[Aleader-dev] Re: pre-conceptual definition

[William L. Jarrold]

Hi,

Hmm, interesting.  I'm still digesting but I have limited time and
really want to respond.  Read on...

On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 12:10:10AM -0500, William L. Jarrold wrote:
> > > ... I'd like to
> > > send one impractical email which I've been working on for more
> > > than a week.  Perhaps you can review it first before finishing
> > > the backlog?  What do you think?
> >
> > Sure.  Send it on.
>
> Again, please give this email higher priority than the other
> emails in our queue.  I believe this email will change our
> focus in a positive way.  Anyway, here goes.
>
> > > "emotion".  I don't think emotion is very well defined (in general)
> > > and "affective state" is a mouth-full.  What do you think?
> >
> > It depends on how the field has defined emotion.  Do what the field
> > does before arbitrarily redefining emotions.  OCC defines emotion
> > one way.  How do others define it?  Reading happens fast, so long
> > term names are okay.
>
> OK, I'll follow the literature.  Here is a _draft_ quality glossary:

Bascially this is excellent.  Some differences, which I will describe
quickly...

>
> emotion - The words which people typical consider as referring to
> emotions: hope, fear, joy, relief, sadness, distress, frustration,
> etc.  We generally agree with the OCC definition of emotion.
>
> affective state - We consider classical emotions a subset of a more
> general category of affective states.  Beside emotion, affective
> states include moods such as curiosity, abandoned, criticizing or
> invitation.

Fine but wouldn't it be clearer to say "OCC emotions" rather than
classical emotions?  I don't know enough emotion literature to
know what "classical emotions" are.

>
> mindreading - To infer another person's affective state by running our
> system ``off-line'': to place ourself in other person's shoes and see
> how we resonate in the pretended context.  Perhaps the most obvious
> example of mindreading is what happens while watching a film.  A film
> is nothing but 3rd person perspective: image and sound.  However,
> people can easily mindread the actors and feel a precise replica of
> the affective states depicted onscreen. [also mention baron-cohen?]

I disagree.  You describe mindreading-pritikin.  There is also
mindreading-beck, a dysfunctional process.  baron-cohen's mindreading has
to due with more than just emotion.  it also has to do with non-emotional
states, i think.   affective mindreading-generic is any cognitive process
which attempts to model/guess/predict/whatever the emotional state of
another....There is mindreading-jarrold which is a rule based process...
In our article, we could reify an ontology of different types
of mindreadins and show subsumption relations between them.

>
> empathy - Some vague mixture of mindreading, sympathy and emotional
> bonding.  We avoid this word since we feel that it is not v well
> defined.

Or you could say it has a profusion of defintions and offend fewer people
who are looking for reasons to keep you off of their email lists. (-;

Btw, I think you will like Aaron Sloman.  Check him out.  Google,
probably.

>
> appraisal - The cognitions which precede and trigger cognitive
> affective states.  These cognitions are originally unconscious, but we
> posit that we can gain awareness of them.

Hmm.  Maybe.  Especially in the personal growth context.  I'm more comfy
with being a strict OCC acolyte but whatever.

>
> We distinguish affective states by cause.
>
> + Biological factors such as hormones, hunger or thirst
>
> + Cognition, meaning cognitive appraisals
>
> + TODO: expand list with help from the lexicon article
>
> + Mindreading one of the other causes
>
> > It should not be hard to studies that have looked at the reliability of
> > judging emotion in pictures of people's facial expression.
>
> When I get time, I am going through _Cognition and Emotion_ just
> reading stuff somewhat at random to absorb the style & etc.  It seems
> like re-test reliability is a pretty standard statistical measure.
>
> > > On the other hand, please recognize that if we stick with
> > > Aleader's simple, narrow view of emotion then we still
> > > get useful classifications ("useful" meaning that the
> > > classifications subjectively feel correct) without
> > > resorting to generativity.
> >
> > [Will's long and interesting response omitted.]
>
> I think our discussion with respect to generativity boils down to one
> metaphor: If you have a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

Fair enough.

>
> + I acknowledge that generativity makes a non-generative cognitive
> model deeper and more believable.
>
> + You acknowledge that a non-generative cognitive model may be
> important in the context of training, as long as it doesn't make us
> "more rigid, inflexible or unidimension."
>
> It seems like we are mostly in agreement.  I believe that your
> discussion of generativity (with minor revisions) will fit gracefully
> into our theoretical framework.  Even if there remain minor points of
> contention, I want to focus other issues which I feel are more urgent.

Cool.

