Can and Do Machines Think/Feel For Us? - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15125416
ness31 wrote:
I must be human. I’m so much slower physically than my peers. And my sense of time is different.

If you are constantly feeling inadequate in a physical sense , than you are more than likely human.

That’s my conclusion anyway. :|



You've got *health* issues -- try adding some *sea salt* to your diet, and also *vortex* your water before you drink it.

It sounds *weird*, I know -- but it *works*, and it's inexpensive.
#15125512
lol, yes...most humans do have health issues. It’s called aging :lol:

So why sea salt? And what’s vortex? Is it a supplement?
#15125522
ness31 wrote:
lol, yes...most humans do have health issues. It’s called aging :lol:

So why sea salt? And what’s vortex? Is it a supplement?



There's the theory that 'aging' is just the acceptance of ill health, and so 'aging' is actually a *physiological* issue of one kind or another -- if you treat the malady you treat the 'aging' issue.

Here's from web searches:


19 Amazing Benefits Of Sea Salt

https://www.organicfacts.net/health-ben ... -salt.html


The Power of Water Vortexing - Viktor Schauberger

http://ecoaeon.com/benefits/the-power-of-water


2 Tornado Vortex Bottle Water Science Cyclone Experiment Tornado Bottle

https://www.ebay.com/i/164211322990
#15125546
I think we'd want machines who can think for us, but not feel emotions, as most emotional decisions are poor ones. I sure hope we don't get them to feel, unless we have only positive emotions programmed into them.
#15263340
Potemkin wrote:Cultural and technological development leads to an enfeeblement of our intellectual and emotional faculties, just as it previously led to the enfeeblement of our physical faculties. After all, the invention of fire led to changes in our dentition and digestive system which meant that we could no longer eat or properly digest raw meat. The invention of flint tools and hand axes and spears meant that we could no longer take down animals with our bare hands. Chimpanzees are now six or seven times stronger than any human.

When I wish to remember something, I usually write it down. By doing so, I am creating something external to myself which will do my remembering for me. This, of course, enfeebles my intellectual capacity for remembering things. Whyis that a good thing, but canned laughter doing my laughing for me, and thereby enfeebling my capacity for laughter, a bad thing? This is not just a rhetorical question; I genuinely don't know the answer.

This is difficult for me and I wonder if this is still too abstract and I don’t know other relations which complicate the direct bad/good sentiment.

For example when considering the development of emotions, the tension between seeing past humans as more passionate and good, and a restraint of emotion in later forms somehow bad is complicated that the mediation of emotion through the intellectual and social mores adds complexity and isn’t simply a diminishment. Just as the use of tools to help us remember frees up working memory and allows us to coordinate a great deal more.

Page 153
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm:978-1-4615-4833-1/1.pdf
Among people of a single generation, Lange finds the same law manifested: the most obvious trait of being educated is the calm self-control with which blows of fate are borne that in uneducated people evoke unbridled outbursts of passion. And as if to leave not the slightest doubt that historical development of the human mind leads to extinction of emotion, Lange formulates the law of causal relation between the one and the other: "This suppression of the affective aspect of life under the influence of increasing education, both in individual personalities and in whole generations, not only goes hand in hand with increasing development of the intellectual aspect of life, but is, for the most part, the result of this development" (ibid., p. 78).

In addition to establishing this position, Lange finds himself unexpectedly confronted by a definitive result that is in irreconcilable contradiction to his original point. In truth, he started with being for health and ends by being for burial. He began with sharp objections to the thesis of Kant, whose views of affects as a sickness of the soul Lange called a pitiful representation of man; he ends with a full capitulation to this thesis, to the view of mutual relations of mental forces that wants to see something random in the phenomenon which plays a much more significant role than sound judgment in the mental life of the basic mass of people, and which guides the fate not only of individual persons, but also of whole nations and all of humanity to a much greater degree than does sound judgment.

The logic of the investigation was stronger than the logic of the investigator. The bear stubbornly leads the hunter. For Lange, it remains only to admit this and to proceed to full capitulation to Kant, which he does in the concluding lines of his study. He says: "With the passage of time, as a result of constant restraint and inadequate harnessing, the vasomotor centers continuously lose the energy of their emotional activity. This result of training the intellectual life is conveyed through heredity to subsequent generations. New generations appear in the world with an ever more slack emotional innervation of vessels and with a stronger innervation of organs of intellectual activity.

