From Frankenstein to Gollum: The Cognitive Fetish and AI’s Emotional Void
Emotional void. We humans are born curious creatures who crave agency. If anything defines being human, it is the desire to make our world coherent and feel better. Our most fundamental questions center around these issues from childhood until our final moments. We are biologically wired to be interested in the world around us and to solve problems. However, somewhere way back in time, we divided these questions into two big categories for unknown reasons.
Beyond Logic: The Need for Emotional Intelligence
The first concerns how to get things done—why, how best, etc. Whether it’s building a bridge, running a government, or even formulating the best questions to ask, our minds go to work solving these problems. The second category concerns questions about intimate relationships with oneself and others. Sadly, in this mythological past, our intellectual founding fathers (all men) decided that the types of questions that answered the first set could also answer the second. This has set us back a couple of thousand years. Nothing brings this into focus more sharply than the issues surrounding AI and the singularity. It is a hypothetical future point when AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes self-aware, leading to unpredictable changes in human society: the fantasy that our latest iteration of Frankenstein will eventually kill its creator.
AI and the heated conversations about its seemingly inevitable rise into consciousness are being tackled with tools that its creators, or those passionate about it, have fetishized for the last two thousand years, all based on our ability to think. It’s a fetish of cognition, much like Gollum’s love of his precious ring. In academia and most mainstream intellectual trends, cognition is utilized to make feelings disappear. We discuss the fear of AI singularity, a metaphor for the potential future point when AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes self-aware, as a math problem, a way of reducing complex emotional and ethical issues to logical and computational problems, and ask questions about how to get things done or prevent things from happening. But the real issue is about intimate relationships—how we feel. It is time to study feelings.
The Fetishization of Cognition and Gender Roles
Historically, the fetishization of cognition in Western civilization can be traced back to the pre-Socratic philosophers, who emphasized rationality and observation over mythological explanations. Plato and Aristotle further developed this intellectual tradition, prioritizing reason and logic as the primary means of understanding the world. This cognitive focus, paralleled by a strict division of gender roles and labor, has had profound societal implications that we are urgently grappling with today.
Men were expected to engage in public life, including politics, philosophy, and warfare, while women were largely confined to domestic roles, raising children, and managing households. Boys were initially attached to their mothers but were eventually sent into the male-dominated public sphere, where emotional expression was often suppressed. This created a dichotomy where men were trained to prioritize rational thought and action while women maintained the realm of affect. Of course, this distinction was artificial, as it did not reflect the true nature of human experience and wrongly attributed emotional and rational capacities based on gender.
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Consequences of the Cognition Fetish
1. Fear of Creation and Frankenstein:
The metaphor of Frankenstein illustrates the fear and potential shame associated with creations born purely out of cognitive endeavors. Frankenstein’s monster, a product of scientific experimentation devoid of emotional consideration, becomes a source of terror and regret for its creator. This reflects broader societal anxiety about the consequences of prioritizing cognition over affect, suggesting that creations lacking emotional insight can become uncontrollable and destructive. This should serve as a stark reminder of the potential dangers of neglecting the affective dimension in our pursuits, urging us to proceed with utmost caution.
2. Rich Affective Life and Gollum:
Gollum serves as a metaphor for the hidden emotional depths of men. Like Gollum, men in Western society often conceal their rich, complex emotional lives due to shame and societal expectations. Gollum’s obsession with the Ring symbolizes how men may use cognition and achievement as a way to hide their true feelings, ultimately leading to an identity that is not authentic. This concealment can result in internal conflict and a fractured sense of self.
AI, Cognition, and the Avoidance of Affect
Artificial Intelligence, emphasizing algorithms, data processing, and machine learning, represents the pinnacle of cognitive fetishization. By focusing on creating machines that can think and perform tasks, we continue to sideline the importance of affect. This reliance on AI to solve problems underscores our ongoing preference for cognition over emotion.
Hiding from Feelings: The development and use of AI can be seen as a way to avoid dealing with our emotions. By creating machines that can handle cognitive tasks, we distance ourselves from the need to engage with our feelings and those of others. This avoidance perpetuates the cycle of emotional suppression that has characterized Western civilization for centuries.
Integrating Affect into AI and Cognitive Science: To break this cycle, it is crucial to integrate affect into AI and cognitive science. This is not just a possibility but a necessary and promising path forward for AI and cognitive science. By developing technologies and methodologies that recognize and value emotions as integral to human experience, we can create a more holistic understanding of consciousness, including cognitive and affective dimensions. This integration is not just beneficial, but it is imperative for the future of AI and cognitive science. It offers a promising future where AI can truly understand and interact with human emotions.
The Role of Affect in Human Intelligence
Caring about, being interested in, and feeling shame when disconnected from what feels good are essential parts of human intelligence. AI does not have this and likely never will. In large part, questions about what makes up general intelligence are not relational. Relational questions, questions of the heart, could be more well-formulated. Why? Because they are messy, affect-driven, and usually full of shame. As are all relationships.
