“What is consciousness? Is it an emergent state of the brain altered by a life-force energy while electrically processing stored information?! That’s not a pretty hard problem (PHP) to solve. That’s a really hard problem (RHP) to solve.” – Renee Puchalski

Introduction

When discussing artifical intelligence, questions often arise about machines taking over the world. Humans have an irrational fear of robots being “smarter” than us.

The fact of the matter is that the human brain, which contains both emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence, is intellectually superior to mechanical systems, which only contain artificial cognitive intelligence. You may be asking yourself, “Why is emotional intelligence an advantage to the human brain?”, or “Can artificial emotional intelligence be developed?”. I hope to answer those questions for you in the following sections.

The Emotional Brain

Artifical intelligence is a rapidly growing field in technology. It is mainly the study of cognitive science, which, according to Joseph LeDoux, “is really a science of only a part of the mind, the part having to do with thinking, reasoning, and intellect. It leaves emotions out. And minds without emotions are not really minds at all. They are souls on ice – cold, lifeless creatures devoid of any desires, fears, sorrows, pains, or pleasures.”

Although, the studies of cognition and artificial intelligence have advanced amazingly far in recent years, machines that are built and programmed to be artifically intelligent will never surpass human brains in general intelligence – not until we instill them with emotions and human energy, or the biological energy that connects all human beings. Emotion is one human brain capability that mechanical systems lack, and it is a human brain function that neuroscientists haven’t completely figured out. However, it has a major effect on our decision making processes and is crucial in some situations. For instance, our emotions can cause us to react before we “know” we are in harm’s way.

The Problem With AI

Ever notice how emotions are contagious? Humans are capable of mirroring and tranferring emotions via energy and brain neurons. Such an elaborate biological system cannot be duplicated without being fully understood by the creator. Thus, until neuroscientists fully understand the way the human brain functions, we cannot develop an artifically intelligent system to compete with it in all aspects of intelligence.

We know our emotions by their intrusions (welcome or otherwise) into our conscious minds. But emotions did not evolve as conscious feelings. They evolved as behavioral and physiological specializations, bodily responses controlled by the brain, that allowed ancestral organisms to survive in hostile environments and procreate. If the biological machine of emotion, but not cognition, crucially includes the body, then the kind of machine that is needed to run emotion is different from the kind needed to run cognition.

Programming a computer to be conscious would be an essential first-step toward programming it to have a full-blown emotional experience, since the feelings through which we know our emotions occur when we become conscious of the unconscious working of emotional systems in the brain. However, even if a computer could be programmed to be conscious, it could not be programmed to have an emotion, as a computer does not have the right kind of composition, which comes not from the clever assembly of human artifacts but from eons of biological evolution. (LeDoux)

Conclusion

In sum, because of their lack of emotions, machines that are artificially cognitive intelligent cannot outsmart us at all tasks. They cannot replace humans altogether. Emotional intelligence is the intellectual advantage of humans, and it is strengthened by an energy that can only be found in biological systems.

Even if we do fully understand emotional intelligence in the future, and we are capable of programming a machine with an emotional experience, it is not likely that the system will be able to transfer that emotion to another machine or human via energy or brain neurons. In order to make this happen, developers have to build or program the mechanical system with an artificial energy source that simulates the energy that connects all human beings biologically.

Resources

LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. 1996. pg 25, 40-41.