>
> > > > Here's another one...You really need to have a controlled list of terms.
> > > > How many terms are emotion terms?  50, 5, 100, 500, 1000?
> > >
> > > Hrm .. I thought I explained in the prototype research paper
> > > that emotion _terms_ are secondary to the collection of
> > > examples of a given emotion.
> >
> > I disagree.  To be sure, note: a term is not a word.
> > [... snip ...]
>
> I read your whole reply. I think you are missing my point.  Allow me
> to offer an analogy.
>
> What does the phrase "the taste of suger" mean?  You know because you
> have eaten suger.  Common suger is a particular family of chemical
> compounds of a particular purity.  When we eat suger then we _know_
> how suger tastes.  We experience the taste in a _pre-conceptual_ way.

Okay.

>
> In my opinion, this distinction is incredibly important.
> Pre-conceptual experiencing is how we actually know reality.  A symbol
> which is not grounded with a pre-conceptual experience may not have
> any precise definition.  Even a Cyc KB with 100 million assertions
> can't offer a more precise definition of "the taste of suger" than I
> get when eating suger.

Hrm.  Maybe.  Gallons of ink have been spilled on the symbol grounding
problem debate.  Quite possibly to my peril, I have ignored it out of fear
that I will loose lots of time and have nothing original to say.
However, like a good Cyclist, I'm essentially interested in building a
useful artifact and am willing to quickly give up on the question of what
magical process happens between homo sapien's ears....Nevertheless, I'll
add that a KB with 10 assertions about sugar probably has a much poorer
"definition" of "the taste of sugar" than does a KB with 1M assertions
about sugar does.  But will grant you that you probably have a
*much* better defn of "the taste of sugar" than does such a sterile
in-silico 1M assertion Cyc KB that represents and reasons about sugar.

I say we know reality via a combination of conceptual and pre-conceptual
experiencing.  I say when we really understand how the brain works and
creates conciousness we will view such distinctions as pre-conceptual vs
conceptual like we now view distictions such as vital essence vs
non-vital essence.  That is, such distinctions will seem primitive and
irrelevant.

Here's another angle on the issue.  A preconceptual definition is an
oxymoron.  The only kind of definitions there are are classical ones with
sufficient and necessary conditions.

Here's another angle on the issue.  You said, "pre-concpetual exp. is
actually how we know reality."  Sorry I beg to differ.  If that were true
then we'd know reality no better than sea slugs.  Sea slugs have tons of
preconceptual experiencing and nuthin' in the way of conceptual
experiencing.  My faith is that the wisest ones have BOTH conceptual and
pre-conceptual.  The greatest knowledge of reality comes from the subtle
interplay between the two types of representations.

Here's another angle on the issue.  So many people have spilled so much
ink on the fight between "symbols need to be grounded pre-concpetually"
vs "we can get by w/o such groundings"...They have fought so hard and for
so long and nobody has won.  Answer?  The debate is a trap which produces
long emails, long boring books which do not advance our understanding.
Therefore avoid the issue.

I have the most faith in the idea that we should talk about the debate a
little and buiding both types of representations into our models.  That's
not to say that useful ground can be gained by focusing exclusingly on one
or the other.

Sorry, I'm getting a bit windy here.

>
> Everything you mention in your reply: term, word, 59092928098092,
> snicklefritz, "Fears Confirmed", #$FearsConfirmed, label, name,
> pointer, category, prototypes, all these things are conceptual.  The
> difference between these concepts and film examples is the difference
> between the phrase "the taste of suger" and eating suger.
>

Fine.  A film is more visceral than a pointer to some dried stuffy
desiticated concept.  But a film is a pointer too.  When you watch someone
eat sugar on film it only points us to the experience of eating sugar.

So, I will grant you that a film is closer to sensed reality than is text
or Cyc Terms or what have you.  But film is not identical with affective
experience.

> In other words, when I define an affective state, I want to provide a
> reliable (repeatable) recipe which causes you to _experience_
> (mindread) exactly that state.  Why?  Because pre-conceptual
> experience is always more vivid than conceptual description.  That's
> why I am very picky about insisting that I have not identified any
> affective state _terms_.

Okay.  Well, I'm not super excited about that.  It sounds so hard.  I am
so old and tired and poor that I'm loathe to start up new research
programs.  (-:  What really floats my boat is making a box understand
what makes people happy vs sad for a large heterogeneous set of simple
(e.g. 5 word) stories.  Well, I'll help out.  I'll follow you in your
charge.  But, I suppose there's gotta be a mix between what really floats
my boat and what floats yours, yes?

>
> I feel like this point is absolutely crucial to a new theory of
> emotion.  If I am using funny terminology then introduce me to the
> standard terms.  Especially _this_ discussion needs to be crystal
> clear to readers.

