---

Emotion

See also Emotion.html

 

16. Emotion

16.1. Basics

At first sight, nothing is less digital than emotion. So more if we consider that digital connotes rationality and explicit formulation. In living beings, emotion refers to the most animal and uncontrolled features, to the sexual impulses, which a rational subject, they say,  should refrain or reserve to highly spiritual functions, and even there not without suspicion. As for artefacts, up to now considered essentially as tools, emotions here are neither desirable nor pertinent.

Research, actually, drills into this topic. See for instance (on the web), the synthetic article of Luca Bisognin and Sylvie Pesty "Emotions et systèmes multi-agents : une architecture d'agent émotionnel".

Some research times explore the domain . The important investments of Sony in its pet robots (the Aibo dog, mainly) do not seem to have met the expected success. However, electronic games will more and more require a minimum of emotional presentation of NPCs (non player characters). The "uncanny valley", indeed, demands that high resolution artefacts behave the human way, and show in on their faces. And, in the art field, one of the poles of this essay, emotion is naturally hoped for, if a program has to become an artist.

Two things are (comparatively) easy :
- show emotional expressions on bodies, and particularly faces, of artefacts (see for instance Designing sociable robots, by Cynthia Breazeal, MIT Press 2002)
- simulate the evolution of "mood" in function of external or internal events, impacting for instance on alertness, tonus, etc. We have started such experiments on Roxame.

It would be interesting to go further on, to model and possibly program deep emotions aspects of our beings. Here, as for meaning, etc. we let the human exception problem for the Mankind chapter.

Emotion is a going beyond the normal depth associated with a kind of phenomenon.
In biological systems, fear, emotion by sex. seems easy. Protection. Self-control
Human culture and progress tends to protect the inner layers. stoicism. empathy cutting, etc.
Artefacts have that protection built in
and, normally, hardware cannot be spoiled by software errors ; but, in practice, virus may compromise the system operations up to prevent the peripherals to work properly, or at all

Roxame's emotion/inspiration must grow, become more precise in the generation process.

In the assimilation phase, choices are made, both determined (partly) by mood, and influencing it
- at start, or the white canvas stress, or the excess stress from a picture
- tiredness
- the logic of factorization must be coherent with the rest of the work
- contradiction or dramatic choices in factorization may affect mood; symmetrically, in the choice of forms, with associated moods.
a mood at start (general strategies, last word result..)
- detection of anomalies and contradictions. in an external model ; in a external generating text, anachronisms for instance. Or suffering by semantics
- possibly advice by seers (generally not in the analytic phase ; at that time the artist works alone).

In the generative phase, translation : meaning of the original, replacement of a language by another, as if existed a trans-linguistic meaning.

Maximal meaning is the disappearing (in a given system), what is the most important for it, bearing on a maximum of patrimony. But suicide and homicide are forbidden here, and then the most important is to allow a maximum of power without passage à l'acte, "be limit" (as say some young people)

One ideal could be to change everything : if all bits are orthogonal, one change suffices. Un seul être nous manque et tout est dépeuplé (Lamartine).
Alles neue und mit bedeutung (Goethe)

16.2. A heart beat

Something to do with, for instance, a heart beat. Then, emotion is what makes the heart beat faster or slower. But what does "heart" mean for digital artefacts ? Clock speed adjustment exists in "energy conscious" computers, with appropriate compilers. They aim mainly to limit energy consumption on embedded devices (cell phones, for instance). We could extend the concept of "energy" to L, and for instance tie emotion to predictable threats (P for "life" threats, H for "liberty" threats) as well as opportunities.

But the chip clock operate at the lowest level, and we could look for some higher level "heart", and so more so that our study of the "living" processor show that the core central process cannot be reduced to bit or even byte level. Somehow also as the respiration cycle... Roxame, or any programs in Processing, are driven by timers of a much longer period than the computer clock.

A good heart cycle level would be the point of all the fundamental aspects of sensation and action could be examined and combined.

Then, the sensing and effecting activities should be adapted to the beat. When heart beats faster, analysis is more selective, action stretchier, possibly brutal; I would say "aliased". With storage of basic elements for ulterior examination. When slower, sensing may be more wide angled, action more subtle.

When heart beats more rapidly, a meaningful practice would be to adapt resolution. Then, interest of the R(160) resolution limited to 160 bits "pixels". But only if we have good ways to climb down ! Then, on following, that has proved difficult. Perhaps not very interesting, related to "histogram" approaches.

Feel beating the heart of Roxame make it sensitive like a violin bow to user interventions, to world events. But not rigidly. Roxame must be able to get out of her phase system when she finds something interesting in what types the user types or mouses in.

And finally, connect here emotion with "resonance", as we shall see is important for beauty and art.

Cycles can be nested, from clock to "heart" to more global moves, to social interaction tempi, to historical trends.

