Affective Computing

Could be

I only sang because the lonely road was long;

and now the road and I are gone

but not the song.

I only spoke the verse to pay for borrowed time:

and now the clock and I are broken

but not the rhyme.

Possibly,

the self not being fundamental,

eternity

breathes only on the incidental.

Ernesto Galarza (1905-1984)

Black and White Futurist Forcefield - Giacomo Balla (1916)

As we find out more about brain function, events in the brain associated with being and experience become amenable to description in terms of ordered, lawful processes and relationships, and so the division of the world into observer and the observed is transformed and needs to be re-examined.

This division of knowledge was nurtured by scientific thought of the last few centuries out of necessity. At the basis of the objective edifice of principle admittedly lay ultimately subjective axioms, but this was regarded as a necessary evil; it was attempted to reduce the number of subjective concepts to the minimum possible. This made the ordered basis of the subjective at once less obvious and more obvious. Most aspects of subjective experience were excluded from the objective world-but the ordered basis of these few subjective intuitions were made all the more apparent by their million-fold application in the universe. Inherent order and precision of processes of the brain are clearly manifested in non-verbal communication processes. Two years ago, in the house of Pablo Casals in Puerto Rico, the Master was giving cello classes. On this occasion, an outstanding student played the theme from the third movement...

Toward a theory of man: Precision of essentic form in living communication (1969)

How remarkable it would be if one could experience and express the spectrum of emotions embodied in music originating from oneself—without the crutch of a composer’s intercession, without being driven by the composer; and to do so moreover whenever we wish, not when circumstance may call them forth. This, indeed, has become possible through the development of "sentic cycles". [...] It was found that tapping this source directly help a person be more in touch with the vital sources of life. This process largely eliminates a distinction analogous to that between composer and performer: the subject becomes both (without learning to perform on a musical instrument). The power of sentic cycles and music to generate emotions share s a common source. However, doing sentic cycles requires no production of sound, mo laboriously acquired skills divorced from sentic discrimination. Everyone can readily do them. 

Sentic cycles is a simple means by which a person, in his own home, can generate in himself substantially the entire spectrum of emotions in a period of approximately thirty minutes. This method allows one to experience emotions from different points of view, meditatively and with active expression, and had led to a variety of therapeutic effects.

Sentics: The Touch of the Emotions (1976)

Manfred Clynes (1925 - 2020)

Both my collaborator, Seymour Papert, and I had long desired to combine a mechanical hand, a television eye, and a computer into a robot that could build with children's building-blocks. It took several years for us and our students to develop Move, See, Grasp, and hundreds of other little programs we needed to make a working Builder-agency... It was this body of experience, more than anything we'd learned about psychology, that led us to many ideas about societies of mind. [...] In trying to make that robot see, we found that no single method ever worked well by itself. For example, the robot could rarely discern an object's shape by using vision alone; it also had to exploit other types of knowledge about which kinds of objects were likely to be seen. This experience impressed on us the idea that only a society of different types of processes could possibly suffice.

We shouldn't let our envy of distinguished masters of the arts distract us from the wonder of how each of us gets new ideas. Perhaps we hold on to our superstitions about creativity in order to make our own deficiencies seem more excusable. For when we tell ourselves that masterful abilities are simply unexplainable, we're also comforting ourselves by saying that those superheroes come endowed with all the qualities we don't possess. Our failures are therefore no fault of our own, nor are those heroes' virtues to their credit, either. If it isn't learned, it isn't earned. [...]

Why do certain people learn so many more and better skills? These all-important differences could begin with early accidents. One child works out clever ways to arrange some blocks in rows and stacks; a second child plays at rearranging how it thinks. Everyone can praise the first child's castles and towers, but no one can see what the second child has done, and one may even get the false impression of a lack of industry. But if the second child persists in seeking better ways to learn, this can lead to silent growth in which some better ways to learn may lead to better ways to learn to learn. Then, later, we'll observe an awesome, qualitative change, with no apparent cause — and give to it some empty name like talent, aptitude, or gift.

The Society of Mind (1986)

How do we learn our most precious panalogies? I suspect that many of them are virtually born into our brains — because the regions, which represent various realms, have basically such similar wiring that we can discover those metaphors by ourselves. However, we also learn many of our metaphors from the patterns of usage of words by other members of our communities.

On rare occasion, some individual discover a new representation or formulation that is both so fruitful and so easy to explain that it becomes part of the general culture. Naturally, we'd like to know how those greatest discoveries were made. But because this is buried in the past, most of those great rare events may never be explained at all — because, like our evolutionary genes, these need happen by accident only once, and then can spread from brain to brain.

All this has empowered us to deal with huge classes of new situations.[...]

Nevertheless, our brains still have bugs. Similarly, in the coming decades of research toward Artificial Intelligence, every system that we build will keep showing unexpected flaws. In some cases, we’ll be able to diagnose specific errors in those designs, and hence be able to correct them. But when we can find no such simple fix, then we will be forced instead to evolve increasingly complex systems in which each process needs to be supervised by various Critics. [edit] And through all this, we can never expect to find any foolproof strategy to balance the advantage of immediate action against the benefit of more careful, reflective thought. Whatever we do, we can be sure that the road toward designing ‘post-human minds’ will be rough.

The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (2006)

Marvin Minsky (1927 - 2016)