The questions that AI does best at are ones that engineers call well-formulated ones. In engineering and computer science, a well-formulated question or problem is clearly defined, has specific parameters, and usually has a definitive answer or set of answers. These questions are ideal for current AI systems because they can be easily translated into algorithms or data processing tasks. Current AI systems, particularly those based on machine and deep learning, excel at tasks that involve pattern recognition, data analysis, classification, prediction based on historical data, and optimization within defined parameters. However, they do very poorly when it comes to feelings. This stark limitation of AI in understanding and dealing with human emotions underscores the urgent need to integrate affect into AI and cognitive science.
The Missing Piece: Affect Theory
Affect refers to our biologically based, felt experience of the world—the visceral sense of an experience, whether internal or external to us, with a person, object, or idea, real or imagined, is inherently rewarding or inherently punishing. The (mostly) involuntary feeling responses, such as finding a food disgusting, a person we are interacting with as interesting or enjoyable, or a car rushing towards us as frightening, are experienced in varying degrees of intensity throughout the day. (I challenge you not to respond affectively to reading what’s happening in political news nowadays!) However, affect isn’t just about emotions in the conventional sense. A more fundamental, pervasive aspect of consciousness underpins all our mental processes. This theory, rooted in psychology and neuroscience and, interestingly enough, heavily indebted to cybernetics, posits that affect, a term used here to describe the biological basis of feeling states, is not just an add-on to cognition but is supraordinate to it.Affect theory suggests that our cognitive processes are inherently affective. When we perceive something, we don’t just register its physical properties—we immediately and unconsciously evaluate its significance. Is it good or bad? Helpful or harmful? A rapid, automatic affective appraisal is initiated before a cognitive one, shaping how we process information and make decisions. Affects, as biologically-based feeling states, play a crucial role in making experiences feel significant, if not urgent. If you are drowning, are you making a cognitive appraisal? No, fear, an affect, takes over, and you fight for your life! Presenting an important paper for the first time in front of respected colleagues is a source of potential shame. You are not thinking about the negative consequences of a flubbed-up job in purely cognitive terms. You have lots of feelings about it!
Affect: The Invisible Hand Guiding Human Decisions
They serve as the social interface for reality, guiding human interactions and relationships. Like firmware in technology, affects provide the foundational functions that enable more complex cognitive and emotional processes. This interface helps us navigate the complexities of social life, influencing our perceptions, behaviors, and emotional connections with others.
Consider, for example, how you decide what to eat for lunch. You don’t just calculate the nutritional content of different options. Your mood, cravings, and past experiences with various foods heavily influence your choice. Whether you are having dinner with a friend, a parent, or a new love interest also influences the decision of where and what you eat. These affective factors guide your decision-making in ways that pure information processing cannot account for.
Affects evolved as the system of motivation for human beings. An animal moving through space has a lot of information to keep track of. By contrast, a plant, rooted in the ground, responds to temperature, moisture, and ground nutrients, but it doesn’t ever really ask itself, “Should I stay or should I go?” It doesn’t have to evaluate the solidity of the terrain it chooses to step on. It doesn’t need to predict the outcome of its decisions nor react quickly. But something that moves has an enormous amount of information to process to determine, “What do I want, and what do I need to avoid?”
Such a creature needs a system not just for responding to information but storing it, classifying it, retrieving it, and ranking its importance. It requires much more than a simple stimulus-response mechanism, reflex, or instinct. As it moves through space, it learns, adapts, predicts, and decides.
Affect: The Building Blocks of Consciousness
The answer to this particular need of a mobile creature is complex, involving multiple interdependent systems. The affect system, according to Tomkins, is perhaps the most overlooked. The affect system evolved so this creature could experience what was important about its world. Nothing becomes conscious without affect, is remembered without affect, and is sought or avoided without affect. Affect is what motivates us; affect makes things urgent. Each of the nine innate affects has a characteristic feeling, facial display, and body experience. Affects are the biological responses that attach meaning to the stimuli encountered from moment to moment. Affects are the origin of the knowledge of what feels good and bad. Affects tell us what to pay attention to. They are the spotlights of our minds.
There are two positive affects, and they feel good in different ways. Enjoyment-joy helps to pull us toward each other to form bonds of mutual advantage and make friendship ties. Interest-excitement drives us toward discovering the world around us, examining our experiences, and exploring our inner worlds. It is the source of pride in the basic competencies we acquire throughout our lives for dealing with things and people. Both feel good to humans, and we seek enjoyable and interesting experiences, from the relief of hunger to solving a puzzle. On the negative side, we
experience fear-terror, distress-anguish, anger-rage, shame-humiliation, disgust, and dissmell, all of which feel bad in different ways, and we try to avoid experiences that result in these affects. One neutral affect, surprise-startle, serves as a reset button, getting our attention and making us look for the next stimulus. Notice that Tomkins describes most of the affects as if they were on a continuum to show that, while any given affect has a unique flavor, there can be a great deal of variation in the intensity of an affective experience.
