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How Corporations, Robots and God Deal with Emotional Problems
Remember in 2001 A Space Odyssey when Hal goes nuts? If you don't, just think back to the expression What are you doing, Dave? to conjure images a psychopathic machine going after someone. Or on the cinematic flip-side, what about darling little Pinocchio who yearned to be a real boy in spite of his wooden pre-disposition? These tales offer a philosophical question:
What is consciousness?
Do houseflies scream in horror (internally) when you pursue them with a copy of Newsweek? Does Tivo get to know you well enough to offer prime time shows you'll like? Does it hurt a tree to lose a branch? Do hamsters feel embarrassed when they are caught urinating on themselves?
According to some psychological studies, these questions can be answered by with raw intuition. Historically, philosophical conundrums such as this must be weighed through an objective analysis of what one's, to choose a technical expression, gut tells them. If a bunch of people's guts tell them all the same thing, then maybe that can be used as a theory.
So to that end, researchers asked people if particular personality traits could be applied to corporations, robots and God. The idea, of course, being that through our gut intuition on what is appropriate when describing three intangable non-people, we can discover what the logistics behind consciousness are. At least... from our perspective.
When asked about corporations, people were quick to agree that they can "do" things, like: Microsoft is trying to change its marketing image (and they've better get cracking on that). However, corporations cannot feel things: Microsoft is angry at Yahoo for breaking up with them and hooking up with Google.
Similarly, robots are permitted to have consciousness, just as long as they don't feel one way or another about it. Robots can, for example, decide upon a chess move but cannot feel jittery about being in front of everyone. Unless. Of course. In a Disney movie.
What about God? That's the most intangible thing out there, right? Not a person. Certainly not a robot. Not a group. Just everything/everywhere. Even the religious will admit to a certain amount of personification of the Man Upstairs (or the Big Guy, if your prefer). Researchers found that God can think, decide and even develop a strategy but He cannot feel happy, sad or otherwise emotional.
This is all a bit arbitrary, right? Well, sure. But there is a reason our "guts" say things like this. Maybe at a higher level of consciousness we recognize that there are different levels to consciousness or different scales of perception. Language being our only tool to communicate these ideas, we can intuitively emote with words and expressions.
Maybe it's the ability to understand one's level of consciousness in comparison to other levels of consciousness that makes something "aware".
This
work by
Mark Havenner is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Photo courtesy of Max Kiesler at flickr.com
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