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From: marty@indirect.com (Marty Stoneman)
Subject: Re: Human Emotion & AI...
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Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 17:01:47 GMT
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Mike Reddy (mreddy@comp.glamorgan.ac.uk) wrote:

	[snip]

:  A completely lay and personal view is that emotions are at the root of
: human (and animal) cognition, but the mechanism is very well buried and
: not so easy to represent as formal logic, etc. The question I have is
: whether emotions are an emergent phenomenon or if can they be "extracted"
: and represented in the abstract. Being a devotee of Artificial Life, I
: have my own bias towards the former.

	IMHO, try both emergent and "extracted".  A private project with
which I was associated in the '80's, on an intermediate-systems-level
basis, built up from simulated animal systems to human, programming many
subsystems to run in parallel, with about a dozen "emotions" programming
in theoretically-selected subsystems.  The resulting virtual robot, with
simulated facial muscles to show "emotion", was demo'd to show VERY
humanlike response patterns (including emotional patterns). 
Unfortunately, our demo was apparently dismissed at the time by the
academics and alife people who saw it as "impossible and therefore faked". 
For business reasons, we offered examination of the code on a confidential
basis, but that was refused.  However, if Greg Stevens wants some help
from our unpublished work, I'll try to help him privately.  In this area,
as in many, the most useful future experimental findings (and their
funding) will depend on trial of a tentative general theory of cognitive
behavior (including emotions) which even though too broad is inherently
measurable and testable in most, if not all, of its sub-parts.  And there 
is and will be tremendous resistance to any such theories or models as 
"way too early"!
				Marty Stoneman
				marty@indirect.com

