Lisa Feldman Barrett: How the Brain Creates Emotions | MIT Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

today we're going to try something different we're going to try a conversation we have Lisa Feldman Barrett with us she is a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University director of the interdisciplinary affective Science Laboratory author of the new amazing book how emotions are made the secret life of the brain she studies emotion human emotion from social psychological cognitive science and neuroscience perspectives and so I think our conversation may help us gain intuition about how we instill emotional life into future artificial intelligence systems as Josh Tenenbaum gave you a shout out on Tuesday and said that if you want to understand how to create artificial general intelligence systems from an engineering perspective we should study the human brain so with that let's have some fun let me start with the curveball to conjure up an image of emotion have you ever cried while watching a movie that you remember and what movie was it I've cried during lots of movies let me think the last time I cried actually here's an interesting thing when I'm speaking about when I'm giving an academic talk I sometimes will talk about a study that we did where we had people watch films and we have them watch the most evocative clips of films and there's several clips that are really powerful and a couple of them every time I talk about them I'm gonna try not to cry now every time I talk about them I'm describing for the audience what subjects are seeing one of the clips is from a movie called Sophie's Choice does anyone know this film raise your hand if you know this film so we show this is a film about a woman who is forced in a concentration camp to choose which of her children will die in the gas chambers and so I'm already you know like if you were if I had a heart rate monitor and respiration monitor you would see them like it's a really powerful scene Meryl Streep is Sophie and it's very very evocative we have we also show there's a scene from a film with Susan Sarandon who is dying of breast cancer and she has to tell her 12 year old daughter that she's dying so there's another scene also that um that I find very compelling and you use these scenes to listen to motion as part of experiments we do yeah and in fact I was just giving a presentation to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts on implicit bias and to start the you know they want to understand the neuroscience of implicit bias and whether or not they should be crafting jury instructions for juries to be aware of implicit bias and to open the discussion I showed them a clip from a film that was filmed I you know almost 20 years ago actually called a time to kill a scene where Matthew McConaughey is this kind of he's his closing statements in a case where he is defending an african-american man who murdered two European American men who raped his twelve-year-old daughter and so the scene is he's this completely pathetic lawyer until the end when he masters this fantastic defense basically of this man on trial for you know basically avenging his daughter's death and that one I hadn't seen that for 20 years that film and it brought me to tears actually it's just a really powerful powerful scene and it's it just really punches you in the stomach you just can't help but just experience the weight of racism in that in that room and the brilliance of the closing argument to sort of puncture through it basically right okay so experience so one of the things you talk a lot and you're working in your book is the difference in the experience of emotion the expression of emotion so what our what's our biggest misconception about emotion for folks who haven't considered have only considered emotions at a surface level I would say one common misconception is that you can look at someone's face and read their emotion the way you read words on a page that everyone around the world when they're feeling angry they scowl when they're feeling happy they smile when they're feeling sad that they frown the way that I'm saying it sounds preposterous and it is preposterous but unfortunately that is actually what people a lot of people believe and tech companies around the world spend tremendous amounts of money and you know in the investment of some of the most creative people on this planet trying to build a motion detection systems when really what they're building our excellent systems for reading facial movements which have no intrinsic emotional meaning I mean sometimes facial movements communicate emotion but many times they don't so people scowl for many reasons they scowl when they're concentrating they scowl sometimes when they're sad they even can scowl when they're happy people smile when they're angry they smile when they're sad they don't just smile when they're happy they sometimes smile to indicate to send commute you know a social message that has something to do with emotion and so the idea that there's one Universal facial expression for example for each emotion is just there's no strong scientific evidence for that claim so how is emotion created them because we nevertheless feel like we're observing emotional we're communicating with others so how does emotion the creation of emotion change in the presence of others the does the audience change the display of emotion is that essentially the message well emotions are not displayed I would say right so basically you and I are having conversation right now and part of what you know my brain is doing is it's guessing make making educated guesses about what your facial movements mean so right now you have a slight smile on your face not exactly a smirk but and so you know say Russian by the way so we're not allowed to show any emotion you know I have a friend of mine who is Russian who told me and she when she moved to this country actually I've had several friends tell me this that their cheeks hurt for a year for how much smiling they had to do I have also a friend from the Netherlands who moved here who told me the same thing her face ached for how much smiling she did and in Bulgaria they haven't apparently like a name for you know the pervasive American smile kind of like a not flattering name for how much Americans smile but basically you when you look at someone's face you're making a guess about how they feel and although you yourself are focused on their face to you it feels as if that's where all the information is your brain is actually taking in the entire sensory array so it's taking in also you know the sound of the person's voice and the person's body posture and the dynamic temporal changes in all of those signals to make sense of things it's not you're not really the face is not a lighthouse it's not a beacon that just displays somebody's internal state in an obligatory way nevertheless there's some signal there of course and so what are what would you say as far as I understand there's no good answer yet from sciences what are the basic building blocks of emotion well I wouldn't say that there's no good answer from science I would say scientists disagree I think it's very clear what the building plugs are but you know in one way or another if you look back all the way to ancient Greece you can see that there are two kinds of views of emotion that have been battling it out for millennia one is the idea that you have I will give you the modern versions of these views but they really do have a very long history one is the idea that you are born with circuits in your brain that are pre what you know kind of pre-wired for emotion so that everybody around the world is born with an anger circuit a fear circuit a sadness circuit a happiness circuit some other circuits too you have them we all have them all neurotypical brains have them and actually other animals have them too and the idea is that when you know one of these circuits is triggered you have an emotional response which is obligatory so you have a very stereotypic your breathing changes in a stereotypic way your you know heart rate changes your the chemicals in your body change in a particular way you make a particular facial expression and you are have a propensity to make a particular action like you you know attack and anger and you run in fear or you freeze in fear and then there's another view which says well there are some basic kind of ingredients or building blocks that the human mind or the human brain now people talk about the brain now there are some basic ingredients that your brain uses and it uses them to make every kind of mental event that you experience and every action that you take the recipes are what are unique the ingredients are common right just like you can take flour and water and salt and you can make a whole bunch of different recipes with them some of which aren't even food like glue in a similar way the idea is that your brain has some kind of all-purpose capacities and it can it puts these ingredients together and it makes emotion as you need