^Tagemotions

^{Type
post

Author
Gary Varner
Date
August 26, 2023

Categorized
Arts & Culture, Science Fiction

Tagged
Adam and EVe, Arts and Culture, Consciousness, emotions, free will, god, mind, Movies and TV, Robots, tv, Westworld}

Westworld Episode 10 Review (Part Two)

_{Welcome to the dark end of the journey} _{Gary Varner

August 26, 2023

7

Arts & Culture, Science Fiction}

Last time, Teddy had just finished saving Dolores from the Man in Black, who turned out to be William all along. He takes her to the coast because that was where he promised to take her when they were performing their pre-programmed loop. However, the coast is apparently not very far because as Dolores dies in his arms, Teddy starts reciting a campy monologue, and then shuts down while the board applauds the speech. Even when they’re trying to escape their loop, the robots still, somehow, find themselves trapped in yet another one of Dr. Ford’s narratives. Dr. Ford appears, addresses the crowd, then orders for Teddy to be cleaned up, and for Dolores to be taken to a nearby Read More ›

Sad man getting dislikes and being rejected by audience for social addiction ad

^{Type
post

Author
News
Date
August 13, 2023

Categorized
Social Media

Tagged
Andrew McDiarmid, Anxiety and depression, Cal Newport, emotions, mental health, New York Post, Reality, social media, Twitter}

The Benefits of Ditching Social Media

_{Tech writer Cal Newport explains why boredom is actually a good thing} _{News

August 13, 2023

2

Social Media}

Cal Newport ascended into the limelight upon his viral Ted Talk in which he called people to ditch social media. In this video from last year, Newport rehashes some of the main benefits of not having social media. Boredom is on the list, interestingly; Newport notes that most people no longer have moments of boredom, and as a consequence, don’t have any space in their lives to reflect, think, and work through their emotions. Andrew McDiarmid, a contributor at Mind Matters, has written on this in the past. He notes, Mind wandering, or stream of consciousness thought, gives us several mental gains, including the ability to consider obstacles to future goals, generate novel, creative thoughts, and place our experiences in meaningful Read More ›

Lonely Human with water reflection, emotion, sadness loneliness, depression, mental health, fantasy painting, surreal illustration

^{Type
post

Author
Peter Biles
Date
October 21, 2022

Categorized
Arts & Culture, Science Fiction

Tagged
1984 (book), Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (book), C.S. Lewis, emotions, Featured, fiction, George Orwell, mourning, Roger Scruton, Science fiction}

Huxley’s Brave New World and the Hard Work of Sadness

_{A society centered on pleasure has no place for mourning, and so has no room for love} _{Peter Biles

October 21, 2022

5

Arts & Culture, Science Fiction}

Ninety years ago, Aldous Huxley published his prophetic and incisive Brave New World (1932), a dystopian novel that imagines a society of people intoxicated and controlled, not by state power, but by pleasure. Whereas George Orwell predicted an inevitable totalitarian world government in his novel 1984 (penned in 1949), Huxley proposed that human beings wouldn’t need to be coerced into submission but could be coaxed by the allure of pain-erasing drugs. Both nightmarish visions of the future have already somewhat played out today in American society. The government set up the Disinformation Governance Board in April of 2022, which sounds eerily like the “Ministry of Truth” in Orwell’s 1984. (The board has since disbanded.) Tech companies can track us more Read More ›

Frightened guilty dog pug looking sad at camera.

^{Type
post

Author
News
Date
July 2, 2021

Categorized
Natural Intelligence, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
Animal emotions, Anxiety, emotions, Fear, Joseph LeDoux, Lisa Feldman Barrett}

Is Fear the Same Thing for a Human Being as for an Animal?

_{Psychiatrist Joseph Ledoux has thought about that; it’s a complex problem} _{News

July 2, 2021

4

Natural Intelligence, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind}

Recently, we looked at consciousness from the perspective of Joseph LeDoux’s recent book, A Deep History of Ourselves (1919). Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett situates his work at Nature, offering an interesting qualification: LeDoux, an academic at New York University in New York City, is best known for his research on fear, and for carefully mapping the brain circuit centred on the amygdala — a knot of neurons in the medial temporal lobe. The amygdala, he showed, has a crucial role in non-conscious, defensive behaviour responses such as freezing or fleeing. His conclusion, based on the assumption that all mammalian amygdala circuits are structurally similar, was that all mammals (including humans) share these responses. He described this work in The Emotional Read More ›

Collage of portraits of young emotional people on multicolored background in neon. Concept of human emotions, facial expression, sales. Listening to music, delighted, winner, shocked. Flyer for ad

^{Type
post

Author
News
Date
April 26, 2021

Categorized
Business and Finance, Education, Ethics, Science, Surveillance, Work

Tagged
Atlas of AI (book), COVID-19 (and AI), Emotional recognition technology (ERT), Emotional recognition technology (regulation), emotions, Human emotions, Kate Crawford, Paul Ekman, Universal human emotions (Ekman)}

