“Sentient aliens in my sci fi book are cool and mysterious because they aren’t carbon based and they don’t have bilateral symmetry blah blah” Cool but how do they feel?
That General Artificial Intelligence is making paperclips without a single recognizable emotion - there’s nothing human about it, it’s probably just calculating success probabilities all the time. No feels.
Humans are different is because our software evolved slowly before suddenly being updated with stronger hardware. Our worm ancestors once used their neurons to eat in response to appetite. Our fish ancestors developed fine motor controls, memory, and more complex responses to the environment. Our monkey ancestors conceptualized physical space and imagined solutions to complex problems. Only now do we have the capacity for very complex problem solving, abstraction, and introspection, though we have held on to our old instincts - we do not reason that we should eat to continue to live, but instead we get hungry like worms do.
Neurotransmitters convey signals between individual neurons, but can also be delivered in large volumes from many neurons to many more all at once, in what are called neurotransmitter systems. The dopamine system is maybe the most famous of these because it’s the reward system. I love when that shit pops off and you do too. Systems like these (and hormonal effects) cause longer lasting behavioral modifications, including emotional states, which are at the center of our cognitive processes, tied inseparably to "higher" cognition.
Humans can be in a good or bad mood, bored or excited mood, angry, compassionate, fearful, horny, hungry, lonely, embarrassed… curiosity is particularly important for technological progression.
But now you’ve got some intelligent aliens. They’re nothing like us because they evolved independently. They’re nothing like AI because their intelligence did evolve.
The challenge - name an emotion they feel but we don’t.
That General Artificial Intelligence is making paperclips without a single recognizable emotion - there’s nothing human about it, it’s probably just calculating success probabilities all the time. No feels.
Humans are different is because our software evolved slowly before suddenly being updated with stronger hardware. Our worm ancestors once used their neurons to eat in response to appetite. Our fish ancestors developed fine motor controls, memory, and more complex responses to the environment. Our monkey ancestors conceptualized physical space and imagined solutions to complex problems. Only now do we have the capacity for very complex problem solving, abstraction, and introspection, though we have held on to our old instincts - we do not reason that we should eat to continue to live, but instead we get hungry like worms do.
Neurotransmitters convey signals between individual neurons, but can also be delivered in large volumes from many neurons to many more all at once, in what are called neurotransmitter systems. The dopamine system is maybe the most famous of these because it’s the reward system. I love when that shit pops off and you do too. Systems like these (and hormonal effects) cause longer lasting behavioral modifications, including emotional states, which are at the center of our cognitive processes, tied inseparably to "higher" cognition.
Humans can be in a good or bad mood, bored or excited mood, angry, compassionate, fearful, horny, hungry, lonely, embarrassed… curiosity is particularly important for technological progression.
But now you’ve got some intelligent aliens. They’re nothing like us because they evolved independently. They’re nothing like AI because their intelligence did evolve.
The challenge - name an emotion they feel but we don’t.