them on the spot and you don't have one anger you have a whole repertoire of anger you don't have one sadness you have a whole repertoire of sadness and if you grow up in a culture that has no concept for sadness you don't experience sadness and you don't perceive sadness because your brain becomes wired to make whatever mental events that are exist in your particular culture so for artificial intelligence systems the idea of emotional intelligence is really difficult and it seems like it's an important thing to try to instill so for human beings where do you see the importance on the priority list of what makes us human where does emotion sit I usually think that's the wrong question to ask because no I mean I think I think people constantly ask that question but I don't think it's the right question to ask because you know some cultures in our on our planet don't even have a concept for emotion and people don't while they experience what I'm going to refer to as in scientific terms we call effect which is our simple feelings of feeling pleasant or unpleasant or feeling worked up or calm or comfortable or discs or you know having discomfort these are feelings that come directly from the internal state of the physical systems in your body not everybody makes emotions out of those feelings and in fact we often don't make emotions out of this way so those feelings the way to think about it is that your brain comes wired to regulate your body actually sort of take that back you your brain comes wired when you're born your brain comes wired with the potential to regulate your body infants actually don't regulate their own nervous systems very well they can't put themselves to sleep they can't calm themselves down they can't regulate their own temperature that's what they need caregivers for and as caregivers regulate the nervous systems of their infants that wires the infant's brain right so infant little infant brains aren't born like little miniature adult brains they're born at waiting for a set of wiring instructions from the world and they wire themselves to the physical and social realities that they grow in and as they learn to do this they experience these simple feelings that you know a feeling Pleasant or unpleasant feeling worked up or feeling calm these are kind of like barometer readings in a way they're very simple and they lack a lot of detail because of how we're wired and we have to make sense of them and the way that a culture makes sense of them is not always about emotion so I would say you know in our culture when we lose something significant like a loved one we feel sad into heat intuition people feel sick they they have an illness it's not sadness a hundred or two hundred years ago there was an emotion called nostalgia which killed people was thought to kill people after you know for example after serving in World War one we would now call that depression it's not just a matter of changing the label of something it's actually the formation of the experience is very different so if you want to build an intelligent agent I don't think emotion is what you need to endow it with you need to endow it with these basic ingredients that it can use to make whatever experiences or guide whatever actions make whatever States or guide whatever actions are relevant to the situations that it's in that will be different if it's an American or a British or a Western urbanized environment than say if you were to go to Tanzania and steady you know the HUD's ax who are hunting and gathering since that culture since the Pleistocene so do you have words or human interpretable labels on these basic ingredients that we can understand so I mean I think the first thing to understand is that when we think about building an intelligent agent we think about endowing the agent with cognition or with emotion or with the ability to COO you to perceive things in the world because as humans that those are these are the things that are really important to us especially in our culture thinking feeling seeing and other cultures you know they have different ways of parsing things but the truth is that your brain did not evolve so that you could think and feel and see it evolved brains evolved to control bodies brains evolved so that they could control the various systems of the body as creatures move around in order to gain resources like food and water and a brain has to figure out how much resources to expend on getting additional resources now that may sound really trivial but it turns out it's actually really hard and scientists actually haven't really figured out completely how brains do this I mean what's really interesting to me is that if you look for example at computer vision try to figure out you know how how to make an agent see that's a pretty much solved problem not completely it's a pretty much solved problem the basics are solved it's your perception problems yeah the peer perception problem however if you want to create an agent that just reaches out smoothly grabs a glass and brings it into the body to drink that problem is not solved something is simple as movement which we think of as this really basic thing like oh it's so trivial all animals can do it is actually the heart at one of the hardest problems to solve and the brains basically I mean there's a whole story here about evolution which has nothing to do with having a lizard brain which is wrapped in you know a cognitive brain or anything like that that's a reference to the Trion brain which a lot of people believe it's a way of thinking about brain evolution instead what we what seems to be the case is that as bodies got larger and there were more systems because the nish of the animal the environment the animal got bigger and bigger and bigger brains also had to get bigger but they had to get bigger to a point with some constraints like they have to be you have to keep metabolic costs down it's really important if you don't you know creatures get sick and die and we can talk about what that means in terms of depression or metabolic illnesses or what-have-you but so what are the basic ingredients well one of the basic ingredients is that your brain is controlling your body all the time whether you feel it or not whether you're thinking about it or not whether you're asleep or awake certain parts of your brain are always very active all the time even when you're sleeping or else you'd be dead and those parts of the brain that are controlling your heart and your lungs and your immune system and all of those regions that are controlling the systems of your body are also helping your brain to represent the sensory consequences of those changes in your body which you don't feel directly you don't feel your heart beating most of the time you don't feel your lungs expanding most of the time and there's a really good reason why we are all wired not to feel those things and that is you'd never pay attention to anything outside in the world ever again if you could feel every little movement that was going on inside your body so your brain represents those as a summary these kind of simple summary feelings you feel good you feel bad you feel great you feel like you feel really jittery you feel really calm and these feelings are not emotions they sometimes get your brain can make them into emotions but they're with you every waking moment of your life there are properties consciousness in the way that lightness and darkness is a property of vision and sometimes we make them into emotions when they're vit when we have a big change in our heart rate or a big change in our in our breathing rate or a big change in our temperature or a big surge of glucose we might the brain might make a motion out of those changes those very strong changes which you will feel as really feeling unpleasant or really feeling Pleasant but your brain might also make hunger or your brain might make an instance of a physical sensation like nausea or your brain might even make a perception of the world like that's a nice guy that guy is an this is a really delicious drink that's a beautiful painting those are also moments where these simple feelings which we call effect are very strong so effect is a basic ingredient there are others that I could talk about too it's not the only one but one of the things I think that that sometimes people who are studying to build AI systems don't realize is that the brain its fundamental job is to keep your body alive and well and if you don't have some kind of body to regulate with effective feelings that come from that regulation or something like that it's you're kind of gonna be out of luck I think in rendering something that looks more something that seems more human right so maybe you can elaborate like in the book sapiens that we as human beings are really good on mass as a thousands millions of people together believing something even if it's not true so while scientifically sort of from a neuroscience perspective it may be very true that emotions aren't real I didn't think real but I said they're not there there isn't so