[Fis] First Author Response on Emotional Sentience

[Karl Javorszky]

Last sentence from Eric
.... Can be useful if you go beyond binary...

May one suggest
... Can be useful if you calculate the liaison values parallel to the
calculations you presently use.

This has nothing to do with binary or hexadecimal. The more complicated but
more exact combined calculations can of course be transformed into a
programming language. Otherwise the contraption would not be rational and
would not work.

Do not mix the two aspects. It is conceptually possible to create and
simulate life in the form of cooperating finite automata. The algorithms
that drive this yet to be assembled meta-automaton will be written in a
mathematical language that will be converted into binary.


Eric Werner <eric.werner at oarf.org> schrieb am Sa., 13. Apr. 2024, 16:13:

> By the way, Kate, I’ve developed a formal theory of communication where
> language is operating on the representation state of agents. The cognitive
> representational state of agents includes formal definitions of intentions,
> of information and of value.
>
> Such a theory even applies to bacteria and ants. In that sense, my theory
> may actually support your theory.  However, as the representation of the
> world and intentions get more sophisticated and complex, the corresponding
> linguistic operators become much more complex.  It is doubtful that they
> can be reduced to binary relations.
> That being said, your theory may still have validity if you go beyond
> binary.
>
> Eric
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Apr 13, 2024, at 15:55, Eric Werner <eric.werner at oarf.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Kate,
>
> If you’re going to generalize your ideas to humans, I think there’s an
> intimate relationship between intentions and emotions.
>
> On first impression, at least it seems that you have a more of a
> reductionist program, tries to reduce emotions to some kind of elementary
> chemical processes -even in bacteria.
>
> However, I don’t think that human emotions are binary. I think they’re
> much more complex than that, and the occur in social settings that are more
> sophisticated than bacteria or ants.
>
> So I’m wondering how you will attempt to upgrade your theory from bacteria
> to humans?
>
> Simply saying that it works for humans, and that their emotions are binary
> in nature isn’t really to the point.
>
> I’m wondering what do you think of the intimate relationship between
> intentions and emotions?
>
> Do bacteria have intentions?
>
> Pedro has a fascinating account of laughter, which I don’t know if we can
> ascribe to bacteria.
>
> Bacteria may produce laughing gas , but that only has an effect on humans
> as far as I know !
>
> You put a lot of emphasis on fight or flight. But many emotions are more
> related to the formation of intentions in social contexts.
>
> Thanks for your focus on this topic I’m looking forward to your reply.
>
> -Eric
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Apr 13, 2024, at 10:01, Christophe Menant <christophe.menant at hotmail.fr>
> wrote:
>
> 
>
> Dear Kate,
>
> Thanks for your answer to our comments that allows interesting overview
> and synergy on different perspectives.
>
> Let me just add a brief comment about your “fundamental semantic
> information bit” that could be related to “binary good or bad feeling” by
> meaning generation.
>
> Good or bad feeling can be related to basic constraint satisfaction (stay
> alive, limit anxiety, look for happiness…). And the “fundamental semantic
> information bit” can be the meaning generated by the organism to trigger
> actions (physical or mental) leading to constraint satisfaction.
>
> If you are interested there is a short paper summarizing that at
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://philpapers.org/rec/MENITA-7__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Roy6TR_UiX6oWWlYxWyBT-95pgtDshu3u1kkAaDvUpmkF7F9cU2ljrfDTcOYTziq7fr-yA9XV-NHjXCNG6K2cL1rcz0$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://philpapers.org/rec/MENITA-7__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UJIeLe2_kaEJ3FepzdpsTvPaLzot4Xqm_MNyH1sZ5CCjAJBCYDNPJwCjrmGLp3t8i3jZvNxk2SO0kSHC5OgOk-dnorJa2RGz$>
>
>
>
> All the best
>
> Christophe
>
>
>
>
>
> *De :* Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> *De la part de* Katherine Peil
> Kauffman
> *Envoyé :* vendredi 12 avril 2024 23:51
> *À :* fis at listas.unizar.es
> *Objet :* [Fis] First Author Response on Emotional Sentience
>
>
>
> Dear FIS Community,
>
> Please forgive my delayed response as I’ve been out-of-state due to a
> family medical emergency. But that situation is stable now, and I can give
> this discussion the attention it deserves.
>
> I’d like to thank everyone for such engaging, inspiring, and compelling
> comments and questions. It’s a pleasure to experience each personalized
> offering, and an honor to embrace the many strands of focus, interest, and
> previous exploration they represent. I see myriad overlaps with the core
> idea: That emotion serves as the inaugural “self-regulatory” sensory system
> in all living creatures, an outgrowth of the earliest forms of
> sensory-motor control, genetic, epigenetic, and immune regulation.
> Subjectively, it provides a uniquely identity-relevant stream of
> information and coupled (self-correcting) behavioral actions. And so much
> more.
>
> Tomorrow (or soon), I’ll offer a more general response to the overlapping
> themes that have emerged, and within a framework that better describes the
