RE: Today’s lesson: Why do we feel love? What is its origin?
Nice thought.
Just a warning: when talk about human evolution and make distinctions between human parents who take care of their children and parents who don’t, you are taking a dangerous path.
Human beings are not created from nothing, in fact we are the product of an evolution that started some billions years before.
As you state in the article, even animals take care of their pets, so the real origins of this feeling come from long time before the first Homo Sapiens appeared on the Earth.
But if we talk about the origins of Love as a feeling, and not an instinct, then we need to take a step further...
We feel Love thanks to a feature only Human Beings have, as far as we know, that is self-awareness.
We are conscious that we are conscious.
We not only feel the need to take care of our children: we are also aware of it.
And when we add an extra layer to our life, then we have more chances to have it broken, as many other layers may overlap this feeling.
That is, there are many parents who don’t take care of their children and let them die, a feature sadly unique to Human Beings.
You are totally right my friend. Self-awareness is also an important aspect when explaining why we behave the way we do, the same goes to how we act and think.
I think one of the most difficult things to achieve when creating AI is coding self-awareness into them. This is a tricky subject for sure.
Indeed it’s a very tricky subject!
The real issue here is: we still don’t understand what consciousness is, and how it originates.
There are many theories from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, but none is clear and easily applicable to a software.
Until now, the best solution I’ve seen is what I call “the one way soultion”: it doesn’t matter whether the machine has consciousness or not.
What matters is that the user, the human being who interacts with the machine, perceives it as human.
It works, as replicating the human behaviour is becoming more and more easy and accurate.