interesting you finished yeah yeah so what I'm trying to say is also from AI perspective is they become these trivial ideas of mapping a smile to being happy and these kind of trivial ideas become real to us through Hollywood through cultural spreading of information and we start to believe this and therefore it becomes real innocent in in in as much as anything is real about our cult our perception together so it's really important scientifically the ideas that you're presenting but does that mean there's just because our brain doesn't feel those explicit emotions does I mean they're not real I didn't say we don't feel explicit emotions so I want to be really clear about this because it's an interesting this you know this sum this inference it's an interesting inference that people often make and so but it's it's a mistake and it's a mistake that betrays a certain kind of thinking that we do in this culture and is it's the mistake of the following sort so when I say there is no facial expression that is diagnostic of a single emotion that doesn't mean that people don't express emotion they certainly do express emotion they just don't you know when when they're in a state of anger in a state of sadness or in a state of awe their faces don't do one thing when I say well your body can do many things when you're angry or when you're sad or but let's take anger your heart rate can go up it can go down it can stay the same your breathing rate can go up it can go down it can stay the same the same pattern that you see in anger you sometimes see in sadness and you sometimes see in fear you sometimes even see it in enthusiasm and in awe so does that mean that emotions aren't real no emotions are real but but sometimes things are real because the physical meaning of the signal is endowed in the signal okay so when your retina communicates to your brain that you have that you are faced with a wavelength of that you know is 600 you know 600 nanometers the signal is endowed in your brain that's like in the signal it's not like interpret you don't interpret that it's 600 you know nanometers it is 600 nanometers the informations in the signal but when you see read that information is not in the signal your brain has added information that isn't in the signal itself in a sense your brain has imposed meaning on a signal that the signal doesn't have on its own they'll let me back up and give a different example to make it a little easier and then will reproach this there's a there are some things that we impose this is true almost of all civilization right that we there are some things that are real by virtue of the fact that we agree that they exist little pieces of paper serve as money or now you know bitcoin or little pieces of plastic or gold or diamonds or in the past barley salt shells rocks serve as currency have value only because a group of people agree that they have value so we impose meaning on objects and once we all agree that that object actually has value we can trade it for material goods the minute that some of us disagree that we risk we withdraw our consent right the things lose their value that's what happened in the mortgage crisis that's what happened in the tulip crisis in the you know the Netherlands in the 17th century or 16th century when it was money currency this because we impose meaning on objects in the world physical objects in the world that themselves don't have that meaning on their own and they are very real money is very real to people I can stick somebody's head in a brain scanner and show you that they experience value in a very real way but that that reality is constructed by the fact that they have learned the value in a particular culture well that's also what we do with emotion we impose meaning on certain physical signals that they don't have by on their own and but we have collective intentionality we all agree that scowling is sometimes anger and so it becomes anger in a very real way just like little pieces of paper become money so it sounds like you kind of think about the expression R emotions a kind of language as an extension of a language that will learn in the same way that we collectively agree in a language ana lexicon and how we use that language sure you could think of it that way I mean everything everything in our culture is almost everything agriculture is a function of social reality in this way we are citizens of a country because we all agree that the country exists more or less and wow you guys barely even laughed at that okay [Music] what's a revolution a revolution is when some people in the country withdraw their consent they no longer agree right a president has powers in a country because we all agree that a president has powers present only as powers by virtue the fact that we all agree that he or she has powers if we stop agreeing the president doesn't have those powers anymore it's very real people's lives depend outcomes of real people depend on these social realities that we build and nurture and we why are these social realities into the brains of our children as we socialize them and when people move from one culture to another they have to learn the new social reality that they are faced with and if they don't they get very sick physically because our ability to agree on what something means actually is important for regulating our nervous systems so can you speak to that a little bit I mean for machine learning methods for systems that learn to behave based on a certain reward it's important to kind of have some ground truth and and learn so how do it sounds like the expression of emotion is learned can you talk about how we learn to fit into our culture by expressing emotion with our phase body given the context given the rich what's that process look like when does it happen how much sure well you know I mean yeah I wrote a 400 page book so I'll try to do it in like a couple sentences yeah so so how does it how does an infant learn anything so an infant's born and it can't do anything for itself it can't regulate its own nervous system it can't keep its body systems balanced this is a term scientific term for this is alice stasis alice stasis is your brain's ability to predict what your body is going to need before it needs it and tries to meet those needs before they arise so an example would be if you're gonna stand up if your brain is gonna stand you up it has to raise your blood pressure before it stands you up if it doesn't you'll fall that's costly from metabolic standpoint it's costly you'll hurt yourself so an infant's brain can't do this very well an infant doesn't know when to go to sleep and when to wake up an infant doesn't can't feed itself can't regulate its own temperature someone else has to do it and when someone does it the infant is learning the infant is learning it's taking in sights and sounds and smells and the physical sensations from the body which are comfortable and pleasant when the infant Alice stasis is maintained so right from the get-go an infant is learning statistical learning you know the capturing events including their consequence for the infant's body some people think babies are born you know attached already to their caregivers but they're not actually infants don't even know what a caregiver is it's just that the caregiver is there constantly meeting that infant's needs that's how infants start to learn now if there are statistical regularities like for example an infant is not born with the ability to recognize a face as a face but it learns that in like the first couple of days of life why because human faces have some statistical regularities to them right to eyes and nose and a mouth kind of in the same place most of the time so it learns really quickly but here's the interesting thing around three months of age infants start to learn what we call abstract categories they start to learn that some things which don't look the same or sound the same or smell the same actually have the same function and how do they learn this they learn it with words so if you do an experiment with a three month old three months old okay and you say to that baby very very intentionally look sweetie this is a one and you put the web down and it makes a noise like a beep and then you say I'm like I don't have props and then you see my wallet yeah okay and then you say give me your wallet yeah give me your wallet and then you say look sweetie this is a and you put the down and it makes a beep if you say look sweetie this is a that infant expects that object to beep why is that important because in the real experiments this might be yellow and squishy and tall and this might be red and pointy and you know hard and this might be you know so lots of different perceptual features but but the infant nose learns that the word is inviting the infant to understand that the function of those very different physical signals are actually the same similarly you can take you know six objects that are exactly identical in their physical features how they sound how they smell what they feel like what they look like