Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT strips 3671 to 3675 (5th to 9th February 2018)

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ckridge:

--- Quote from: Aenno on 07 Feb 2018, 15:09 ---Because if there is a emotion that have less social component that direct sexual arousment, I don't know it. It can be emulated, sure - but WHO emulate it in Bubbles?

--- End quote ---

Here, I think, we have the heart of the question.

There is no question that human sexual arousal is accompanied by a biological response and occurs in particular humans. That said, how those particular humans interpret arousal is all over the map and is the most social thing possible. The last time I checked, the U.S. consensus is that the ideally sexually arousing woman has the face of a twelve-year-old girl, the breasts of a nursing mother, and the body of a boy athlete. None of those three is biologically optimal, since all three of them signal infertility. That is what counts as normal here, and it gets more extravagant from there. Sexual arousal is completely permeated and threaded through with literature, with poetry, with art, with cinema, with popular songs, with advertising, with status markers, with religion, with resentment, with fear, and with power relations. It was all built up on that primal, powerful impulse, but it is its own old, rich, changing, complicated set of traditions now. This is why old people, who have very few sex hormones left in their systems, can still feel it.

That is why AIs can learn arousal. They no doubt feel something different in their metal and plastic bodies than I do, but I strongly suspect that women, much younger men, and much older men do too, and that it still counts as arousal.

fayelovesbubbles:
Here's some more poetry that Bubbles might relate to.

but my tongue is frozen in silence;
 instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin;
 with my eyes I see nothing;
 my ears make a whirring noise.

 A cold sweat covers me,
trembling seizes my body,
 and I am greener than grass.

 Lacking but little of death do I seem.

 

Aenno:

--- Quote from: SpanielBear on 07 Feb 2018, 15:48 ---Well first off I strongly dispute that displays of arousal are non-social. Biologically they are displays to indicate availability and to attract a mate, they are social by necessity.

--- End quote ---

--- Quote from: ckridge on 07 Feb 2018, 16:45 ---The last time I checked, the U.S. consensus is that the ideally sexually arousing woman has the face of a twelve-year-old girl, the breasts of a nursing mother, and the body of a boy athlete.
--- End quote ---
No-no-no, displays of arousal are 100% social. Arousal itself isn't. Arousal is arousal and defined biologically (and actually that's why libido is lowering with age - when you would be perfectly ridden of hormones working in arousal, oxytocin for example, you would quite probably be dead, or at least have quite serious problems). How society and person itself reacting on people showing arousal is completly another matter.
I'm sorry for bringing example, if somebody would see it as offensive, that's an example I had in university.
Let's imagine you feel arousal when see plush chairs. You feel arousal, but in the society you lives it's no-go. People demand to you to conform and feel arousal to a woman who has the face of a twelve-year-old girl, the breasts of a nursing mother, and the body of a boy athlete (let's use US Target for simplicity), but you can't and plush chairs is your thing. You're shunned as freak by people around, "that's ok to feel arousal to US Target, but plush chairs? whats wrong with you?". Hello, social rejection.
It's not the worst scenario. It's quite possible you feel arousal but voices in your own head speaks to you - "no-go". "People like you are counted as freaks around here, and we don't want this to happen with us, do we? Shush back into subconcious, this chair, let's not be aware and hit that US Target moving around!" To help this voices, humans have help button "activate arousal by stimulating erogenous zones", and also humans are rewarded with oxytocin blast for conforming society (same oxytocin that activating in sexual arousal), so person in question can live in happy marriage with US Target for years. But stress would accumulate, and quite possibly would boom sooner or later, some way or another. Hello, sexuality-based traumas.


--- Quote from: ckridge on 07 Feb 2018, 16:09 ---If you had to consciously coordinate walking, you couldn't react fast enough to keep your balance.

--- End quote ---
Quite the opposite. If I really need to keep my balance (let's say it's unknown night forest) I would drop reflexive walking and start to look my steps. As conditions became less familiar, I would take more attention.
The problem with consciousness isn't that it's slow. Problem is it's small. Human consciousness have little field of attention, so untrained person can't, say, thinking about six or seven unrelated issues at once. Imagine computer with two terabyte RAM installed, but application is allowed to get 256 kB - of course it would looks slow. But if anything else you have is oversized software routines written by awful programmer and tending to be bugged as a hell and sometimes crushing your system, you'll use something beyond this 256 kBs only when you're perfectly sure in situation.
Anyway, as Bubbles declaring that he haven't access to the part of mind Corpse Witch blocked, and point it as something non-usual, it's safe to assume she normally have full access to her mind.


--- Quote from: ckridge on 07 Feb 2018, 16:45 ---That is why AIs can learn arousal. They no doubt feel something different in their metal and plastic bodies than I do, but I strongly suspect that women, much younger men, and much older men do too, and that it still counts as arousal.
--- End quote ---
Actually it's called "Qualia problem" - how to prove that my sensual experience is correlated with yours in any way - and is one of the most heatenly debated questions of modern psychology. :) But with arousal it's quite simpler then with, for example, color perception. Arousal have physiological markers, no markers - no arousal.