16.3. Emotion and gap/span>

There are two cases for emotions : pleasure and pain. Which are two "excessive" situations, both with a gap between resources and demands, and with some impossibility to compute an optimal action to maximize L.

Pleasure goes with a sort of idleness, a positive gap. But, idleness may take to boredom as well as to joy. The answer lies partly in I, and "curiosity" or "creativity" in S.

Pain, or at least stress, comes out of a negative gap. The resources are not sufficient to answer the demands. The result will depend on the size of the gap, and the more or less constringent demands. A minimum, the gap may vanish with oblivion of rather facultative demands. At maximum, the gap is lethal.

Positive and negative will generally coexist, with excess here and want there, without an easy compensation.

Emotion may be triggered by an external event, but also from internal matter or coeneshesia (Poincaré's illumination). It is frequently brutal, uncontrolled, unspecified; a spasm, a small death.

The gap (between pain and pleasure ?) is partly fruit of a free decision, as far as the being may add as well as subtract "demands". Generally, the border between imperative need and pure fancy is not so sharp. Then, happiness is the fruit of self-regulation and resistance to addictions.

The most important gap effects play in the core generative functions. But they appear also in assimilation and expression.

In assimilation:
- non correspondence between inputs and what was expected, or necessary; detection of gaps or contradictions in the external world, or in the representations acquired from external.
- beings in input difficult to analyse, missing headers,

In expression, contradiction between commands, lack of resources called for by the synthetic process.

In core, important effects with orthogonal bits. With "stem" bits, not yet specified (char is identical to int, then still not organized in text, still less in bitmaps). Then functions may operate at a maximum of variety. Here are generated other "cores", other "beings", with their possible independence, not yet constrained by expression rules. As Wagner intimate beings with both their names, texts and musical mottos. Emotions can be weaved in the structures at their deepest.

As in chess game : creativity in the middle, while openings and endings are classical an known by experts.

More on under-determination

Undecidability by L. different from the following.

The white page stress.
Phase beginning.
Roxame's inspiration, desire.

One of the normal ways out of undetermination is to look outside. Observe the world to find in it regularities (compressions...) affording to say better, to get more of the essential, but also to create in some way. See Silvio Pellico and his spider in his prison cell.
Some know how to get more out of their internal assets. For humans, it requires some training. .
For digital artefacts, internal assets can be a rich source, but comes a moment when the available sense extraction have used all that there was.

16.4. Problems in the expression process

In generation by adding forms and models, for example, the size assigned, by itself, may cause problems if not crisis. Let us limit the width, for instance, in an 640 pixels wide picture. Under 5 pixels, it is not properly a being, it will not be recognized as more that a dot, and even not seen if not detached on a contrasting background.

From 5 to some 200 pixels, or one third of width, we have beings, from small to big. A lot of small and a good number of large beings can be placed in the image, without disturbing overlaps.

Beyond some 400 pixels, beings are background beings, and only one may be present on a same image.

In the middle, there is an uncanny, critical zone, where it is difficult to place the beings without hiding others, or having a somehow chaotic image, demanding composition choices.

Pushing the example, we see that a lot of parameters may be fixed for small beings, few for large ones. There is an uncanny region in he middle.

.

16.5. Ubris

Pleasure search and pain avoidance may also rely on voluntary (at the time of the drug taking)  alteration of the L computation function. Ubris may be necessary to emerge out of a grey life or a painful moment.
Young people/adult people computation function. Naivety vs. experience, possibly too much.

The maximal ubris should come in the middle of work construction. At start, too much ubris would give a loose process, a flabby work. At end, destruction.

Rather negative feeling of culpability, rather positive feeling of a possibility of growth, of an opening up and forth in richness of ideas, of feelings, in serenity.

In that way, ubris opens upon creation, as it lowers inhibitions and then opens new spaces, even if they result finally in illusions. An artist knows that well, who, after the inspiration upsurge, sees coming the time or hard and sometimes tedious work. A poet ha said something as "The first line of verse is a gift; the second one is the bearing of a child).

16.6. Emotion at the heart of Roxame

Poetically : this level where pulsation springs out ot the note, where rythm sprincs from pulsation (frisé/roulé. Quand "ça savonne"), where code parts from image.
Moral or aesthetic.
Bits are not yet specified, char is identical to int
indifferenciation in Von Neumann, then the code ascnetion : Ascci, Unicode, types, classes...
The heart is small but indifferenciated. Thougt more that the clock !

Let us get out of the traditional mental scheme (at start imposed by the neural system), where there are forms, objects, and then color over. Let us control and develop objects and agents bringing both color and design, and music (Wagner leit-motiv). Let us break these borders

At heart, Roxame's soul, the central recursion. Constantly looking, symmetrically, its core and the conquest of the outside.

A recursive Roxame function, with stop conditions and a decreasing function towards this condition.