and you can name three of them with one word and three of them with the other word and the infant will understand that these are actually different objects that happens a little after you know not not as early as three months but the point is that when we talk all the time we use words all the time what do we do with infants we're constantly pointing things out and labeling them this is a dog this is a cat you're angry this person's sad Oh mummys really happy today oh you know mommy loves you Oh daddy's really excited about this and so on and so forth and infants learn really really quickly words are considered to be kind of invitations to form abstract concepts that is the basis of almost all of the you know mental categories that we that that we mental events that we experience we're basically teaching children to form these abstract categories not and that's the basis of money and it's the basis of rules that we have with each other and what we expect from each other it's the basis of a lot of the sort of functional categories that we use in everyday life we're impose meaning on sensory on sensory arrays that those sensory arrays in and of themselves don't necessarily have they only have that meaning because you and I both learn that that package of sensory array means something so when I make that you can anticipate what will happen next just because we've learned those are they're wired into our brains you know in our culture and when we go to a different culture we have to learn sometimes different packages yeah different mappings so you're saying that there's a few sources of sensory data and a few building blocks inside us the feelings of some kind that we learn to then from an early that we've come born with those or part of what your brain is doing is it's trying to make sense of the sensory array around it so from your brains purse so from your brains perspective just think about from your brains perspective your brains perspective it spends its entire life trapped in a dark silent box [Music] Anna NASA makes sense of what's going on around in the world so that knows what to do to keep itself alive right and well but it has to it has to know what to do based on it has to know what what's happening all around it only from the effects that it receives through the sensory systems of the body so a flash of light what's a flash of light it could be anything what you know what's a look like a siren a siren could be you know a firetruck or it could be somebody's car alarm went off or it could be a doorbell or it could be right any particular sensory cue could have multiple causes so your brains trapped basically in your skull and all it gets are the effects the sensory effects of stuff that happens in the world but it has to figure out what those things are so that it knows what to do so how does it do that well it has something else that it can draw on it has your past experiences your brain basically is doesn't store experiences from the past it can reconstitute them in its wiring and that's what it uses to guess at what those sensory cues me of those sensory changes me so in one situation a siren means one thing in another situation it means another a flash of light means one thing in one situation and a different thing in another so your brain is using past experience to make guesses about what these sensory changes me and so that it knows what to do and it has the same relationship to the sensory changes in your body what's an ache in your stomach well it could be hunger it could be anger it could be discussed it could be longing it could be nausea it's not that there's one ache in your stomach for nausea and another ache in your stomach for hunger there are many aches in your stomach any different feelings of achiness for nausea and many different feelings of aching is for hunger and sometimes they overlap so your brain has to make the same kinds of guesses about what's going on in your body as it does about what the sensory events mean in the world and that's really what it's doing it's it's guessing and making sense of the sensory array so that it knows what to do next and when it guesses wrong it takes in that the you know the the sort of information that it didn't predict well which you know in psychology we have a really fancy name for that we call it learning your brain takes in the information that it didn't predict and so that it can predict better than the next time to make sense of things the next time so you kind of answered this a little bit I'd like to elaborate on it if you were to build a robot that performs maybe passes the Turing test or performs at the low bar level of instead of myself here today it would be a robot talking to you it'd be convincing as a human how would you what kind of how would you build that system in a sense in paralleling the infant's what essential aspect of the infant experience do you think is important it needs to well I mean I you know I don't I'm not a computer scientist so but so the way that I would say it is it needs to have a body these have something like physical systems or an analogy to physical systems it has to do something analogous to a low stasis so whatwhat's sorry to elaborate so what would be the goal for the system you kind of mentioned previously that the goal will be to for the brain to just stabilize itself no it's not that the brain is stabilized though you know so people talk about reward what is reward and machine learning is pretty easy it's it's something but it's it's mathematical so it's there's no philosophy to it you just oh yeah there's philosophy to everything right whether you admit it or not as a different story right yeah so you wanted to play a game of chess playing give them go you wanted to pick up a water bottle is uh okay but what is reward existence dopamine is actually not reward dopamine is effort dopamine is necessary for effort it's not necessary for reward maybe it's commonly if you read the most caught those up to date literature that is what you'll see that it's actually people can animals can find things rewarding can be without without dopamine actually but they they they need to open to move they need dopamine to encode fits and to learn information so it's really for effort that is required to work towards getting a reward I would say and when the when a brain an animal brain a human any kind of animal brain miss predicts what the reward will be that's what you see a real surge of dopamine because it the animal has to adjust its action but reward is basically bringing the body back into a low stasis it feels good when that happens and people will and animals will work tremendously hard to have that happen so you know what is motivation motivation is is expending resources to get a reward so basically if if you don't have something like physical systems that have to be kept in balance water I mean for humans or for actually any living creature on this planet even you know single-cell organisms actually there's an analogy to what we're talking about here to brains but you know salt water glucose all these systems have to be kept in balance and they have to be kept in balance in a very very efficient way and that's the motivating so-called motivating force really that's what that's what that's what really brains are for so yeah and that is the basis the consequence of that regulation it are the basis of you know effective feelings which are for many many creatures on this planet a property of consciousness ok so maybe if it's ok we'll take some questions in the audience but first let me ask the last question as so I'm building on the robot question how would you build the same kind of robot that you would be able to as a human being fall in love with well you know people fall in love with their cars they fall in love with they fall in love with their blankets they fall in love with their toys you know you don't need MIT doesn't need much to fall in love with something the question is will it love you back I would elaborate I think I think yeah I think you're answering that love in the way we're defining it loosely in poetry and culture as a social construct and its relative what I mean is sort of the idea of monogamous law a long-term love that we have deep connection with other human beings that we have you're saying you could do the same with a car like a nice 69 Mustang are you telling me that you you telling me that you've never you know anyone who's like so in love with their car that you okay now here's the thing so one so here's the thing we we are social animals okay what does that mean what does it mean to be a social animal it means that we regulate each other's nervous systems so our brain my brain isn't just regulating my nervous system right now it's regulating yours and actually it's regulating other other people's in the audience too and vice versa and why is that you know I mean other animals do it too we're just looking really good at it but other animals like there are some insects that are social species they regulate each other's nervous systems they do it with