Philosophy 101 Unit 1

Steven Spielberg created the movie Artificial Intelligence, about a little robot boy adopted by two parents whose own child was frozen due to illness. Due to algorithms, the boy had the ability to love, be happy, and fear. Yet is it possible for this to occur in real life? An algorithm is “a rule or procedure that is guaranteed to give a result meeting certain conditions (you just turn the crank and out it pops)” (Haugeland, 41). Thus using an algorithm to produce the emotion of love, fear, and happiness implies that those are set states of being, with certain definable characteristics for each one consistent each time that state is achieved and the same for every human being. To simulate these emotions, though, it’s impossible to “just turn the crank” and produce them. Firstly, love takes many, many forms: sexual love, familial love, material love, on and on. Secondly, within those categories, there are again many variations; within sexual love, for example, people feel passionate love, intimate love, any mix of both that changes over time, and within familial love exists similar patterns, etc. So for humans to believe that we can reproduce real versions of these emotions is absurd, and to use algorithms to do so is just impossible. Haugeland points out that for chess, there are more possible moves than the total number of seconds since the Earth began, and for any formal system to carry out an algorithm to find the right move would take centuries. Given that love, fear, happiness, and emotions in general are much more complicated and intricate than chess games and the possibilities and variations within each emotion are endless, a formal system cannot possibly reproduce, to the same level a human feels, these or any emotions.

Love, happiness, and fear are all merely primary emotions, however; if humanity wants to produce more emotions than that, say the amount that an average human feels on any given day, we have to account for secondary emotions as well. Secondary emotions are much more complicated than primary emotions, especially if attempting to reproduce them. Primary emotions are innate; they are “biological,” so to speak, existing cross-culturally around the world, possible for every human to feel without outside influence. Words for primary emotions appear in every language, which is a good indicator of their universality. Secondary emotions, however, are not all found around the world. They consist of blends of primary emotions: for instance, contempt is equivalent to anger and disgust. Secondary emotions far outnumber primary emotions, and tend to differ for each person each time they experience it (the same is also true for primary emotions, although the former tend to vary quite a lot more than the latter). If an algorithm can’t even reproduce one primary emotion in a reasonable amount of time, there is no way it will be able to produce secondary emotions.

Primary emotions and secondary emotions are all complex and varied, but almost none of them can be felt on command; humans cannot just tell themselves to be happy and then be happy. If that were the case, psychiatrists would be out of business and wars would be a thing of the past. The same must be true then for synthetic emotions; for the emotions to be real, they cannot be programmed into a machine. However, machines, robots, formal systems, whatever the name, none of them can function on their own without being programmed. Thus, by the simple “P-Q” argument, if emotions cannot be programmed, and automatic formal machines cannot function without programs, then automatic formal machines, or robots, cannot feel emotions.