And the more I read and study about artificial intelligence, the more I get interested in understanding what makes us human.
Even consciousness might be something AI will reach, they say. From everything AI can already do, feeling emotions doesn’t seam to be one of them, they think.
So I started to delve into emotions. Fear, happiness, love. Isn’t love the mother of all emotions? I think it might be. That doesn’t make it an absolute truth, though, but anyway, by researching about it I found an interesting concept: that being in love and to love might in fact be two different things.
Dorothy Tennov was an American psychologist and wrote that being in love is a state, it’s unconscious and is processed by our limbic brain. It happens beyond logic, before thought. Trying to justify why we are in love is an act of translation from an area of the brain that cannot speak; at best, what emerges are interpretations, never reasons.
Now, to love is an act, and an act is chosen. It’s a deliberate decision to commit to someone or something. It arises in the frontal lobe, where reflection and intention take place. Unlike being in love, it’s a conscious state, shaped by reason and responsibility.
Surely, this is something quite interesting when we think about the way we relate to other people, though I could not help but let my thoughts wander toward the way we relate to objects.
How many times have you come across a product, a device, a thing, whatever it is, and felt that strange urge: you don’t know why, but you just like it, you just need it. You try to explain it, to make sense of it, of this thing, but in the end, it all sounds like the kind of excuses we tell ourselves when trying to reason without success. Smartphones, in the past, used to provoke that kind of feeling in many of us, myself included.
Nowadays I decided to love my phone. It became something too precious for me because it’s so much work to change to a new one. It works alright, although buggy updates drive me nuts!
But I didn’t decide to love robots, it just happened to be the case. I’m in love with my robot vacuum cleaner, I even saw a grenade thrower robot in a military parade in my hometown and found it “cute”. A grenade thrower robot.
Love is only one emotion, but it’s already so complicated: part instinct, part choice, part chemistry, part conviction.
And so, the more I study emotions, the more I return to the same question that led me here: perhaps what makes us human isn’t that much that we think, but that we feel, even when it makes no sense. Now try to emulate that, AI!