chemicals they do it with smell primarily and a little bit with touch like earwigs well you know like they can actually I have this great picture of there's like totally disgusting looking little bug but it's like you know cuddling it's a little baby ugly little ugly baby bug - it's adorable picture but you know what about mammals like rats well they also use chemicals like smell but they also use touch and to some extent they also use sound these hearing primates add vision and as primates we do all weaves all of those senses to regulate each other and we also use something else words right exactly and words the systems in our brains that allow us to speak and allow us to understand words are directly connected to the parts of the brainstem that control the body I don't mean like they're a bunch of I mean monitor I mean monosynaptic we connected so exactly the same systems in your brain that are important for you to be able to understand language and to speak are also directly directly affecting the systems of your body and that is why I can say something to somebody I can speak to you and I can have an impact on the nervous systems of people all the way at the back of this auditorium without they you know maybe they can see me maybe they can't maybe they can't hopefully they can't smell me maybe they can hear me maybe they you know but they can if they hear me speak words I can affect their nervous systems that's why a telephone works that's why the telephone works to where you can feel connected to someone just merely by hearing their voice because the sound of their voice has an effect on your nervous system it can it can make you breathe faster it can make you breathe slower and the words also have an effect because when I say a word like hmm I don't know when I say word like car that's a short form I have a bunch of mental features in my mind when I say the word car and I say that word and that invokes those similar mental features maybe not identical but similar enough that invokes it in your mind and your mind is made by your brain so it invokes if I just say the word car there are changes in your motor system that would be exactly the same or very close as if you were actually in a car right so this is something that we do and the fact we're attachment comes from an infant to a caregiver or or to lovers or to really close friends comes from the ability that we have to regulate each other's nervous systems and that is why when you don't have that kind of attachment you die sooner on average seven years sooner loneliness kills I always tell my daughter my daughter's 19 years old I always tell her you know breaking up when you break up with someone it feels like it will kill you but it won't loneliness however will kill you it will kill you on average seven years earlier than it would if you didn't have an attachment and that's because our nervous systems you know as our bodies got really complex through evolution and our brains got bigger they could only get so big there are constraints on how big any brain can get that have to do with you know birthing the infant but it also has to do with the metabolic cost of a brain your brain is really expensive my brain really expensive three pounds 20 percent of your metabolic budget that's a lot and so what did evolution do to solve this problem well it couldn't make our brains any bigger so it just entrained other brains to help manage our nervous systems so you bear the burden of other people's Alice stasis and they bury your the burden of yours not always at the same time but that's what it means to give people support when someone when you're feeling horrible and somebody Pat's you on the back or says nice words to you or gives you a hug they are physically having an effect on your body that they are helping your body to maintain a low stasis at a time when your brain probably couldn't manage it on its own and so the basis of love or attachment is basically that it's the ability to affect each other's nervous systems in a positive way I always say to people you know the best thing for a nervous system a human nervous system is another human and the worst thing for a human nerve system is another human because we're social animals well beautifully put so maybe a few questions in the audience do you mind if there's a there's microphones on both sides okay sure hi thanks for talking here you're saying cool stuff not a question I'll take it it's all right so I was thinking about what you're saying about reward and I'm wondering first of all is he described as a return to a lo stasis is reward in any way linked to the and just like the reinforcement of pathways or behavior so that the next time you get that stimulus you will you'll respond in the same way and I'm also wondering about the link between the desire for aloe stasis and the need for novelty and then he did like a great it's a really great question so um the second question is so much more interesting than the first actually so let me say this that that there is a need for novelty the need differs right for different people I will say novelty so first of all the we can think about the need for novelty in a really proximal way we can think about it in a really distal way like but basically when I say that a brain is organized or engineered for metabolic efficiency that doesn't mean that the goal is to to only ever have your prediction you know your brains predicting all the time to always have its predictions completely perfect so you'll never learn nothing because you'll be bored out of your mind right and also you know humans like to and their niche they like to explore so it's a constant balance between what biologists would call exploitation and exploration novelty is is um it's exciting it there's actually an increase in norepinephrine an increase in arousal it feels really exciting but it's also super costly novelty requires usually that you learn something new that means that's actually really metabolically expensive thing to do and it also means usually that you're moving your body around which is also metabolically expensive thing to do so the need for novelty is balanced by its cost and different nervous systems can bear different amounts of cost so for example if you take two rats that are somewhat genetically you know moderate like they've been genetically bred one is bred when you stick it in a a novel cage it just sits still and the other one when you put it a novel cage it like roams all over the place and it's just you know it's going crazy kind of exploring everything well the one that sits still scientists might say oh that's a nervous rat or that rats afraid what is that rat doing the rat is not moving and it's not encoding anything because encoding something is expense it's expensive this rat on the other hand is roaming all over the place moving a lot learning a lot so it's encoding a lot spend spend spend save save save spend spend spend there are time there are differences between people and there are also differences between times in your life where moments where you feel like you have a little bit to spend and other moments where you feel like you really have to conserve when I talk to the public I always talk about I don't use the word out of stasis it's just too boring a word but I sort of do is sort of explain it like a budget you know like your brain is sort of like the financial office of a company a company has lots of offices it has to balance the expenditures and revenues and it's got to keep everything in balance so it might take a little money here move without office you know it's got to keep everything in balance we're just always trying to do is spend a little bit to make a little bit more what happens when it spends a little bit and it doesn't get a revenue back there's no reward what happens well it goes into the read a little bit so what do you do when something goes into the read well you might do something risky you might actually spend a lot to try to really may you know not just make back your deficit but actually make a lot that would be novelty that would be move and spent moving and encode or you might reduce your spending you might say well I'm gonna save a little bit now that would be I'm not gonna move too much I'm not gonna spend too much I'm not gonna encode anything so I certainly don't mean to suggest to you that that novelty is unimportant or that learning is unimportant and it's a really important question about what is there any intrinsic value to novelty over and above the rewards that it would give you an analysis at ik sense but it is really clear to me that the extent to which you any nervous system will embrace novelty and even seek it pretty much depends on the allostatic state of that of that system if you don't have a lot to spend and you're already in the red you if you at a certain point if you continue to spend when you're in the red you go bankrupt what that means in human terms is you get depressed it means that your your brain makes you fatigued so you can't move and it makes you locks you in so you stop