Bodily manifestations that form the essence of emotions are immeasurably richer, brighter, and more palpable in animals than in man; in primitive man-than in cultured man; in a child-than in an adult. Of what kind of development but of reverse development, of reduction, can we be speaking with respect to emotions? Their evolution is nothing other than involution. Their history is a history of their atrophy and loss. Thus, the very understanding of development is not applicable to emotions and is impossible in the area of their investigation if we accept the basic assumption of the visceral hypothesis. As we have seen, following the logic of their own theory, both Lange and James are forced to come to this in the same way. The second envelope that covers the nucleus of their theory arises from the separation of emotion from all of our consciousness; this is part of the very nucleus of the theory. By separating emotions from the brain, taking them out to the periphery, reducing them to peripheral changes in the internal organs and muscles, the theory thereby hypothetically creates for them a substrate of residual consciousness. Of course, the internal organs-the heart, stomach, lungs-are that part of the human organism that cannot in any way, from the point of view of its participation in the historical development of man, be compared with the central nervous system, particularly with the cortex of the brain.

Everything is successful in proceeding with this dualistic principle as long as Descartes is not confronted by the indisputable fact of the union of both mutually exclusive substances in one phenomenon, human passions. As we have seen, they undoubtedly reveal the indisputable fact of unity of spirit and body in one phenomenon, in one being. Here the logic of the dualistic system must of necessity suffer definitive collapse. Descartes says: "Nature teaches me nothing as clearly as the fact that I have a body that suffers when I feel pain and that requires food and water when I experience hunger or thirst. I cannot doubt that there is something real in these sensations. My affects and instincts make it clear to me that I am in my own body, not like a swimmer in a boat, but connected with it in the closest way and as if mixed in so that in a certain way we form as if one being. Otherwise, due to my spiritual nature, I would not feel pain when my body was harmed, but would only realize this harm as an object of cognition the way a shipbuilder sees when something in the ship breaks. When the body needs food and water, I would know about these states without having indefinite sensations of hunger and thirst. These sensations are actually vague representations originating from the union and seeming mixing of the spirit and the body" (ibid., p. 371).91

In the above, the separation of the intellect/mind from emotions seen as bodily manifestations poses them in conflict, not seeing how emotions aren’t purely constrained and retarded. I think of human development of the will, of intense want without reason but then suppressed as a teenager as one cannot impose unrestrained emotion onto others, but one must still feel but manage ones affect by managing their environment and thoughts.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ae39/63aeacdb9bb3cb9c634adbf229297820346d.pdf?_ga=2.72731731.1322756584.1675005275-1307303649.1674321645
Considering specifically the contributions of his studies on hysteria, one can see that the process of development of the will, according to Vygotsky, is based on the following stages: 1) maximum expression of impulsive and emotional states; 2) overcoming hypobulia as an independent instance; and (3) emergence of an end-oriented will. By understanding this process and identifying the regression that occurs in cases of hysteria, it becomes possible to think about how this regression to a lower state is also expressed in other pathologies ( Vygotsky, 1931/2006a).


Emotions can become more complex as one becomes more cultured. A liberal arts education as an idea isn’t simply knowledge but development of human senses for art as well as knowledge. Emotions are retarded by a lack of development and the reduction of peoples own life to the basic.
[url]d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf[/url]
As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions. (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW 3:275)

So when I think of canned laughter I think of a person worn down from work who watches light shows to escape from the world and hasn’t the energy even if they have the capacity to watch more engaging works. Is “low” art bad? Not really but doesn’t a satisfaction for junk food only arose where ones taste are so limited in experience/development and there is something that drives one to such low effort ends.

[url]rickroderick.org/107-kierkegaard-and-the-contemporary-spirit-1990/[/url]
That kind of society produces different kinds of people. The question is whether we still want to call them that or not. At a certain point, we don’t! I don’t, anyway. This is my view… where they reach… I call it the “D.Q. threshold”; the Dan Quayle threshold. Beneath that I cease to give an analysis of human values or of the subject. Beneath that threshold, I am dealing with what Descartes called “cleverly constructed automatons”, dealing with people without affect. In other words, they can fake affect. They can pretend to be moved, but can’t be moved. You know, where being moved was an inner relation.

I’ll try another example to evoke this postmodern scene that I will discuss again in the next lecture, not using Kierkegaard, but using a little Freud, but what the hell, it’s something. Measure the distance this way. Try to measure the distance between Wuthering Heights and the interior of reading that novel, Wuthering Heights. You know, that’s a love story, I mean it’s really a love story because it’s scary and crazy and embodied like love, its nuts. You know, the guy loves the woman so much, he’ll follow her forever and drive her crazy, even into hell if she dies. You know, it’s just a… It’s a loony, scary novel, but it has a tangible feel and it has affect, and that’s what I am coding as still real. Now, let’s compare that to Love Story. [crowd laughter].

One way to measure the historical distance we have come is by measuring the distance between Wuthering Heights and Love Story. I don’t know what you thought about the movie, but the book‘s real short. [crowd laughter]

Effebablement of affect is cultural regression by the retardation of human development of needs because we are valued only to produce commodities, not develop as people.

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