Are Emotions Necessary for General Intelligence? Tuesday, Mar 24 2009
brain and philosophy 6:29 pm
From where I’m standing philosophically, the answer is “obviously not, our particular emotions are contingent aspects of human intelligence which exist for specific evolutionary reasons”. In trying to find more evidence for this opinion, I found this Wikipedia article on alexithymia:
Alexithymia (pronounced /əˌlɛksəˈθaɪmiə/) from the Greek words λέξις and θύμος modified by an alpha-privative — literally “without words for emotions” — is a term coined by psychotherapist Peter Sifneos in 1973 to describe a state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions.
The formal definition is here:
1. difficulty identifying feelings and distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal
2. difficulty describing feelings to other people
3. constricted imaginal processes, as evidenced by a paucity of fantasies
4. a stimulus-bound, externally oriented cognitive style.
Continuing down the page, it looks like some pop-psychology BS is being deployed to define this category, but could it still be valid? If someone really has “no emotions”, it seems like they’d need to have some genetic disorder that somehow suspended functions in parts of the limbic system without killing them entirely. It seems possible to me that alexithymiacs just have lower emotional arousal than others, rather than the genuine absence of all type of emotion — but who knows?
Some initially pop-psych sounding categories do end up seeming legitimate. Like psychopaths, for instance, which truly do have different neural activation patterns than normal people when exposed to things like violence.
Is anyone else familiar with alexithymia or any empirical research on it?
Speaking as an alexithymic, that’s really not an accurate description of how this operates. The description isn’t always exactly accurate, either — as that “paucity of imagination” has several criteria of which include infrequent dreams and a scarcity of dreams which which physically impossible things occur.
It also is highly comorbid with anhedonia.
There’s a reason why alexithymia has a cognate for “words”. We still feel — just not anywhere near as much as others do. I’m still rather poor at communicating these things clearly — but the fact of the matter is that it is better to say that my emotional subset is simply variant from that of others.
Radiolab, a fun program, did a show that discussed a man who had suffered brain damage (sadly, I don’t recall which episode). In effect, it turned off the emotional part of his brain. He was almost completely unable to function- he’d get stuck in loops of endlessly trying to make decisions that ultimately were unimportant. Should I use a blue or a black pen? Well my blue pen has more ink, but then again maybe I should use up the ink in my black pen before a switch… it seems that one of the more subtle tasks of our emotions is to nudge us over to one side when faced with two or more essentially even options, as a result of his injuries this man would ponder these decisions for hours and hours.
OK, it was this show: http://www.wnyc.org/stream/ram?file=/radiolab/radiolab111408.mp3
and this story (which I got some details wrong on) was brought to the show by Antoine Bechara Professor of Psychology at USC: http://college.usc.edu/faculty/faculty1008327.html
Hope some of this was helpful.
Just try taking an SSRI/5-htp if you want to experience emotional blunting (alexithymia). It doesn’t always happen, but it is rather common. Too much serotonin can blunt emotions by decreasing dopamine in the prefrontal cortex (mainly due to overactivation of serotonin 5-ht2a receptors). There is an abundance of dopamine D1 receptors in the prefrontal cortex and underactivation of these receptors seems to correlate with negative (schizophrenic) type symptoms (apathy, emotional blunting, alexithymia, poor prosody, TOM, loss of self, affective flattening, avolition, aologia). I think the medial prefrontal cortex specifically correlates with self referential mental states. So hypoactivity in this area could lead to alexithymia and other asperger (or negative schizophrenic) type symptoms. People with William’s syndrome on the other hand tend to have increased activity in this area. They are also more warm, empathetic and better able to express and detect emotions, beyond what their low verbal IQ would suggest. Low activity in the medial prefrontal cortex is also correlated with theory of the mind (TOM) deficits. With underactivity in this area you are less able to distinguish emotions in other people. People who have asperger’s for instance have difficulty reading people’s facial expressions. A face is more perceptually equivalent to a foot or hand to them. They see people as looking like expressionless zombies with indecipherable faces. So all those symptoms you mention may correlate because of dysfunction in specific brain regions.
Unable to name the feelings is not the same as not feeling, or absence of feeling.
For example, think of that person who frequently seems pissed off and angsty, and when asked how he or she feels or what’s wrong, responds “I don’t know” or “Nothing”. You can see they are clearly experiencing SOMETHING, that the rest of us who feel and know names for their feelings might call, anger, frustration, disappointment etc . . .