Tomkins’ theory
Such nuance is characteristic of Tomkins’ theory, which takes pains to account for the fact that this system is keyed not to static qualities but to changes. Only a system that responds to the change in the intensity and quality of experience as an organism moves through time and space can serve its needs. Much like music exists as something that unfolds over time and ceases to become music when one note is isolated, the innate affects occur in response to changing stimuli.
Tomkins proposes that affects evolved to favor three outcomes: survival, affinity with people, and discovery of the new.
“It is our belief that…natural selection has operated on man to heighten three distinct classes of affect: affect for the preservation of life, affect for people, and affect for novelty…He fears threats to his life, is excited by new information, and smiles with joy at the smile of one of his own species. These constitute some of the basic blueprints for the feedback mechanism.” (Affect Imagery Consciousness Vol. I page 26-27.)
The Biological Basis of Affect
We must understand its biological roots to truly appreciate the challenge of replicating affect in AI systems. Affect is not just a psychological construct—it is deeply embedded in our biology, resulting from millions of years of evolution. From an evolutionary perspective, affect served (and continues to serve) a crucial survival function. Our ancestors needed a quick way to evaluate their environment and respond appropriately. Affect provided this rapid appraisal system, allowing them to quickly sense whether something was beneficial or threatening.
This system did not disappear as we developed higher cognitive functions. Instead, it became intricately intertwined with our more advanced mental processes. Neuroscientific research has shown that affective processes involve complex interactions between multiple brain regions, including the amygdala, insula, and prefrontal cortex. These neural networks do not just process information; they are intimately connected with our bodily states. When we experience an emotion, it is not just a mental event. Our heart rate changes, our muscles tense or relax, and our hormonal balance shifts. This embodied nature of affect is crucial to how we experience and interact with the world. Nathanson has argued that the prefrontal cortex evolved not for more complex cognitive processes but to accommodate the need for an affective system that complimented increasingly complex cognitive tasks. This is a hypothesis I highly recommend those in AI take a good look at.
AI: Smart, But Emotionally Stunted
Compared to current AI architectures, most AI systems are based on artificial neural networks, which, in some ways, mimic the structure of the human brain. However, these networks are purely information-processing systems. They do not have bodies, hormones, or the complex, interconnected systems that give rise to affect in biological organisms. This is where current AI systems need to catch up. While they can process vast amounts of data and identify complex patterns, they lack this fundamental affective dimension. An AI can analyze the nutritional content of thousands of meals in seconds but cannot experience hunger, crave a particular flavor, or feel satisfaction after a good meal. Affects are the biological and motivational roots that drive human experience, providing the foundational functions—much like firmware in technology—that enable more complex cognitive and emotional processes.
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The Limits of AI and the Future of Human Cognition
AI’s capabilities, while impressive, highlight a crucial distinction between human and machine intelligence: the absence of affect in AI systems. These machines can process data, recognize patterns, and perform tasks at speeds far beyond human capacity. However, they lack the essential human experiences of emotion and affect, which color our perceptions, guide our decisions, and imbue our lives with meaning. This gap signifies the fundamental limitations of AI and underscores the necessity of integrating affective understanding into our technological advancements.
Affective computing, a field dedicated to developing systems that recognize and respond to human emotions, holds promise for bridging this gap. However, it remains in its infancy and faces significant challenges. Emotions are not merely responses to stimuli but complex, context-dependent experiences deeply rooted in our biology and social interactions. To truly replicate this in AI, we need a profound understanding of the intricate interplay between affect cognition, and the real challenge lies not in surpassing human intelligence but in understanding it more deeply.
AI: A Reflection of Ourselves and Our Future
In the end, the most significant insight AI can offer us is a mirror, reflecting our complexity and highlighting the unique qualities that make us human. As we continue to develop and refine AI, let us not forget that our greatest strengths—our emotions, our relationships, and our capacity for joy and sorrow—are also our most profound mysteries. In the words of the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” Let’s strive to gather both as we stand on the brink of an AI-driven future.
In conclusion, our fascination with AI and its potential to surpass human intelligence is a testament to our unending quest for knowledge and mastery. Yet, it also serves as a poignant reminder of the limitations of cognition divorced from emotion. As we move forward, let us embrace a more holistic understanding of intelligence—one that honors the vital role of affect in shaping our experiences, guiding our decisions, and enriching our lives. By doing so, we advance the field of AI and deepen our appreciation of what it means to be human.
Let’s start a conversation about the importance of affect in AI and human understanding.
Interested in exploring the role of affect in your life and relationships?
Dr. Scott Conkright offers therapy sessions to help individuals understand and integrate affect into their lives.
