Is human emotion or intelligence programmable?

Question

Human beings can think, feel, sense and act. Computers, in a way, simulate the brain, while robots simulate their actions. But will it ever be possible that the combination of computer and robot can make the combination look as if they are human? That is, can programming a computer make the computer feel, think and act as we do?

Answer 1

I had a long thought about this question. There cannot be thinking, feeling, posing actions etc. There is only instantaneous instinctive reaction to outside stimulus that we call our senses.

What someone would call "seeing" is very complex in science. There is a photon quitting a light source somewhere. It hits an object like a wall and some levels of energy of the photon are absorbed by the object. The rest is reflected. This reflected photon could hit your eye. Then you have exchange of energy. The moving particle that is the photon creates electrical current onto your optic nerve which travels the brain.

Your life is never a choice. You act by pure instantaneous reaction to the stimulus provided by your senses. Where you end up is determined by movements of atoms of which you are composed. Even further, the way these atoms collide make you move the way you move. It's not a matter of choice, decision or emotion. There is none of that. There are just small particles which collide and make you move in a certain way. And none of that is decided.

I do believe in destiny but not one created by god for me. One that is created by the fact that we are just beings who instantaneously react to outside stimulus. I thus have a written destiny that's not changeable created by simple movements of particles.

You say humans think. What is it to think? Thinking is a reaction to outside stimulus which makes you move in a certain way. You don't really think. To me using the word think has a religious connotation because it aims at transcending our existence.

For a computer to "think" as much as we do, it would have to be able to do the basic tasks that we are able to do like recognizing faces and it can already do that.

As to the emotions part, it is more difficult to answer. There would have to be negative feeling and positive feeling. Negative and positive feeling is just a reaction to outside stimulus again. For example, if someone touches and it hurts, it is just that the electrical influx to your brain may be stronger. A lot of pain will trigger a scream. All it changes is what it triggers. It is just atoms colliding. For a robot to have emotions, you would have to program it so that it will react to speech or harm in certain ways like screaming if you hit it.

Answer 2

Of course. Because we can treat the brain as being a Turing machine (maybe a quantum one), and so know it can be simulated by other Turing machines. Embodied-cognition poses challenges, things like the gut-brain axis; but those can all be simulated too.

A defence of progress of substance being made in AI research, towards true cognition: Is AI in a Crisis of Science?

Also related:

• Philosophy and the question 'When is a robot considered alive and thinking?'
• What would be the first indication that an Artificial Intelligence Entity (AIE) has become sentient?
• Explaining to my 11 year old why the question "Will robots ever have feelings" is part of philosophy, not science?

I would suggest by the time we can get robots & computers to do this, we won't want to. I'd look to Neuralink, to understand what is likely are hybrids, increasing degrees of human-computer hybrid, mixing what biology & what computer chips do well together. Emotions are a kind of intelligence, but many of ours evolved for different circumstances. We might expect an Age Of Spiritual Machines, where hybrids or synthetic sentiences feel and experience more, and more deeply.