Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

  On 2/26/2010 at 12:06 AM, A/D said:

Did you and Gordo read the same textbook or something? This seems to be mostly non sequitors and broad statements about some controversial and complex stuff, but you guys understand it. Maybe there's further reading you can suggest? Comments below if you care to elaborate.

 

  On 2/25/2010 at 10:08 PM, theSun said:

fear, love, hate were all developed unwittingly by our ancestors to give future generations a better chance at survival.

I don't get this. You're saying emotions were consciously created in order to give an evolutionary advantage? On the one hand, emotions do not share an obvious connection to survival. Why are couples possessive of each other? Strong emotions lead to death, killing, and celibacy. On the other hand, you're implying some kind of "superego" that can create emotions for a specific purpose (in early humans? in our genetic ancestors?). Is that what you're saying?

 

No, he said emotions were all developed unwittingly (as in the opposite of consciously). that they are a product of the evolutionary process.

and yes emotions do share and obvious connection to survival, as I wrote before, love and fear are directly correlated to survival and reproduction. but as was stated before, some emotions in a modern world lead to unexpected consequences; the primitive human didn't have the concept of celibacy.

That misunderstanding covers most of your other points.

goats are fucking scary

case in point

Sorry, I should have been more clear . . "fear, love, hate were all developed unwittingly by our ancestors to give future generations a better chance at survival" only makes sense in the context of something developing emotions for a purpose. I realize he's not saying they sat down and worked on it, but what was it that was able to imagine that purpose and then create emotions to suit it?

natural selection.

started out with one monkey being a little more irritable and kicking the shit out of everyone and fuckin' all the monkey bitchez. irritable monkeys kick more ass than docile ones i'd say.

keep in mind that this is a slow process. evolution doesn't work by a single being changing itself, but by nature sifting through generations to find useful traits, discarding others.

I'm so glad you've figured all this out!

Welp, have fun in here. See you in another thread!

  On 2/24/2010 at 5:12 PM, acidphakist said:

Computers writing music? Fair game. I see no reason that a sufficiently complex algorithm couldn't write something interesting and moving.

parameters, it's all about i'm afraid. I wonder what new styles will be identified and capitalized on by our new boogie down rhythm overlords.

-- also if you want to be appreciated for being creative in the future, maybe they will allow a 'special' performances of our creations. 'aww, he sure does try' ... 'wow, he did all that with only a class 9 intellect'

-soes siez-

  On 2/26/2010 at 6:14 AM, Awepittance said:

  On 2/25/2010 at 9:43 PM, GORDO said:

what he means is that feelings are consequence of the primitive stages of human evolution but are often counterproductive in this modern world, and that what our feelings tell us often clashes with what our knowledge tell us, producing unexpected consequences and often tragic.

He didn't describe them as counterproductive, but instead called them useless outside of the context of making judgments about evolution. That's what I had a problem with, because I think we make lots of 'use' of our emotions -- even for reasons.

I think you're right to point out the fact that our emotions often overcome our ability to think straight and lead us to make bad decisions. But I don't think they necessarily do that, all the time. I can feel, for example, justified anger at someone who has wronged me illegally. My feeling of anger embodies not just a brute physical reaction, but a thought that something wrong has happened and it needs to be corrected for.

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you conception of evolution is somewhat wrong. old, useless treats aren't necessarily discarded by the evolution process. also it should be pretty clear that humans have managed to bypass some of the classic dynamics of evolution. human society (and knowledge) changes many times faster than any biological evolutionary process. this means our environment changes much faster than how we can biologically adapt to these changes.

I'm not sure I made a claim about any of this.

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one can clearly see the connection of feelings with evolution. for instance fear and love are strongly correlated to survival and reproduction. I think all feelings are mixtures of some basic ones although i can't say what those basic ones are.

I agree with your first sentence here. But I take you to be saying that the only meaning emotions have is in an evolutionary context, and I am disagreeing there, and saying that our feelings are also meaningful considered psychologically or socially or whatever, setting aside any thoughts about whether our feelings promote survival.

For example, if you asked me, 'Why do you love your girlfriend?' and I responded, 'Because it helps me survive and reproduce' -- your response had better be that I am a fucking psycho or am totally out of touch with human relationships or am pulling your leg. You don't love someone because they help you survive, you love them because you admire them, because they support you, because they share your views about what a good life is, etc. If these considerations have anything to do with evolution, it's only way down the line, after many more relevant and important social, personal and psychological considerations.

I agree with you, I don't think feelings only make sense in an evolutionary setting, because they have developed to be such complex things, however I do think one could possibly break them down as combinations of some basic ones.

the thing is that we build our society around feelings too. so it's kind of a cycle: we build concepts and social structures based on feelings that are in turn consequence of the way we live.