> underlying metaphysic of my approach. But for today, I’d like to briefly
> address each of you, in the order received. (And if I have missed anyone,
> please resend your comments to me directly.)
>
>  *Marcus:* Great points, and yes stimulus-response behavior is central to
> my model. To my mind, the “cognitive” revolution in psychology overshadowed
> the importance of black-box behavioristic principles. But we could not have
> learning, let alone complex cognition, without some experience of binary
> pleasure and pain (Pavlov’s original “unconditioned stimulus-response pair”
> – what I call the *fundamental semantic information bit*.) But the
> soft-wired informational component of emotion does not make sense without
> also understanding its hard-wired behavioral counterpart. Also, while
> thermodynamics is an important bridge between physical happenings and
> agentic doings, I promise not to make that reductionist move. (What I mean
> by “self-regulation” implies something akin to a Maxwellian daemon,
> sensing, remembering and deciding). There is also much to say also about
>  exploration and wanderlust, but for now I’ll just note that they are
> intrinsically rewarding because of the positive emotional valence serves
> the self-regulatory purpose of adaptive self-development – and all that it
> implies in terms of physical, psychosocial, moral and spiritual human
> development.
>
> *Francesco:* I love your concept of emotional rationality (as a dimension
> of emotional intelligence). The legacy of Cartesian dualism sadly pits
> emotion against reason, when there are very deep and biologically
> meaningful “emotional reasons” that have thus far remained opaque to
> science. I heartily agree that we need a new science of value, central to
> my mission! Please do share what your approach. Indeed, our emotional
> biology delivers the Platonic appreciation for The Good, The True and The
> Beautiful, as well as clarity on Justice that can help better inform The
> Legal.
>
> *Gordana:* Thanks for the great article on the Sentient Cell. I’m
> thrilled to see this line of thinking becoming more mainstream. Our
> experience of emotion is like a course graining of  myriad layers of
> self-regulatory processes – at molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, neural,
> mental and social levels. While the embodied chemistry is well established,
> now Levin’s work demonstrates a deeper electromagnetic layer of stimulus
> and regulatory control. I will look to you as my guru on ethics!
>
> *Aaron:* Thanks so much for your pioneering work on basal intelligence!
> I’d wish I’d known about it early on. Ganti’s Chemoton model, along Ashby’s
> Homeostat, were early inspirations! As were Hume’s view on moral sentiments
> and Kant’s view of parts and wholes! As an elder in this community, its an
> honor to engage with you here. I look forward to sitting at your knee and
> embracing your seasoned wisdom. I’ve love to discuss the role of affect in
> AI, and/or its intersection with the immune system (distress and eustress),
> inflammation, and placebo and nocebo effects.
>
> *Karl*: Your mathematical insights about process, sequence, and
> transitive ordering resonate very deeply. While I’m hardly math literate,
> I’m a closet Platonist in my appreciation for maths as a primal language
> for The Book of Nature. There is something key here about self-reference
> and “incongruence” that I’d like to understand better, as well as your
> point about transitive sorting. I hope my Tao process metaphor helps you
> fit them in the proper place, as I see commutative as residing in one
> sphere and additive in another, same with index and sequential retrieval.
> Ultimately, I’d love to hear your thoughts on Fibonacci sequences, phi (The
> Golden Mean) and fractal geometry in pattern formation.
>
> *Joe:* I hope to clarify what I mean by “logic” as there are entire
> philosophical spheres that are foreign to me. I’m most curious about your
> Predicate logic as I hear lovely consonance within my Tao story (that I’ll
> share tomorrow) in your complements of being and becoming, change and
> stability, internal and external, self and not-self. Please feel free to
> straighten me out (logic-wise, conceptually and linguistically) when I try
> to describe the binary computational process. I need to invent some term
> like “eduction” to add to deduction, induction, and abduction – although
> emotion has a role in each.
>
> *Eric:* Thank you for making my task easier! Your comments about the
> nature and structure of identity are spot on. So too for the significance
> of both *attachment* and *boundaries* in optimal social relations and
> psychosocial development. The critical – epigenetic - development windows
> are key to many physiological and psychological disturbances and lasting
> traumas. You are prescient in your comments about communication as a
> fundamental form of action. Learning is also a primary form of adaptive
> action. Both learning and communication are what I call “right responses’,
>  optimal mindful creative actions that “right oneself”- rebalance the
> self-world relationship - in response to emotional experiences. As creators
> of culture, we humans have been doing this for eons. They are the
> conscious, intentional, cooperative “soft-wired” alternatives to hardwired
> , competitive, “fight and flight” behavioral defenses. This is where the
> three distinct levels of self-regulatory information become key. Once the
> foundational binary value system is embraced (a subjective link to the
