Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal about the Mind and Artificial Intelligence by Craig DeLancey

Author:Craig DeLancey [DeLancey, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0195142713

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defeasible threat (and regardless of how successful such an account is as a general description of the function of anger, we can identify individual classes of eliciting objects about which we should be able to find broad agreement on the most plausible function of the corresponding emotion; an obvious kind of case would be one where an organism is angry at a sexual rival that attempts to copulate with its mate, and consequently attacks that rival), then the anger must identify and "track" the appropriate object. It is a complete failure of the function if the organism is made angry by a rival, and ends up attacking a bystander, for example. Similarly, to flee a fearful object one must recognize and track the very object that inspires fear. And to avoid a disgusting—presumably toxic—substance, an organism that is disgusted must rightly recognize and avoid ingesting the object of its disgust. And so on.

These capabilities are nontrivial. For example, nonhuman animals have been altered to show deficits in these skills. The decorticate cat experiments referred to in chapter 2 also produced the observation that cats so prepared could be enraged by particular stimuli, but then end up misdirecting their angry behavior.39 Thus, there is a norm of success that applies to having and tracking the appropriate object, and which, to varying degrees, the organism can satisfy.

(2) Some subcognitive instances of basic emotions can be shaped by learning in an appropriate way. Fear conditioning demonstrates that an organism, including even a relatively simple organism, can learn to associate a novel stimulus with the occurrence of a noxious stimulus. Furthermore, in organisms with more complex nervous systems, more complex differentiations can be made through such learning, such as distinguishing tones that signal a shock from tones that do not. Similar kinds of learning have been shown for disgust; and it is reasonable to assume that anger and other basic emotions are susceptible to such learning. Thus, the eliciting conditions of some, perhaps all, of the basic emotions can be shaped by learning; organisms learn which objects merit particular emotional responses, and over time they may learn to refine their differentiations. This is a skill which is clearly necessary if one is to be able to use these emotions in a successful way.

(3) Some basic emotions are, in various senses, revisable in their subcognitive instances. Fear conditioning can be extinguished by learning. That is, if we pair a noxious stimulus with a novel and unconditioned one, and form a fear-conditioned association, then later a large number of exposures to the previously unconditioned stimulus can sometimes result in the disappearance of the conditioned behavior. Thus, a rat that is taught that a particular tone precedes a shock will jump when it hears that tone; but if that tone is played again and again without a shock, it may "extinguish" this reaction, so that eventually the rat will not jump when the tone is played.40 It is likely that similar kinds of revision are available

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