I think there's an interesting parallel to that thought in musical creativity: We get our sense of how to express something musically from listening to how others have expressed something through similar musical phrases and structures. So in a sense, when you create music you're not making some statement whose meaning is 100% your own and out of the blue (I mean, if that were true, there would be no way anyone else could recognize it as expressing anything in the first place).

  On 2/26/2010 at 2:50 PM, encey said:

For example, if you asked me, 'Why do you love your girlfriend?' and I responded, 'Because it helps me survive and reproduce' -- your response had better be that I am a fucking psycho or am totally out of touch with human relationships or am pulling your leg. You don't love someone because they help you survive, you love them because you admire them, because they support you, because they share your views about what a good life is, etc. If these considerations have anything to do with evolution, it's only way down the line, after many more relevant and important social, personal and psychological considerations.

this is all highly unreliable though, because you're gay.

*wants to jot it down but can't, as my pen is in my anus*

  On 2/26/2010 at 2:50 PM, encey said:

  On 2/25/2010 at 9:43 PM, GORDO said:

what he means is that feelings are consequence of the primitive stages of human evolution but are often counterproductive in this modern world, and that what our feelings tell us often clashes with what our knowledge tell us, producing unexpected consequences and often tragic.

He didn't describe them as counterproductive, but instead called them useless outside of the context of making judgments about evolution. That's what I had a problem with, because I think we make lots of 'use' of our emotions -- even for reasons.

 

I think you're right to point out the fact that our emotions often overcome our ability to think straight and lead us to make bad decisions. But I don't think they necessarily do that, all the time. I can feel, for example, justified anger at someone who has wronged me illegally. My feeling of anger embodies not just a brute physical reaction, but a thought that something wrong has happened and it needs to be corrected for.

i don't think you're getting why having a greater deal of emotion (whatever it is) can help you survive in primitive times. take love for example, our modern romanticized notion of it is quite contradictory. clearly, the emotion we call love is incredibly complex these days. but think of what it started as, simply a tendency to keep the same partner. i would say children with 2 parents had a better chance at survival than those with 1. my whole point before was that our brains have been evolving in a pre-technological society, not accustomed to the incredible degree of communication and sophistication that we have in our society. technology advances exponentially, evolution is linear. we still have all the emotions our ancestors had, but we use them in very different ways due to our ridiculously complex social structures.

you're missing it again, you're analyzing why you're angry, when that simply doesn't matter. the construct of legality is useless scientifically, it only matters that stimuli x makes you feel increased tension, anxiety, etc. the "why?" question isn't important here because it is based entirely on circumstance.

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one can clearly see the connection of feelings with evolution. for instance fear and love are strongly correlated to survival and reproduction. I think all feelings are mixtures of some basic ones although i can't say what those basic ones are.

I agree with your first sentence here. But I take you to be saying that the only meaning emotions have is in an evolutionary context, and I am disagreeing there, and saying that our feelings are also meaningful considered psychologically or socially or whatever, setting aside any thoughts about whether our feelings promote survival.

 

For example, if you asked me, 'Why do you love your girlfriend?' and I responded, 'Because it helps me survive and reproduce' -- your response had better be that I am a fucking psycho or am totally out of touch with human relationships or am pulling your leg. You don't love someone because they help you survive, you love them because you admire them, because they support you, because they share your views about what a good life is, etc. If these considerations have anything to do with evolution, it's only way down the line, after many more relevant and important social, personal and psychological considerations.

this is again a case of too-complex-to-be-meaningful and highly romanticized definition. our society tells us exactly how to treat someone who we "love" and this is often out of touch with how we actually feel (see divorce, affairs, etc). this conflict between how society tells us to act and what our instincts tell us to do is the whole idea behind laws and social norms. these come about (i'm theorizing) due to our natural urge for stability. you are stressed out if you never know what's going to happen on your way to work, but if you drive to the same place every day, come home to your wife, are accepted in the society, there's that stability. it is brought about by very modern means, but it is something most humans have instincts to achieve.

i think in order to further this discussion it would be best to know what emotions can be physically accounted for and are not exercises in complex social logic. of course i'm no neurobiologist, so i'll just throw a few out and see if you d00ds agree these are primal emotions.

anger

lust

happiness

need for some stability

fear

  On 2/26/2010 at 3:46 PM, encey said:

I think there's an interesting parallel to that thought in musical creativity: We get our sense of how to express something musically from listening to how others have expressed something through similar musical phrases and structures. So in a sense, when you create music you're not making some statement whose meaning is 100% your own and out of the blue (I mean, if that were true, there would be no way anyone else could recognize it as expressing anything in the first place).

this is exactly why computers will eventually be able to compose "moving", "emotional" music, even if they shit out a bunch of wrong notes the first million tries. i mean, take rdj, i think half of his catalog is shite, but the other half brilliant. the same thing will happen with ai composers, some of the shit you may love, other tracks is WTF.

our emotions are just tied to chords as defined by our society. major makes you happy, minor is creepy, and a million other combinations.