Let me try to show what I mean by this way:
Imagine situation in "Basic Decency", but there Bubbles is a human woman, not AI. What is happening?
She's entering the room and seeing Faye bottom. Faye is her thing, her body reacts with arousal, her nipples erecting, pupils dilating... well, I will not list full spectrum. Bubbles identify this reaction as arousal. AFAIK in US (and in Western World) it's not counted nice to feel arousal to another person beyond some specific situations (nobody said social demands are always reasonable or even feasible; but, for reference, recall reaction Faye had when Marten asked her can he lust her secretly, it's 4), so she feel bad and shunned, it's mixing with arousal, and her inability to hide arousal. "That's not how good girls behave!", she is lectured by her own morality. So she turns around, shunned, and asking Faye to remove stress factor. Perfectly understandable and common situation, I believe most of us being here at least once.

Ok, current situation.
Bubbles entering room and seeing Faye bottom. Some X happens. Bubbles identify this X as arousal, then every step from previous example, because it's how AIs build their social behavour (and I'm completly OK with it). X definitly isn't human arousal, so it's some reaction put into her body or mind which Bubbles identify with arousal and then behave following social protocols. What is X?
If it's some kind of uncontrollable special reaction directly placed there to mimic human arousal (for example, some kind of software subroutine that downcycling processors a bit and loading part of RAM with nasty pictures), who placed it there, and how exactly it's triggering?

ckridge:
I will respond in detail later, but I must point out that you keep insisting that someone must have put a sexual arousal program into Bubbles. That's not the way even the primitive AIs we actually have work. They teach themselves, and by doing so are able to do things that merely programmed AIs cannot. We have every reason to suppose that the AIs in QC would teach themselves arousal, some by looking at porn and some by reading novels.

SpanielBear:

--- Quote from: Aenno on 07 Feb 2018, 18:34 ---What is X?

--- End quote ---

Mega-snip

I think the qualia problem is a good one to reference here, because it (unsurprisingly) also comes up in philosophy, which has spent a long time trying to answer the question "What is a mind" (The answer, for people playing at home, is "I 'unno.". It's *always* "I 'unno". Philosophy is an incredibly frustating degree). Like you say, the problem of only having priviledged access to our own minds means that we have to operate on assumptions about what other people feel and think, based on incomplete information.

Analogy time! Wittgenstein came up with a thought experiment involving a beetle in a box. Everyone has a beetle in a box. We can talk to each other about our beetles, describe them to one another- "My beetle has shiny wings", "My beetle has lovely mandibles"- and we all think we know what we're talking about. The problem is, because we can't show each other our beetles, what we think we know about the other person is only an assumption. When someone says "My beetle has eight legs" we're surprised and confused, because we thought we knew what we were talking about but it turns out it's just a house of cards. The same when talking about the mind.

Thing is, this happens even between two regular humans. The qualia problem is exactly that- I cannot know what it's like to be you. I can only assume that, because most of the time you and I share emotional responses, react in certain ways, you are like me. But that isn't the same as *knowing* that you are. When you say "I am sad", I cannot know what that feels like for you. I can only compare it to what I feel when I use that word, and react accordingly. Unless something happens that shows I am making a mistake, any differences just wont be apparent.

So what's the point of all that? Well, basically if I can't know what another person is feeling, but still try to empathise with them, why would a person-mimicking AI be any different? Bubbles is formatted differently, but functionaly she is identical to Faye or any other person. When she talks about anger, sadness or arousal, she demonstrates human-like behaviours that correlate with those words. As long as that correlation persists, I am faced with a choice of whether to behave as though she has those emotions or not. I could make a mistake either way. But the consequence of me behaving as though a feeling entity has no emotions would be far worse than the other way around.

This is on a day to day level. You mention about biological markers for arousal, which can be detected and are indicative. Assuming for a moment that those markers are always accurate (Which they aren't. The room could be cold, you could have high blood pressure- sometimes a cigar is just an erection. I mean cigar.), presumably one could with sufficient technology match the brain state to the emotion. Reasonably one could assume one could also do the same with a robotic mind- find the string of code that indicates arousal. But in both cases, knowing what it looks like tells us nothing about what it feels like. We can see which part of the brain lights up in response to pain, but the feeling is going to be different between the person who has stubbed their toe and the person who is into BDSM. We are back to having to use empathy and assumptions to guide us into what their inner life is like, and again, humans and robots wouldn't be that different in that regard.

The problem is, the ultimate question you seem to be asking is "how are QC AI's programmed?", which is a damn good question, but one we have no idea how to begin answering, because it's so advanced from our perspective. So we are stuck with treating them like metal people, which, to be fair, in universe is how they want to be treated. Just because two minds are made differently tells us nothing about what it's like to have either of them, if functionally they are identical.

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