AI Prof Sounds Alarm: AI “Emotion Detectors” Are Faulty Science

_{An industry worth over $30 billion uses emotion recognition technology (ERT) on school children and potential hires} _{News

April 26, 2021

4

Business and Finance, Education, Ethics, Science, Surveillance, Work}

Kate Crawford, a principal researcher at Microsoft, and author of Atlas of AI (2021), is warning at Nature that the COVID-19 pandemic “is being used as a pretext to push unproven artificial-intelligence tools into workplaces and schools.” The software is touted as able to read the “six basic emotions” via analysis of facial expressions: During the pandemic, technology companies have been pitching their emotion-recognition software for monitoring workers and even children remotely. Take, for example, a system named 4 Little Trees. Developed in Hong Kong, the program claims to assess children’s emotions while they do classwork. It maps facial features to assign each pupil’s emotional state into a category such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear. It also Read More ›

The human stomach is strong. The internal organs are shaped by green trees. (environment)

^{Type
post

Author
News
Date
December 23, 2020

Categorized
Medicine and Health, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
Abdominal brain, Butterflies in the stomach, emotions, Gastrointestinal tract, Gut neurons, Karolinska Institutet, Michael Gershon, Second Brain (book), Second brain (concept)}

Did You Know You Have a Second Brain?

_{Our guts operate on a quite separate nervous system. Learning more will help control gastrointestinal diseases} _{News

December 23, 2020

3

Medicine and Health, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind}

Our huge gastrointestinal tracts operate their own nervous system, using neurons that follow different principles from those of brain neurons, according to recent findings: Our approximately seven-meter long gastrointestinal (GI) tract has its own functionally distinct neurons. Since this enteric nervous system (ENS) operates autonomously, it is sometimes referred to as the “second” or “abdominal” brain. While the ENS controls muscle movement (peristalsis) in the gut and its fluid balance and blood flow, it also communicates with the immune system and microbiome. Karolinska Institutet, “New fundamental knowledge of the ‘abdominal brain’” at Medical Xpress (December 7, 2020) Paper. (subscription required) The Karolinska researchers made progress in studying the little-understood second brain by mapping the neuron types in the digestive systems Read More ›

set of funny colored stickers with different emotions

^{Type
post

Author
News
Date
December 17, 2020

Categorized
Arts & Culture, Science

Tagged
Actors, emotions, Human emotions, Universality}

Study: The Expression of Human Emotions Is Universal

_{Most representations in visual arts depend on the universality of human emotion} _{News

December 17, 2020

3

Arts & Culture, Science}

Most of us wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the expression of human emotions is universal. But today there is a study for everything and 16 “universal human emotional expressions” have been identified: Whether at a birthday party in Brazil, a funeral in Kenya or protests in Hong Kong, humans all use variations of the same facial expressions in similar social contexts, such as smiles, frowns, grimaces and scowls, a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, shows… Researchers at UC Berkeley and Google used machine-learning technology known as a “deep neural network” to analyze facial expressions in some 6 million video clips uploaded to YouTube from people in 144 countries spanning North, Central and South America, Africa, Europe, Read More ›

3D Illustration Emotionen als Freisteller

^{Type
post

Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
December 13, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Natural Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, Religion

Tagged
Affective Computing (book), emotions, Rosalind Picard}

Can We Teach a Computer to Feel Things? A Dialogue…

_{Okay, There’s the computer’s side… and then there’s the dog’s side. Listen to both} _{Denyse O'Leary

December 13, 2020

6

Artificial Intelligence, Natural Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, Religion}

The dialogue got started because of a gifted computer nerd, Rosalind Picard, also a playwright (pictured), who decided to become an evangelical Christian in midlife (approx 2019). As she tells it, “a flat, black-and-white existence suddenly turned full-color and three-dimensional.” The director of MIT’s Media Lab, she had also written a book in 2000 called Affective Computing which seems to suggest that one could somehow give emotions to machines. I asked Eric Holloway to help me figure that one out: O’Leary: Emotions are based on actual well-being or suffering. How can something that is not alive have actual emotions? Don’t think of people here!; think of dogs. Dogs have emotions. When my computer is giving trouble, I certainly hope it’s Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
July 22, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
Consciousness, emotions, intelligence, Max Tegmark, media, media bias, Stephanie Singleton}

Multiverse Physicist Max Tegmark Seeks AI That Checks News Bias

_{Naive people who truthfully claim to be acting only “for good” in trying to address bias in the news via AI are kidding themselves} _{Denyse O'Leary

July 22, 2020

7

Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind}

Max Tegmark (right) is probably better known as a multiverse cosmologist than as an AI specialist. The MIT physics professor told New Scientist in 1998 that “All possible universes exist, even triangular ones.” He also informed Scientific American in 2003 that “Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations”: Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
News
Date
November 18, 2019

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, Work

Tagged
Antonio Damasio, chatbots, emotions, Featured, Feelings, Kingston Man, Robots}

How Far Have We Come With Giving Robots Feelings?

_{Pretty far, in our own imagination} _{News

November 18, 2019

5

Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, Work}

At times, we may think a more powerful illusion is a good enough substitute for reality.