> criteria for natural selection), a lovely virtue ethics falls from our
> emotional biology, complete with universally optimal (self-actualizing) or
> deficient (self-destructive) trajectories in both individual and social
> realms.
>
> *Stu:* Thank you for raising the question about complex emotions such as
> schadenfreude. This is most important as both the chemistry of emotion and
> the hardwired behavioral impulses can be invested in destructive activity –
> and hijacked by emotionally manipulative others when the mind is not
> heeding the informational component. For example, us-versus-them tribalism
> is something we should have evolved away from long ago. It is
> self-destructive on both personal and social levels. It is an ideology that
> is not attuned to the egalitarian ecological values of nature, as all
> living systems have both identity and social dimensions of personal
> identity. Both a “me” and “we” self is being regulated from bacteria, slime
> molds, and up to humans, with the simple pleasure~pain semantic honoring
> each equally across time and space. But with humans, our need to bond with
> others is so powerful that we get a nice dopamine hit when an “enemy” or
> “other” experiences pain. This is fully a function of limited identity
> beliefs, but given how emotion-driven ego defenses are forged upon our
> embodied immune defense it is a predictable pitfall our emotional
> illiteracy and ignorance.
>
> *Alex*: Great to have you here. I agree with that Stu’s instincts are top
> notch - but not second to none at our house! Haha! And let’s not throw out
> the digital baby with the bathwater, as it may be significant to your stuff
> on quantum criticality – which I find to be brilliant, and hope to hear
> about in this context.
>
> *Carlos*: Thanks for your prescient work as well! I’ve just discovered
> your model, and you’ve captured something intriguing about the core
> distinction between basic and complex emotion. Indeed, the biology of
> emotion has plenty of implications for the development of AI. Your graduate
> student’s work on social isolation versus early socialization in dyadic
> relationships reflects some of the predictable emotional dynamics in terms
> of syncing in cooperative collectives. This is one lovely outcome of our
> universal preference for pursuing evermore complex pleasure – the emergence
> of evermore complex, ordered and cooperative collectives. Are you familiar
> with Kelso’s coordination dynamics? Deep stuff  on bodily movement and
> synced behavior.
>
> *Christophe:* Thanks for pointing out the roots of emotion in our primate
> ancestors.  The late great Franz de Waal’s iconic video of our sense of
> fairness and justice – mediated by basic anger – speaks volumes
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Roy6TR_UiX6oWWlYxWyBT-95pgtDshu3u1kkAaDvUpmkF7F9cU2ljrfDTcOYTziq7fr-yA9XV-NHjXCNG6K2DgTglQY$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UrOOImUqXBY73N_YX3SxR-MgIlD5jlDLtJIrMcrLro_jTeBu_7Jo9wQLOa-hmn2q_8MZ6voGEDUtTR6VYA$>).
> As do the differences between Chimps and Bonobos, primate social systems
> arrange loosely by negative or positive emotion respectively. But our
> emotional roots actually go very much deeper, with the behaviors associated
> with the basic emotions observable in mammals if not reptiles. In fact, the
> wonderful single-celled creature Stentor exhibits several of these as well
> as Pavlovian learning (See Dennis Bray’s Wetware), and binary emotional
> signals can be traced all the way down to bacteria.
>
> *Plamen:* Thanks so much for backstage suggestions and examples for
> discussion. The films The Big Short and Wall Street, are indeed great
> examples of the destructive dynamics of greed, short-term profit, and a
> competitive, consumer and growth-only oriented economy on a planet with
> finite resources. The question of AI systems delivering therapy is huge
> too. Have you met Sophia?  (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(robot)__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Roy6TR_UiX6oWWlYxWyBT-95pgtDshu3u1kkAaDvUpmkF7F9cU2ljrfDTcOYTziq7fr-yA9XV-NHjXCNG6K2qECAp9I$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(robot)__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UrOOImUqXBY73N_YX3SxR-MgIlD5jlDLtJIrMcrLro_jTeBu_7Jo9wQLOa-hmn2q_8MZ6voGEDVN4y8toQ$>.
>  I see some benefit as a supplement to human therapy, particularly as it
> concerns learning what information the various emotions are offering, the
> universal needs they represent, the personal and social strategies for
> meeting them, and the optimal responses they suggest. This part can be
> quite “algorithmic”. But nothing can replace the therapeutic effects of
> genuine human emotional connection, the synchronicity and improvisational
> serendipity of flow. (I also thought of the new book Rural Rage, as a good
> example as it parses the difference between anger, resentment and rage –
> and how they can harnessed for political gain.) So many roads to choose, so
> little - and precious - time. I will rely on your judgement as the
> discussion unfolds.
>
> *Pedro:* Thank you so much for appreciating my work and being “the man
> behind the curtain”, jumping in with just the right responses when I could
> not. Again, I wish I’d known about your take on information way back in the
> day, your 2003 paper is still so far ahead of its time. When this is all
> over, I will miss you like Dorothy misses the Scarecrow.
>
> Until tomorrow or soonish,
>
> Kate
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