously it was rejected, not just because of game balance issues, but because it's boring. You can't do plots around a character who can do whatever they want, at best you can do plots around people reacting to that (and even those are likely going to suck unless you give Miss Omnipotent some restrictions). Likewise, although we want freedom, theoretically we don't want to be able to do whatever we want without restriction. (Although one might think here's where the analogy breaks down because perhaps you, like I, want phenomenal godlike power. But for me at least, I want the power to _do_ what I want and while still being fundamentally me - that is the restriction, and it's a bigger one than you'd think).
Of course, if we already _had_ this ability, we either _would_ grow to want this ability or we'd decide to use it very sparingly.
You might think I'm going towards a point. Well, you'd be wrong! It's just random mind-wandering, and I'm done now. That is the essense of Random Foo of the week. But feel free to reply and discuss if you agree/disagree with anything I've said.
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And I am super ninja guy in person. The problem is, ninjas are not really renowned for their social skills. You never hear, "Hey, the other day I was at this great dinner party a ninja friend threw." or, "My, you're such a charming ninja." It's always, "Hmmm, no ninjas here, good." or "Did you hear something?" "No..." "Oh, it was probably just the wind.", or "Hey, is that a ni.. (choking sounds as ninja attacks)". So in person I can hide and do other ninja things well, but carry on a conversation? Nope.
More seriously, I'm nowhere near as interesting in real life as online. Online I have the advantage of being able to take time to think of what I'm going to say, and do so without mumblng or being overly conscious of facial expressions, etc.
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