paying attention to anything going on around you in the world and your experience is just what's in your head that that's actually what depression is so that makes me think of aloe stasis more of as a range than as a zero point it's not homeostasis it's Alice stasis it's a range for sure but we answer some other questions and maybe I'll get back to your first question if there's time so if I understand your argument correctly if we're going to make anything like a general intelligence something approaching not like like a human it needs to be an embodied system well I want to be careful about saying that because for two reasons one because in biology there is this concept of degeneracy just a sucky word but it's a great concept and it means that there's more than one way to skin a cat basically you want a functional outcome there are many ways to get to that functional outcome so genes for example you know there are a lot of characteristics that are heritable but we don't know the genes for them and the reason why is that there isn't one set of genes there are like multiple sets of genes that can give you actually the same outcome so what I want to say is that you need something akin to a body it doesn't actually have to be a body I imagine there are lots of ways that you could implement a system you could implement an agent that has multiple systems of some sort that it has to manage but my point is that one thing about that is very important that we continually miss when we think about building an agent with mental states we continually miss the fact that it has a body it has about humans have bodies and that's the brains primary task and our most fundamental feelings come from the physical changes in our body even though we don't normally experience it that way that actually is how it is if you just look at the wiring of the brain if you just see it so it seems to me that if you want to build an agent that is human like it has to have something like a body doesn't have to maybe be a body and I'm sure there are many clever ways that you could implement something like a body without it actually being a body if you know if you understand what I mean so Amazon Alexa could be there if we just gave it some sort of I don't know representation of mental states or some kind of a low static yeah target sure here's just say one other thing because I think it's really important all a brain requires is that you at some point had a body you know right so basically being this is what phantom limb pain is this is what chronic pain is this is what happened you know if at some point you cease to get information from your body anymore your brain still can simulate still can reinstate the sensory patterns that once came from the body and that's what's required right at some point the body isn't really needed anymore yeah I think we're here yeah so emotions in humans Lucas are they implemented by a bunch of hacks so there's a bunch of chemicals that go into your brain those oxytocin serotonin a whole bunch of biochemical things that diffuse around in the fluids in your brain that affect your emotional state and that seems like a Hank that we've inherited over millions of years from premature ancestors and if you look at the machine learning world we can do a bunch of similar things with you on that so you can increase the activation thresholds on a large scale you have changed the map noise going into the system you can do a bunch of similar things but you don't have to rely on fluids being kind of cleaned slowly by glial cells things don't diffuse around in and fluid in the system necessarily seems like there's a lot more flexibility so when you come to an implementation there's not so many constraints imposed by the evolutionary history on the whole system and it seems like that would make it work better so when people are in negative emotional states and they can't think straight people can think actually quite well a negative emotional state they don't tell you so but they can play with crimes they can do very nefarious things very very effectively right so but the general point I think is true even if that example is not so emotions kind of flood your nervous system without emotions don't flood your nervousness all right so some of them do so now perfectly of yes sir you thing in your bloodstream let's talk about this chemical let's talk about this chemical there's not a single chemical in your brain or anywhere in your nervous system that is for emotion serotonin is not for emotion don't mean it's not for emotion oxytocin is not for emotion well even opioid you know even even Opie even opioids are not for emotion so they influence your emotions they're involved they influence every mental event that you have not just emotion so your brain for example your brain is a physical it's a set of physical cells that are bathed in neuro chemical systems and the neuro chemical systems that you're referring to basically change the ease with which information is passed back and forth between those neurons that's always true it's true regardless of whether the event is a motion or whether it's a perception or whether it's a thought or whether it's a belief it's always true so for example serotonin serotonin is a neurotransmitter that allows your brain to delay gratification of a reward it allows you to expend energy now because you anticipate a reward at some point in the future and if you have a deficit in serotonin then you can't do that very well and it turns out for humans one of our great superpowers is the ability to do mental time travel to remember in the past and also to do things now because we know they're going to have an effect ten or twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now so the the you know in when I said you have to have something like a body I'm not saying literally you have to have a physical corporeal body I'm saying you have to have you I mean it's just a fact it's not an argument it's a fact that your brain that brains evolved for the purposes of regulating multiple systems and from a cybernetics standpoint you know the best way to regulate a system is to build an internal model of it that's what your brain is your brain is an internal model of your body in the world it's running simulations it's running this model and if you want to have an age that is somewhat human-like that has feelings like humans then they have to do something that they have to have to be able to do something similar and whether it's a actually physical corporeal body or not I think is you know that's an open question right so it sounds a bit as though you're disputing my premises before I got to my question so I started off by saying sorry I started off by saying emotions are implemented as a bunch of hacks so would you say that was rub broadly correct or would you say that they're not hacks they're finely tuned and adaptive and well I went there not maladaptive but would you say it's a bunch of hacks I don't think I don't know what you mean by hacks I think luge's kind of historical accidents I think they're wrong you're talking about emotions like they're they're talking the the premise of your question I can't answer your question because I think it's not the correct question I mean what its emotions aren't like blood pressure you know they don't exist in that sense they are they are the way that they are first of all not all cultures have not all people in all cultures have emotions everybody has effect assuming they have a neurotypical brain of sorts but but they don't all have emotion and so to answer your question that your answer asking me is I can't answer because I don't think it's the right I don't think it's the right opioids and the the pain systems seem like things that influence your emotions fairly directly so this it's not that it's the same thing but it's that there's a powerful link opioids though so opioids are important for instances of emotion but they are also important for every other category of mental event that you brain can make other things too I agree so I you know but you will see sometimes scientists will assign you know I'm an emotional meaning to something like dopamine is for you know first hedonic pleasantness and then it's for reward people like to assign single functions two biological entities like a chemical or a brain region a cluster of neurons or it's just not that's really I'm not saying every chemical does everything but whatever whatever opioids do they do in every waking moment of your life not just in moments that are emotional for you I should stop thank you very much yep I think it is very interesting that you brought up the last topic of love because I think it actually brings up a really important thing which is and what you were saying about connection that's I mean the primary purpose of life is to procreate right I mean that that's what our genes do so first of all right I'm not gonna be touching that yeah so yeah and and it's of course in humans it's not just genetic it's mimetic I mean we appropriated our ideas as well as you know physically