Let's look at some of most common human emotions and try to find a common nominator. For instance: jealousy, anger, love, loyalty, sorrow. Those are some very basic emotions that we all feel in occasions. Why? I think I know why.
On first glance it might seem that the human intelligence was the first thing to control our behaviour and the emotions would be some kind of secondary system on top of that, in occasions taking control if we are not careful. Actually it is the opposite. It is the emotions that are running the core program in our brain and the so called intelligence is just filling the holes.
The purpose of this emotion core program is nothing less but to keep human race alive! This is all actually very simple. We evolved to feel happy about things that support staying alive, and to feel bad about things that are harmful. To be more precise, the core emotions program could be actually compared to a list of fuzzy logic commands. Those can be even listed. See below a list of fuzzy-logic kind of simple commands, that control human (and almost every mammal) behaviour by means of emotion.
- Stay alive
- Breed
- Take care of your family
- Favor genetic versatility
- Belong in a tribe and protect it
- Lead your tribe
- Obey your tribe leader
- Challenge your tribe leader
These rules would explain many human emotions and behavioral oddities. Let's take envy as an example. How is envy explained as a core logic? In two ways. It can either be explained as challenging the leader, in which way automatically the group will get the strongest possible leader. Or it can be explained as a built-in need of collecting things and goods for survival.
A curious thing to notice in the above list is that the rules conflict with each other. This is not a mistake. Being fuzzy logic, different individuals interpret them differently in different times. Example: For human kind survival it would have been important to both take care of family and children, but also to mate as much as possible and with as many people as possible, to give evolution a change! This conflicting fuzzy logic still haunts us and leads us in trouble.
Now we have defined emotions - they are a core program that give simple primary rules that help a living creature to survive.
But can this be applied to machines? Let's take a robot vacuum cleaner as an example. When it starts running out of battery, it's fuzzy programming logic will start raising a signal that it would be time to return to the dock. Not necessarily does it do it immediately, but when the need of power exceeds the need of executing the other goal (cleaning) then it will. You could as well call this driving force "hunger". Does it really feel hungry? Does a vacuum cleaner really feel happy when it gets its work done? You know, these are just words we give to electro-chemical phenomenon that occur in certain circuits. If they can occur in organic circuits, why not metal-silicon circuits?