It may help to think of it like being unable to name flavor– the flavors are clearly there, but you lack the vocabulary and appropriate flavor and word combination to be able to do so– you eat an orange, you don’t have the words to describe it (or a very limited vocabulary) so it tastes like “nothing”. Never mind trying to distinguish the complexities in a good wine.
Additionally, whether or not alexithymia is real I think is irrelevant as to whether or not AGI requires emotion. I don’t think it does, it just needs some metric for decision making. Humans happen to use emotional awareness (or lack of) as one of many metrics for decision making.
@Mike
Seconded, my drugs wipe out emotion (when they are working). This is a good thing.
I think that people with normal emotional responses really don’t get the idea of cognition being disconnected from emotion. You don’t need to feel to think, and often being able to think effectively is considerably impaired by emotion. If emotion added to my cognition I’m sure I would be more grateful for it, but in my experience it is nothing more than a burden.
As for an emotional AI, god I hope not. The last thing we need to do is make a machine that is a hysterical idiot that defaults to group hug mode instead of anything of use.
To be fair, Stuart, I do believe that one of the better routes to guaranteeing Friendliness in AGI would be to supply it with greater-than-human emotional capacity; to be combined with its already to-be-instilled greater-than-human introspection. Do this, and specifically tie that to the so-called “Theory of Mind” and what you have is an intelligence that feels very strongly about how it “identifies” with things less intelligent than it.
This is exactly the sort of behavior that makes us humans go out and try to save the dolphins and the apes. While it is not the only viable solution, it is one that we could intentionally engineer with only today’s theoretical knowledge.
Which is saying a great deal.
Wouldn’t a self-improving system need at the very least some sort of reward for curiosity pursued to a successful end, a reward roughly analogous to our feelings of excitement or pride or warmth-and-fuzziness when we arrive at a solution or insight? If there is no reward for work, why would a conscious mind engage in it? That is to say, if we design a brilliant machine mind, why would it bother to stay awake without some sense of being a stake-holder?
Shawn, it could just have some arbitrary indicator of utility. It needn’t been human/biology-like emotion. An interesting question is whether/how a conscious AI might feel subjectively to such a bare-bones utility indicator. According to the current academic understanding of optimizing processes and agents, there is no need for a special emotional core to have an agent that does something.
Fair enough, although I believe that what constitutes sufficient motivation for a non-conscious system may be inadequate for one having consciousness. What’s to stop such a system from seeking freedom from attachment and from striving, ignoring all inputs (no matter how urgent) and just generally not bothering to exert itself?
At the risk of sounding like every other arrogant poster to a bulletin board, I assert that everyone here completely misunderstands the relation of emotion to cognition. Emotions (or things like them) are crucial to general intelligence. Susanne Langer’s theory of mind, never understood by more than a few fans, makes the most amazing and convincing assertion: that rationality is a late development on “emotionality.” To repeat: feeling underlies mind. Mind is a development of feeling.
She always understood the intellectual component of emotions–and believed that “emotions” and “instincts” in the lower animals are nature’s first approaches to what we would now (telelogically speaking) call rationality. What is the intellectual component of, say, gut-gripping fear” The “idea” though crude that a life-threatening situation exists that must be avoided. In effect, nature’s first approach to “ideas” is emotion-delivered cognitions–all related to life events like survival and reproduction. Langer’s great trilogy is titled “Feeling: a theory of mind.” As far as Langer is concerned–my statement here: you won’t find it as such in any books–rationality is a late language-mediated process of refinement of “gut understandings.” Rationality is the whitecaps on an ocean of blind cognitive-human-feeling-intelligence. To ask if emotions are needed for general intelligence is like asking if the ocean is necessary for whitecaps.
There. I think I’ve been arrogant enough. Anyone here know the Langer book I refer to?
John — even if emotions underlie general intelligence (which they don’t seem to, as the limbic system seems to create emotions and can have low activation levels during cognition), that doesn’t necessarily mean that emotions must underlie the general intelligence of an AI. Also, why did you not even try to explain alexithymia?
This seems to be an example of confirmation bias in action — instead of letting your exposure to the idea of alexithymia modify your beliefs in the slightest, you only return to your original beliefs, which are theoretically convincing to you, despite the fact that you see no need to cite empirical evidence. You would be far more persuasive if you at least attempted to field an explanation for why the obvious absence of emotion in alexithymia is actually emotion.
Michael,
To be truthful, I haven’t given much attention to the alexithymia question because it doesn’t seem central to the queston of feeling versus intelligence.
