As I read the interchange about GPT-3 and the Chinese room, I was drawn off into side-musings which were finally polyped off to a pure tangent (in my head) when DougC and NickT exchanged:
NLT> Dog do joy; why not computers?
DC> dog is highly interconnected - hormones, nerves, senses, and environment. neurons are not binary . every synapse is an infinite state variable.
While Joy and humor are not identical, there is some positive correlation. Poking around, I was only mildly surprised to find that there was a body of literature and in fact international organizations and conferences on humor (not mimes or clowns or stand up comedians, but real scholars studying the former as well as regular people). I was looking for the physiological complexes implied by humor or joy. I haven't (yet) found as much on the topic as I would like, maybe because I got sidelined reading about 2 neologisms (ca 2007) and a related ancient (Greek) term: Gelotophobia, Gelotophilia, and Katagelasticism. My limited Italian and Spanish had me reading it as "Gelato" or "Helado" which translates roughly into our own "Ice Cream", though the ingredients differ toward less rich technically.
Their meanings, however are roughly: Fear of
being laughed at; Love of being laughed at; and the Pleasure of
laughing at others. These are apparently more than the usual
discomfort or warm feelings we might get from being laughed at, or
from laughing at others, but a more deep and acute sense of it.
https://www.wired.com/2011/07/international-humor-conference/
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/14037/1/Ruch_Proyer_PhoPhiKat_V.pdf
Part of why I bring it up on this list is because as I study
myself and others as we exchange our ideas, observations, and
occasional (un)pleasantries, I am fascinated by the intersection
between (convolution amongsT?) personal styles and perhaps more
formal "training" each of us might have learned from our parents,
among our peers, by our teachers, our workplaces, possibly
professional organizations, etc.
It appears to me that institutions of higher education
enforce/impose a certain code of personal conduct first on their
participants (undergrads, grads, postdocs, staff, faculty) which
is a microcosm of the larger world. White Collar and Blue Collar
contexts are also similarly dissimilar, and within those, a
cube-farm of programmer-geeks and a bullpen of writers, and a
trading floor of traders (all white collar, taking their showers
at the beginning of the day) have a wide spectrum while blue
collar workers (taking their showers at the end of the day) do as
well. Construction crews, oilfield roughnecks, cowboys,
farmhands, etc. each have their own myriad ways of
interacting... sometimes *requiring* a level of mocking to feel
connected, etc. There may also be a strong generational
component... as we cross roughly 3 generations.
Greatest/Boomers/X/Millenials/Zoomers/??? and all the cusps
between.
But what I was most interested in is related to the original discussion which is what is the extended physiological response to humor, joy, mockery that a human (or animal?) may have which a synthetic being would need to be designed to include. Perhaps a properly broadly conceived General Artificial Intelligence would ultimately include all of this as well, and as deep learning evolves, it seems that there is no reason that a GI couldn't simulate the physiological feedback loops that drive and regulate some aspects of humore?
- Steve
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