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Subject: Re: Minsky's work on emotions
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Sam Brown (samb@phil-engl.dundee.ac.uk) wrote:
: I had a newspaper clipping from last December which stated that Marvin 
: Minsky was about to release a book entitled "The Emotion Machine".  I 
: have searched archives and wholesalers, but no-one has heard of it.  Is 
: it a mirage?

: Can anyone give me a reference for Minsky's position on emotion?  I 
: think I can make an educated guess, but I'd rather see a tangible 
: assertion.


This is a brilliant seed-post.

Lets see how close the Society of AI Minds can get to simulating Minsky
before his book comes out and shows how poor a job of it we did...

Like so:

(I haven't ever touched much Minsky, so forgive me if my style-vector
anneals into a different attractor-basin than His...)

First, from Chapter Zero ("The Precursors Of Emotion"),
halfway down page 17 of THE EMOTION MACHINE:

    Some of my colleagues still are under the impression that emotions are
like the colors of the artists' palette, infinite in their subtle gradations,
unlimited in range, possessing some magical expressiveness which (ugh!) mere
words can only rudely approximate, in a manner akin to roads which allow
only so much of a wilderness to be accessible by RV (Winnebago), and then one
must like Tiny Tim take off ones skiboots to fully "appreciate" the
"richness" and "sublime subtlety" of whatever emotion Mother Nature, in Her
Infinite Fecundity has come up with *this* time.

... skipping a bit ...

    Indeed, just as any color which can be seen, and thereby communicated,
can be described by the three parameters of luminance, chroma, and hue,
any emotion is a simple 17-vector in Minsky-space, and furthermore, our
group at MIT has shown that humans are virtually insensitive to 14 of these.


... on to page 19 where we find ...

    The Primary Complex Emotions are:  anger at stupid people, desire to
kill, desire to eat, anger at specific inanimate objects, anger at
unspecified scapegoats, laughter at things one does not understand at all,
avoidance of ridicule, feelings of inadequacy, and recognition of "beauty".

The last PCE is, of course, dealt with to death in my previous book, and has
become such a boring topic that I shall not trouble you with any further 
dissection of its transparently simple mechanism, save to note that every 
person I have every met who found things to be "mindblowing" had at some time
or another taken drugs of one kind of another, and I shall fully explain drugs
in my next book, due sometime in 2001 according to my programmers' timetable.



BTW is it true that MM contributed to the design of the claw-arms on the
EVA Pods in the movie version of 2001?  (I read this factoid somewhere 
hereabouts last week.)  Not something for the resume!  Those manipulators were 
nearly useless, except as pusher-shovers, and for grabbing the doorknobs,
which were co-designed to mate with those not-so-"handy" gripper-paddles
in-the-form-of-a-depth-2-binary-tree-as-if-that-was-a-cosmic-design-symbolism.

      \ 
       \               __/
        \                \   /
         \                O--
          \              /   \
           \            /
            |          /
            |=========O
            |=========O
            |    
           /             


             I felt like Dave fetching Frank while drawing that!
             Looking at my reflection in the screen,
             while NETCOM echoed my characters back so delayed that
             I was going way too far and then backing up too far and then...
             Ah, finally, got these damn manips to look halfway right!




17 12:58 30sep96   I could work on the picture for 7 hrs and 3 minutes more
                   but "it's a rather good rendering" don't you think?


-- 

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                      May the best hallucination win.


          I want a God who takes responsibility for His mistakes.

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