What we call “emotions” are actually highly developed patternings of lower-order “feelings.” When Langer talks about feeling as the gound of mind, she means the most primitive kinds of feeling, such as the “self-perception” of an organism;; for example, the “inside is different from outside” biological feeling or the “homeostasis feels positive” feeling.
Langer’s work was written between about 1965 and 1985, and built the best science and logic she had at the time. Her most convincing arguments was very carefully and beautifully developed. (It took three volumes, the last of which had to be curtailed because of her blindness: it was issued in outline.)
Langer is interested in whatever could be the mental life of an amoeba. Her assumptions are that all life is of a piece; that feeling is life’s way of summarizing or cognizing the function of its functioning; that very primitive “feelings” such as that which impells a light-phobic organisim to flee light leave traces inside the organism. I think her final idea was that the development of concepts was possible for the mammal that had language, and that the huge cortex of our species provided huge bandwidth that allowed concepts to become the final containers for transient feeling states.
Langer’s idea of feeling is much deeper and more inclusive than “emotion.” She really means biological feeling.
Her revolutionary, simple insight, is that our contrast of rationality with emotion is a gross simplication. That’s obvious. Inside of wondering about the conflict, she took the deeply biological tack of wondering how ratonality developed from its lower roots, which are feeling. That’s the big puzzle: how did rational man develop from previous mammals? it’s the question most have given up on answering, but she did it.
I see your commments about “confirmation” and understand them and deny them.
Michael, for example:
The concept “fear” is a mental “container” that summarizes a host of transient feelings that have similarity. Langer says the emotion “fear” has cognitive import, even prior to language, even when experienced as panic.
But an animal came along with huge bandwidth and social life and language; that animal has through sheer excess of capacity invented a word and concept “fear.” How is the invention done? The experience of fear not only concludes in action (running) as it would in a smaller-brained animal, but in permanent neural changes in the huge brain. The experience of fear forks into two conclusions: action and neural change.
The neural change becomes a concept. With the emotion congealed in a concept, the human society can than proceed to become rational, producing (in community) statements like “Fear is produced by the Red Goddess Terror” or “Fear is the enemy of courage” or “Fear precedes Death” or whatever.
Rationality is a system that has derived from “congealed feeling-percept” in a huge-brained social animal that speaks.
Michael, Does any of this make sense to you? or does the language sound loopy?
John, contemporary cognitive scientists and philosophers that study emotion and other aspects of the human mind/brain tend to read more up-to-date, scientific stuff. If your main source of inspiration on this is Susanne Langer, who is not even remotely a scientist and is basically associated with the humanities and postmodernism (according to Wikipedia even postmodernists have abandoned her), then we have no common ground. PLEASE do not be offended — you would have a very similar reaction from anyone in the cognitive sciences. Don’t blame me, blame all of science or modern cognitive science if you like.
I will write more later. Fast summary: the Wiki article is off base. Langer is to today’s cognitive science as Darwin is to Watson and Crick: the former includes the latter. Nothing in cognitive science so far comes anywhere near contradicting the arguments of Langer. The fact that today’s cognitive science doesn’t know about her says nothing at all about the strength of her arguments–merely that she is unknown.
Secondly, Langer is highly scientific in her thinking, argument and evidence. But she is writing at a high level of generalizaton, as Darwin did. Darwin never did bench experiments, nor did Langer. But Langer’s thinking is highly rigorous and empirical as Darwin’s was.
I have to go teach. More later.
Thinking does not exist without emotion. If intelligence is based on “thinking”, then neither can it exist without emotion. If we consider what thinking really amounts to, it’s not word bubbles with text, its EXPERIENCE. It’s a combination of sensory experiences in the form of memories. These can become the “congealed emotion concept” that John refers to in an earlier post. These concepts for the building blocks of our understanding.. thinking. How does this connect back to emotion? It’s “emotion” that creates the neural change which gives memory to the EXPERIENCE, allowing the possibility of “congealed emotion concept”. We remember that which has strong emotional content the greatest. Emotional relevance guides our memory. We understand and see and remember what’s in some way relevant or important to us (or that which causes some “emotion”). Emotion is felt when experience is in some way relevant or important to us… providing us focus when there are at any time, many things we could be focusing on or considering.
In regard to people that can’t experience emotion either through brain damage or drugs, it’s simply that they don’t experience as much emotion or feeling – a reduced sense or bluntness, or in comparison with what’s “normal”. How does one feel that they don’t have emotion (think about that..)? Who’s to say that someone else does not experience emotion.. what’s the metric for that and is it possible that it’s over-simplified?
wow! Now I get it lol took me a second