[Fis] First Author Response on Emotional Sentience

[Francesco Rizzo]

Dearest Pedro.
a hug and a prayer of good wishes: Lord, mercy, forgiveness and pity
your will be done.
Francis


Carissimo Pedro.
un abbraccio e una preghiera augurale: Signore, misericordia, perdono e
pietà
sia fatta la tua volontà.
Francesco


Il giorno dom 14 apr 2024 alle ore 11:58 Pedro C. Marijuán <
pedroc.marijuan en gmail.com> ha scritto:

> Dear All,
>
> I am coping with a sudden medical circumstance in my family. During some
> time I might rather disconnected.
>
> It is important that all FISers maintain the maximum of 3 messages per
> week. Please!
> For the new parties, the counting of messages starts on Monday and ends in
> Sunday (international business week).
>
> My best wishes to all of you,
>
> --Pedro
>
> El 13/04/2024 a las 10:01, Christophe Menant escribió:
>
> 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!V5QUgneDB3uGsNqPqH1arDZlq2A225EpFrBxRHrILFB5U6zDuFm6bULVePqOf4N2BCgJtOKrPoPfjjM0YbOFHeI_WEQu$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://philpapers.org/rec/MENITA-7__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UJIeLe2_kaEJ3FepzdpsTvPaLzot4Xqm_MNyH1sZ5CCjAJBCYDNPJwCjrmGLp3t8i3jZvNxk2SO0kSHC5OgOk-dnorJa2RGz$>
>
>
>
> All the best
>
> Christophe
>
>
>
>
>
> *De :* Fis <fis-bounces en listas.unizar.es> <fis-bounces en listas.unizar.es> *De
> la part de* Katherine Peil Kauffman
> *Envoyé :* vendredi 12 avril 2024 23:51
> *À :* fis en 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!V5QUgneDB3uGsNqPqH1arDZlq2A225EpFrBxRHrILFB5U6zDuFm6bULVePqOf4N2BCgJtOKrPoPfjjM0YbOFHaGe--LS$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UrOOImUqXBY73N_YX3SxR-MgIlD5jlDLtJIrMcrLro_jTeBu_7Jo9wQLOa-hmn2q_8MZ6voGEDUtTR6VYA$>).
> As do the differences between Chimps and Bonobos, primate social systems
> arrange loosely by negative or positive emotion respectively. But our
> emotional roots actually go very much deeper, with the behaviors associated
> with the basic emotions observable in mammals if not reptiles. In fact, the
> wonderful single-celled creature Stentor exhibits several of these as well
> as Pavlovian learning (See Dennis Bray’s Wetware), and binary emotional
> signals can be traced all the way down to bacteria.
>
> *Plamen:* Thanks so much for backstage suggestions and examples for
> discussion. The films The Big Short and Wall Street, are indeed great
> examples of the destructive dynamics of greed, short-term profit, and a
> competitive, consumer and growth-only oriented economy on a planet with
> finite resources. The question of AI systems delivering therapy is huge
> too. Have you met Sophia?  (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(robot)__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!V5QUgneDB3uGsNqPqH1arDZlq2A225EpFrBxRHrILFB5U6zDuFm6bULVePqOf4N2BCgJtOKrPoPfjjM0YbOFHQfHsjT7$ 
> <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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