and so a primary purpose of our wanting our our reactions and interactions with other people and other things is that goal is that we get rewarded when we interact with other things in a way that creates something new whether it's art or you know a book or technology or something like that and if we don't put that if there's no inherent reason for a robot or a computer system to want to do that I mean how do we how can we can even imagine putting that into a system inherently that it wants to that it just desperately wants to make something new I mean well here's what I would say you know when we're we're first of all we're not we talk about we've been focusing a lot on bodies I'm certainly not saying that's a sufficient condition right I'm just saying it's a Ceri one or something like a body but I certainly have the motivation to create and I'm imagining that you do too I have to tell you not everybody has that most adolescents don't have that many adolescents don't have it okay that was a joke I have a teenage daughter I'm just telling you yeah but the point is that that what people what people find rewarding is is remarkably diverse but the property I think is that there has to be a feature of reward for for a lot of people that's you know that's having an impact in some way having an impact on another person having an impact you know on a building something that wasn't there before whatever you know in in innovating or I'm discovering but it's not true for everybody it's just true for like a lot of people in this room probably and certainly the people that we probably spend a lot of time with but not not for everybody sure I mean look but if you want to you know if you want to if you you know we can certainly make a kinetic argument here absolutely there there the there's nothing that I've said today that is inconsistent with the idea that that you have to that you have to pass your genes on to the next generation and actually make sure that that generation survives to reproductive age it's not just enough to have offspring you have to make sure the offspring survive to reproductive age and there's a whole argument about you know the the learning of social reality concepts of social reality that we've been talking about like money and emotions and so on that makes that argument right that it's very expensive to have to encode everything in jeans or to have to learn everything from scratch every generation so instead what we have is a system a genetic system that allows us to wire the brains of the young with what we know and that's what we do basically right so it's the I'm curious about your analogy about intentionality that you talked about when you use the analogy between money and the perception of red to the facts that we the fact that we have emotion because the distinguishing feature it seems to me is the level of intentionality and as you said before our brain assigns meaning to things but we don't or maybe and and my question is whether or not you agree with this I guess we don't always deliberately assign me nothing I've said is about ever deliberate but sometimes we do write often actually yeah so when you go back to like the question of what makes something intelligent a lot of previous talks have been about you know we want to pick a goal and then we create costs to achieve that goal but that goal is deliberately if assigned so when you talk about like what makes something intelligent what do you think the role of intentionality is and the spectrum therein so first of all we talk about intentionality I think you have to really be careful that you are philosophers talk about intentionality in two ways they talk about intentionality to mean a deliberate action the way you mean it but intentionality can also mean that something has a referent out in the real we're out and outside of you really so that a word a word has a referent that's the you know the intention of the of the word basically I think you have to be really careful I also think that you have to make a distinction between a conscious deliberate explicitly a goal that you can explicitly describe and I mean you're you're sort of making you're sort of making I mean wait the kind of question you're asking is getting very close to the question of free will so I would love to not have disgust but but basically okay and and I what I'm about to say is gonna sound very Cartesian unfortunately because that's English I don't know there's no other way to do it actually but what I want to say is that your brain is always there is always a volition but it's not always consciously experienced by you as as agency or will so yeah you're not you're not a sea urchin you know your sensory neurons are not hardwired to your motor neurons you have inter neurons that means you have choice do you consciously experience yourself as making choices all the time no you don't but your brain is actually making choices all the time that's why people who study decision making you know think they're studying the whole brain because they they are actually so I think you have to be really careful about there are words that we use in English and in science that have two meanings they can have a meaning that is about decision making or choice that is just obligatory automatic and a function of how the system works and then there's the kind of choice that feels deliberate and effortful and where we feel like we're the agents we experience ourselves as the agents and intentionality usually can be assigned to the second one but actually in truth in philosophical terms it can also be assigned to the first that when you even if you're completely unaware of having made a choice you're acting on something with some degree of volition because you you it's not a reflex it's not like you know somebody hit your patellar tendon and nuke it and so it's really interesting so you know I think you just have to you have to make that distinction and I probably should get to the next question we can question yeah thank you yep yeah so you've been asked a lot of esoteric questions about AI but I think we might gain some insights by wondering about di that is a dog intelligence oh sure so I believe I sort of understand what my dog is feeling and III usually believe that my dog you know believes the same but not the same with you know a cat because you're not a cat person yeah sure I mean you know I'm not I don't know that much about monkeys but I've never really seen a monkey be able to make the expressions that let's say a dog can and I was wondering if you had any insights about you know why dogs are able to do this and why we're able to read dogs is it something just simple like they're they have the right facial muscles or is it something some drive that allows them to learn this so I think before I wrote my book I would have answered this question differently but now here's what I would say I think what you know many creatures on this planet have effect right and we can debate about whether you know I just came across a paper the other day about whether fly you know just your Safa I have have effect and you know it's I mean it's actually really interesting question they certainly they have something like opioids and they you know so it's consistory question but dogs dogs are really interesting because they do seem to have some capacities that only that you only see in in great apes and they may have capacities that great apes even other than us don't have and I mean so they certainly have some capacities we don't have either but but here's my point we actually bred them we bred these animals we selected them basically it's not natural selection it's it's you know artificial selection and we selected them for a couple of things right if you look at the experiments on breeding taking a fox you know taking foxes and breeding them into what looked like little dog like animals it's interesting what they can do and one of the things they can do is they can move their facial muscles and in in in a lot of ways that they have a lot more control over their facial muscles then you know chimpanzees and do and and other apes and they also do they do joint attention really well with gays so this is something that really no other animal can do I think other than a dog other and humans and that is they can they they meet your gaze and they use gaze for reference so you know they'll look at something and they'll look back at you and you you know that's actually partly that's how we communicate with each other chimpanzees lose that ability after about ten or eleven months a year overall of age but but dogs continually do it and actually joint attention shared gaze is how we communicate with our infants also that's actually partly how we teach infants about what's important in the world is with gaze so I think that dogs may actually have some capacities probably because we bred them to have those but we selected the animals that you know and bred them to have those capacities that's very interesting again awesome well with that let's give these a big hand thank you so much

