Notes: Artificial Emotion

Once, me and my friend Joey were drinking at Mogwai Bar, and at some point in the night, some guy introduced himself to Joey. Then on that spot, something about the guy struck me, like a distant memory, but not so much. Almost instantly, I asked him if he was from Elbi (Our slang for our alma mater, UP Los Banos). Because I was so sure that he studied there. There was this familiarity, almost like home feeling to his face that I have related him to Los Banos. Or was it because I was in Mogwai, and Mogwai reminds me of IC’s and that told my brain that everyone that was in Mogwai was from UP, or just from UPLB.

Now the guy, I forgot his name, kept evading the question. He said almost inaudibly that he’s from UP Diliman, which I did not buy because I swear we were in the same dormitory. I was so sure that even though he has told me countless of times that he was from Diliman, I just shrugged it off, and by the end of the night I was happy because I have met someone who apparently lived in the same dorm as me 7 years ago.

I was wrong of course. The day after, I saw that same guy walking around my street. Then it all came back to me, 15/18 years ago, age six to nine, we were playmates - he is a childhood friend. I think he was my bestfriend when I was a kid. 

I swear I know you from somewhere

Now what struck me was how raw the emotions and how I correlated these three seemingly mutually exclusive entities. The bar, my college alma mater, and my childhood.These three, at some area or at some fortuitous time coincided in order for me to draw out a wrong conclusion - a false positive, if you may - but at that time was seemingly right. 

If one is going to look at it in a black and white perspective, that is text book search. The idea of searching, in artificial intelligence, dictates that one ought to look for something if one does not have knowledge of it. The previous statement could be begging the question but it is true. One searches because one does not know. In the most simplistic sense, we go to Google for the most mundane of answers, some of which are near stupid but is still being searched because some  just doesn’t know. 

But with the case at hand, how the brain conducted its search is something that should be explored further. Because, all in all, the search was driven by a sequence of emotional patterns. The similarities between the three seemingly incoherent objects was summed up into one word: “home”. 

The word “home”, if one looks at it in a blog-type perspective can be considered a “tag”. Something to index things with. If that is the case, is our brain just a huge database of tags? Memories indexed according to the emotion that one has perceived in a certain situation or episode? 

See how I desensitized emotion? I used perceived instead of felt. Because it is true (for me, at least), emotion, I think, is the sixth sense.  How one sees something is the same way how one perceives an emotion. Through a life long exposure to an object, a perceived object, that one has formulated a box of belief system, or an experience database. Our brain is basically a brainsized blog.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, will be my thesis, I think. I wager there is an artificial model in which we can perceive emotion. What it is or how it can be done, I don’t know yet. But I think I have a hunch. :)

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