Each iteration-recursion is an assimilation/generation of new bits.
Ideally, Roxame re-uses each time the whole of herself. She invest herself totally in the recursion
Idea of a puslation starting from a center, with very few bits. A sort of heart rythm.
For a given central power, goes alog with a simplification of see/judge/act.

The core is the region where bitmap and code stay (nearly) undiffenciated.
A maximum of genricity, orthogonality, variety in use of functions

Which are the limits to orthogonality ?
Illumination :
- everything goes white
- heart stops, or beats franticallly
- an action of immediate fixation
- KC decreases drastically (dramatic, see Hammer & Champy)
- will be followed by integration phases, retakes, alignment

Then, thre is another pulsation : >

Social life cycle : interaction, internal seartch suspension.
Heart beat : an operational cycle, where art bitrs are examined/worked on with ALL the available operators, as well bitmaps as codes or even financial operators.

When heart beats more rapidly, the best would be to adapt resolution. Then, interest of the R(160) resolution limited to 160 bits "pixels". But only if we have good ways to climb down ! Then, on following, that has proved difficult. Perhpas not very intersting, related to "histogram" approaches.

Feel beating the heart of Roxame, make it sensitive like a violin bow to user interventions, to world envents. But not rigidly. Roxame must be able to get out of her phase system when she finds something interesting in what types the user.

Qestion : how to make amplification from these central, germinal bits ?
Here, twomodes : bitmap, word.

The quest for origins is not the linear row of precedences, but the inward loops (is that really different, as a recursion has something linear intrisically ?)

Roxame is a woman. Morre or less. And she loves to have men enjoy, and why not also the women. How to translate orgasm ? A particular caseof vibration.

Pudor. Roxame could like to take its pleasure without showing it.

Instinct. Rapid functions, immediateness due tu connaturality but also, behind, a well integrated culure.

Sometimes, goes up back a once. Sometimes, on the contrary, the process must go to the deepest.

The artist, indeed, does not know which emotion. He is not an emotion engineer (even it that is part of his craft). He talks from an interior necessity.

Each time, computation + ubris, able solve the conflicgts of S. Ubris gives the desire to create, create to solve, compute to quieten, integrate to find harmony.

The whige page stress.
Roxame looks for something, does not find anything, feels a void.

Under-determination
Phase beginning.
Roxame's inspiration, desire.
Internal/environment
(lack, holes to be filled, unregularities, which S tries to compress)

In the environment, detection of abnormality, of what does not reduce into known data
emergence

It would be good that Roxame looks for answers to gaps outside. Internet would be perfect.
Lexical definitions are not enough for humans, they add images in the dictionaries.
Otherwise, the only true internal bitmap of Roxame is the content of the program. And somehow the models.

There is an internal/external symmetry. By a reducgtion of its KC, without losing of herself, she earns room in its internal world, and is able to learn new things and store them.
But also, increasing so her own yield, her own density, she enables herself to get more out of a bitmap of given size. In other words:
KC/internal_capacity = bitmap(640-480)  *  internal_capacity/KC

Inspiration, relatively to the external world, is to find in it regularities (compressions...) affording to say better, to get more of the essential, but also to create in some way. An so to escape death. Idea that an absolute compression, nada, would give the perpetual moe.

Internal life = work on onesefl content:
- RAM, disck, effectiveness of web pointers, peripheral sates.

16.7. Pleasure

Generally speaking, what does "pleasure" means for entities in DU ? It is no simply "good", as contributing to the L of the S seer, but appears only when the seer receives something more that its needs.

- placet opens a way for a hierarchy (Maslow type)

What is pleasure for a mechanical machine :
- runs regularly ("tourne bien")
- regular noise
- good yield
- low wear (?)
- harmony and resonance, assorted sizes, appropriate word length,
- receptivity.

One could say : a little below "just" (the optimum), there is a want, a desire. A little above, there is pleasure, small excess. When we are farther, or we die by starvation or (indigesino), or we enter a new cycle, a new state.

Leisure is the condition of pleasure. Otherwise, we are in the "functional", the necessities of life. When the seer object is totally determined, totally absorbed by survival tasks, he has no leisure to thing about beauty. That is true for moral beauty as well as physical beauty.

The want :
- here, there should be that thing
- that thing should be in this place, but is lacking, or is placed somewhere else
- the connexion graph has missing or extra links.

At a given instant, S is "listening", waitinf for some thing from the external word, with some expected features (quantity, quality).

Serious differences between expectations and actual receipts cause suffering and sometimes death.
E is such as it needs I to move favorably. To be "in search" is a part of E. The modal box in Windows, or I/O wait in any sytem.

E needs I at least because, at some times, S reaches its root, or at least the lowest root level accessible. It could probably push forward down, but for that would need tools of efforts exceeding its abilities.