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 64,421

Rating: 4.821166 out of 5

Keywords: mit, artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, human-level intelligence, robotics, deep learning, machine learning, free, open, how emotions are made, emotion recognition, neuroscience, embodied ai, emotion, cognition, conciousness, human brain, homeostasis

Id: qwsft6tmvBA

Length: 77min 38sec (4658 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/EsotericXianAlchemy]

This is part of an intentional derailment of the reactive spiritual awakening that spawned MGTOW.

It's theoretical aKKad-aemic* shite.

• "schooling" (collectivist following behaviour) is the EMPIRE's BLOOD that rules and has enslaved us for several millennia. Now you know why it's solely a Socialist debt-ties NPC farm

AI cannot replace life. AI can only create illusion, due to fast calculation. Tech is based on switching alone. I'll explain this later in another post.

Seriously, your masters' cult of reductionist scientism is the largest threat to male spiritual awakening.

I see this so much "We don't need women. We have bots for sex. Artificial wombs will replace them. Elon Musk is awesome."

Elon Musk is a fake who works for your masters.

FFS, he was responsible for PayPal. Did you not even see the blatant in-your-face "you dumb slave idiots" Pa[y]pal reference there?

Similarly ("I've been to space" - suuuure you have!?!) CANONical were placed to capture anyone suspicious of big tech and wanted to move to Linux. ---buntu OSes have spying like MS, Apple and Google. The Linux anti-SkyNet sanctuary has finally been compromised and will begin to fall apart through tools like Corey the Cross-dresser and his CoC and anti-meritocracy.

Please, guys, f'ing wake up! I realise you younger ones have grown up with belief in their tech religion, yet it's all been seeded through fake advancements taught and promoted throughout your short lives.

ps. TFM is also a problem in respect of tech/scientism promotion. I always suspected the guy, even before he started pushing dolls for sex-craving saddoes and buttplugs for sexually confused pervs. Out of the blue he's recently taken a pot-shot at my territory (thus verifying my suspicion) although "Esoteric The Free" and "Filthy Heretic" both shot the socialist shill down in flames.

[u/Thotsithinknots]

TLDR?