Thanks for the response.

  On 2/26/2010 at 5:07 PM, theSun said:

i don't think you're getting why having a greater deal of emotion (whatever it is) can help you survive in primitive times.

I don't necessarily disagree with this (I don't really know one way or the other, really), but that's not the claim that I'm taking issue with, either. What worries me is my sense that you're claiming there is nothing more to our contemporary thought about emotions than this.

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take love for example,

 

(a) our modern romanticized notion of it is quite contradictory.

 

(b) clearly, the emotion we call love is incredibly complex these days.

 

( c ) but think of what it started as, simply a tendency to keep the same partner. i would say children with 2 parents had a better chance at survival than those with 1.

 

(d) my whole point before was that our brains have been evolving in a pre-technological society, not accustomed to the incredible degree of communication and sophistication that we have in our society. technology advances exponentially, evolution is linear. we still have all the emotions our ancestors had, but we use them in very different ways due to our ridiculously complex social structures.

None of (b) - (d) gives any support for (a). Saying that we have a more sophisticated or complex sense of what loves is does not show that this sense is in any way contradictory (I presume you mean contradictory to the sense of love as a tendency to keep the same partner).

I agree with (b). But I don't think ( c ) is plausible on its own, without any evidence to support it. Why should I think that love started as a tendency to keep the same partner? Do most animals do that? Did cavemen only fuck a single cavegirl each? I'm not inclined to think so.

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you're missing it again, you're analyzing why you're angry, when that simply doesn't matter. the construct of legality is useless scientifically, it only matters that stimuli x makes you feel increased tension, anxiety, etc. the "why?" question isn't important here because it is based entirely on circumstance.

Here we are just talking past each other. I was saying that an emotion like anger has a meaning beyond, or different from, the meaning it has in a scientific context, so my example was meant to show that. I think you read me as saying that the scientific meaning of anger was however I described it to be, but I was setting science aside there, again in order to argue that the concept of anger has a use or meaning in a social or psychological context.

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this is again a case of too-complex-to-be-meaningful and highly romanticized definition.

As in (a) above, here too you are jumping too quickly to conclude that something is meaningless just because it is complex.

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(e) our society tells us exactly how to treat someone who we "love"

 

(f) and this is often out of touch with how we actually feel (see divorce, affairs, etc). this conflict between how society tells us to act and what our instincts tell us to do is the whole idea behind laws and social norms.

Here is a good example of why I am resisting your claim that the only useful or meaningful way of talking about emotions is in an evolutionary context. For, if you believe that, then you must believe that what we 'really' feel is whatever emotion is meaningfully described in terms of its evolutionary consequences. And that's what I disagree with.

Say I have feelings of love for my gf, and I also have instincts to find and bone Scarlett Johansson (just, hypothetically). Your claim is that the presence of my instinctual lust shows that my 'love' for my gf is only 'love' so-called, not really love, because it drives me to do something that would contradict my being in love w my gf (namely, indulge in licentiousness). I claim the opposite: that my instinct is nothing more than that -- a brute, animal response to my perceptions (especially perceptions of that photo where she's in the red dress on the red carpet). It's not what I 'really' feel but is more like a reflex, blinking when someone swats at your face. On my view, what I 'really' feel, the 'true' way to describe my emotional state -- even when I have instinctual feelings of lust -- is love, as we understand it socioculturally, or psychologically, or whatever.

(I didn't make that last point very well, sorry.)

  On 2/26/2010 at 5:33 PM, encey said:

Thanks for the response.

 

  On 2/26/2010 at 5:07 PM, theSun said:

i don't think you're getting why having a greater deal of emotion (whatever it is) can help you survive in primitive times.

I don't necessarily disagree with this (I don't really know one way or the other, really), but that's not the claim that I'm taking issue with, either. What worries me is my sense that you're claiming there is nothing more to our contemporary thought about emotions than this.

Our contemporary emotions are just more complex combinations of basic emotions brought about by increasingly complex situations regarding our increasingly complex social structures. you still have the same anger as your ancestors, but you are angry about not being able to connect to the intrawabble and they are pissed that their axe head just broke. our emotions adapt to the times simply because they have to, but considering the time between the start of evolutionary emotion and the start of civilization, we've had like a half a second for our old emotions to adapt. this is not even considering the fact that the human race stopped evolving via natural selection some time after civilization began.

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take love for example,

 

(a) our modern romanticized notion of it is quite contradictory.

 

(b) clearly, the emotion we call love is incredibly complex these days.

 

( c ) but think of what it started as, simply a tendency to keep the same partner. i would say children with 2 parents had a better chance at survival than those with 1.