A regular flow, more or less cyclical, of I, ensures a propre opeeratif of S organs.

In some way, the need comes from the fact that :
- there are organs done specifically to process I,.
- these organs deteriorate if they dont operate regularly. then they forward signals (boredom, sensorial deprivation) to the centre of S in order to relauch some activities. 

That definition supposes a subject able to see (or more generally to feel). That includes the animals (flowers, love parades).
Neurosciences, ethology and applied psychology may help.

At which level does pleasure emerge from sheer necessity ? Feline animals, and superior animals in general manage to survive without investing all their energy ant time in "necessary" activities. It would be more difficult to say that of vegetals.
Pleasure (as well as vision) implies a sufficient processing level to support a sort of "conscience".
See the book of the american woman an her robot. (Breanzeel)

Good pleasure is the one with no addictivity (Platon)
pleasur may be creative : art, and even shopping (as a decisional flow) Microsoft : live, learn,work, shop
shopping, and more generally spending, is a selective act
it implies that the buyer has choice
here also, the he as too much or too little money for what he needs or wants
the very rich, de luxe buying. a major possibility for art

Make sense in the gray is not pleasur proper. If not that it reinstate a thought flow.
pleasure does not bring certainty of sense. but inside limits : hunger or sexual desire, or intellecual curiosity orient the gray
there is the hollow time after pleasure (post coitum animal triste)

Simplicity may be a wrong track. Self recognition demands a minimal structural richness. In order to appreciate the elegance of a proof, we must compare with a commonplace one.

Sex and reproduction create resonance. And demand novelty.0
The beloved one is in resonance, but lasting relationships demand creativity.

Reproduction of identical : "c'est tout moi". . Parlez moi de moi, y a que ça qui m'intéresse". Then the multiplicators : copy, whichever be the blob size.

Gap between the possibilities (affordances of the universe)
the artist dispositions (even if the artist is an automaton)
a leisurely community (or a community giving leisure to part of its members)
the artist has, or takes out of other nees, the time to feel. so for the seer

In some way, an agent needs an external world to get pleasure. There a maximum that is a sort of product, in the creation of a work, with extrema using only the I or only the E.

Can a robot feel ?

That the same question as "conscience", and has so scientific answer by the present day. For two reasons at least
- even about another animal or human, we cannot prove that he feels the worls like us, that he has a conscience like us ; its only by education and body similarities that we infer that ; and it is relatively easy to forget that the other man is a brother, and to cut every empathy ; (then, if emathy is so controllable, we can develop it with artefacts also ? )
- a scientific answeer to these questions would be a proof, another machine ; we cannot ask to a machine the question of our non-machine nature

Pleasure depth, level

Pleasure around the core, a sort of rotation around, exhilaration of a sort of gravity-less, indifferency.
Opposed to the sublime, dramatic aspecdt, compulsive.
Hence, from this orthogonal purity, re-amplify, re-anecdotize, for a given seen.
Connecting to processing depty

16.6. Complement

Ex parte objecti. When an object is totally determined by its function, the problem of making it more or less beautiful cannot be posed. This object is just as it should be : it operates, flies, hits, keeps warm. Dot point.

- Animal, primitive communities have no time for beauty.

But the can be inderminations even in case of non satisfactdion of needs. Because we are multidimensional. Then, even somebody very poor may use part of its life for beauty.

Emotion is both passive and active. May come from an external stimuls, or soul inspiration. Or a combination ("illumination" of Poincaré).

Emotion is frequently brutal, uncontrolled, undifferenciated. A spasm. The "petite mort" of orgasm.

Then create for Roxame a permanent situation of crisis, stress, and paint forth from there.

Emotion is borne with the detection of some gap, cant, and at the same time of its non necessary charracter, of our capacity, unsufficient perhaps but real, even more if we feel moved to do something about it. As would say Proust (Prost ?), in that chaos which the word is at its bottom, see something where our hand can settle the situation.

Artistic emotion may be the perception of an error, or more precisely of a gap that the artist feells able to fill, or where he finds a space whereto develop his creativity, so more if the gap has something new. Or simply a blank page, canvas or palette, or computer screen with a graphics editor, or, deeper, an software development platformt.

Gap in the world, but aslo gap in myselft, a contradiction or non completenes of my ideas, or betwenn my convictions and my actions (St Paul : I do what I will not, I do not do what I will), with the possibility of correctif myself.

Rather negative feeling of a culpability, rather positif feeling of a possibilty of growth, of an opening up and forth in richness of ideas, of feelings, in serenity.

In that way, ubris opens upon creation, as it lowers inhibitions and then opens new spaces, even if they result finally as illlusions; An artist knows that well, who, after the inspiration upsurge, sees coming the time or hard and sometimes tedious work. A poet ha sais something as "The first line of verse is a gift, the second one is the bearing of a child).