 

(d) my whole point before was that our brains have been evolving in a pre-technological society, not accustomed to the incredible degree of communication and sophistication that we have in our society. technology advances exponentially, evolution is linear. we still have all the emotions our ancestors had, but we use them in very different ways due to our ridiculously complex social structures.

None of (b) - (d) gives any support for (a). Saying that we have a more sophisticated or complex sense of what loves is does not show that this sense is in any way contradictory (I presume you mean contradictory to the sense of love as a tendency to keep the same partner).

 

I agree with (b). But I don't think ( c ) is plausible on its own, without any evidence to support it. Why should I think that love started as a tendency to keep the same partner? Do most animals do that? Did cavemen only fuck a single cavegirl each? I'm not inclined to think so.

my definition of love is clearly inaccurate, and i withdraw my assertion that it may be some basic emotion. after thinking about it, i would liken it to affection or a step above affection. just the desire to be around someone, it may benefit or hurt you, but i'd say more times than not it was beneficial to have a companion in pre-historic times. modern "love" is contradictory to what we feel instinctually, but of course everyone seems to have a different definition for love so that statement isn't really that meaningful. there's plenty of men who "love" their spouse, but also break up and "love" someone else just as easily.

there are plenty of animals who mate for life from birds to monkeys.

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you're missing it again, you're analyzing why you're angry, when that simply doesn't matter. the construct of legality is useless scientifically, it only matters that stimuli x makes you feel increased tension, anxiety, etc. the "why?" question isn't important here because it is based entirely on circumstance.

Here we are just talking past each other. I was saying that an emotion like anger has a meaning beyond, or different from, the meaning it has in a scientific context, so my example was meant to show that. I think you read me as saying that the scientific meaning of anger was however I described it to be, but I was setting science aside there, again in order to argue that the concept of anger has a use or meaning in a social or psychological context.

of course anger has a use in the society, it is a major emotion and anger itself isn't against any law or social norm, but we have to draw the line. excessive anger can lead to violent acts which are illegal in this society. this has happened many times even through our history as some general is pissed at another so thousands of men massacre themselves on a battlefield as a result. this is what you would call an inappropriate societal response, but evolutionarily appropriate. i think what i'm trying to say is that the social meaning of anger is useless because it is so incredibly fluid and changes wildly from circumstance to circumstance.

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this is again a case of too-complex-to-be-meaningful and highly romanticized definition.

As in (a) above, here too you are jumping too quickly to conclude that something is meaningless just because it is complex.

while someday we may know what each specific emotion looks like to the brain, we do not today. the brain is a system too complex for comprehension in this arena. it will be meaningful someday, but not until the technology allows us a better understanding of the brain.

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(e) our society tells us exactly how to treat someone who we "love"

 

(f) and this is often out of touch with how we actually feel (see divorce, affairs, etc). this conflict between how society tells us to act and what our instincts tell us to do is the whole idea behind laws and social norms.

Here is a good example of why I am resisting your claim that the only useful or meaningful way of talking about emotions is in an evolutionary context. For, if you believe that, then you must believe that what we 'really' feel is whatever emotion is meaningfully described in terms of its evolutionary consequences. And that's what I disagree with.

 

Say I have feelings of love for my gf, and I also have instincts to find and bone Scarlett Johansson (just, hypothetically). Your claim is that the presence of my instinctual lust shows that my 'love' for my gf is only 'love' so-called, not really love, because it drives me to do something that would contradict my being in love w my gf (namely, indulge in licentiousness). I claim the opposite: that my instinct is nothing more than that -- a brute, animal response to my perceptions (especially perceptions of that photo where she's in the red dress on the red carpet). It's not what I 'really' feel but is more like a reflex, blinking when someone swats at your face. On my view, what I 'really' feel, the 'true' way to describe my emotional state -- even when I have instinctual feelings of lust -- is love, as we understand it socioculturally, or psychologically, or whatever.

 

(I didn't make that last point very well, sorry.)

since we already know love is differently defined by everyone, let's just say that the fact that your are lusting over some actress while apparently in "love" is proof that we are indeed driven by instincts. would you consciously repress those instincts if society had no opinion on whether it was a good or bad thing to do? our ability to reflect is one of the things that makes us human, but i would argue that we have had emotions long before the ability to reflect on the morals of them.

love is a tricky thing, maybe we should talk about the feeling of attachment (affection?) as its basic component instead.

but the discussion is starting to loop anyway.

  On 2/26/2010 at 7:41 PM, theSun said:

... but i would argue that we have had emotions long before the ability to reflect on the morals of them.

evidence of this is is that animals do appear to share some of our emotions. fear, happiness, anger, affection,...

It's long, but you might find this podcast about the philosophy of the emotions interesting: http://philosophytalk.org/pastShows/TheIndispensibleEmotions.htm