Okay.  My fear is that this is the kind of subtle metaphysical discussion
that has already gone on for 10K pages starting with Plato and Aristotle.
I'm kind of a neophyte in such realms.  But, what the hell. Let's just
write up the damn thing and maybe they'll publish it or give us
useful feedback.  Well, I'm sure I can enlist some of my philisopher PhD
friends to make sure we aren't being idiots.

>
> Perhaps I need to discuss more about "pre-conceptual definition".
> Imagine you are in a foreign country where you don't speak the
> language and they don't speak your language.  You may not have any
> shared words, but you do have shared experiences.  So if we have an
> experience of eating suger and my friend says "saker", then I
> remember that "saker" has something to do with eating suger.  I guess
> the same thing happens when we first learn language as children.

Yes.  But once you know what the word means and what words are associated
with it and how people talk about it within your cultural tradition, then
isn't your understanding affected at a deep level?  Does langugae affect
our view of the world?  There is the Worf-Sapir (sp?) hypothesis which
takes a stance (an affirmtive one, I believe) on this age old question.
These are big scary questions, and coward me runs away wanting to try
to minimize the amount of new intellectual ground I must become
well-acquainted with.  Perhaps I am being too cowardly.

>
> One of the reasons I wanted to come to India is just to remember how
> it feels not to be completely surrounded by known words.  While in
> USA, there is the constant bombardment of English.  Parsing and

So, sorry for the tangent, you are Anglo then?

Are you any relation to Dr Pritikin of the Pritikin diet?

> understanding English becomes a habit which we seem unable to turn
> off.  So I wanted to stay in India just to experience the world with a
> minimum amount of conceptual thinking.  I have even tried to avoid
> learning Marathi (the local language) so that I would have more
> opportunities to experience pre-conceptually.

Cool.  Well, good for you.  Sounds like an interesting adventure.
Nonetheless, I view these conceptuality and pre-conceptuality as pretty
hard to separate in any rigorous way.  A dog has conceptualizations too.
The dogs mental world changes as it smells new poops and finds new pee-ing
spots, and new Alpha dogs to submit too.

>
> OK, language learning is not an exact parallel because the film clips
> typically _do_ include a spoken conceptual component.  However, the
> significance of the conceptual component is minimized when we _unify_
> the examples together (like KM unification, but pre-conceptually).  I
> mean, it is somewhat non-sensical to unify the conceptual components
> specific to different films.  How can the ideas specific to Star Wars
> make sense in the context of Good Will Hunting?  So after unification,
> there remains _something_ which is _not_ a literal description which
> causes the mindreader to experience a specific affective state -- this
> is a pre-conceptual definition.
>

Okay.  Seems like it makes sense to me.  I'm not sure why/how this kind of
thing can be useful.  But, it would be cool if you could provide evidence
that different film clips stuck together due to some preconceptual
definition.  This feels like an area about which I know not v much,
however.

> Understand?  If not, let's try again.
>
> > Hmm, I thought you were interested in prosody.  If you aren't, then
> > I think you'd be happy with representing textual stories and teaching a
> > computer to infer the affect.
>
> After the above discussion, can you guess how I would answer?
>
> + A cognitive affective mindreading model which is built upon
> pre-conceptual definition has the potential to be more accurate than
> a conceptual model.

Sure.  But it is also true that an 1850's steam powered locomotive has the
potential to be faster than a 1920's coal powered one.  Just give the
steam powered one a much much bigger boiler and a much smaller train load
to pull...Now, can you make any sort of apples for apples comparison
betwixt a cog affective mindreading model and a pre-concpetual one?  Me
thinks no.  If you think yes, please clarify....

Also, my view, as I already said above is that we need BOTH...(hey, sort
of related...you might enjoy watching the super cool old arty art deco
1920's?  german film called Metropolis.  The thesis of this futuristic sci
film is that "The mediator between head and hands must be the heart".)

>
> + Prosody (and facial expressions) are investigations which are
> sub-operations of mindreading.  For the purpose of pre-conceptual
> definition, we wish to send experiences through the "mindreading
> module" hostically, without micro-analyzing the operation.

Hmm, well what about saying it this way...To mindread based on
prosody we need a special module that relies heavily on pattern matching
and other kinda similar sorts of computational processes that are not very
much like syllogistical reasoning.  (Ditto for facial expressions)....I
am more comfortable with saying it that way than the way you have said it.

>
> > My sense is that it will
> > help publishability to define what is and what is not an emotion.  It
> > would be useful to give examples....
> >
> > - what is clearly inside the category of "emotion"
> > - what is just barely inside the category of "emotion"
> > - what is just barely outside the category of "emotion"
> > - what is just clearly outside the category of "emotion"
>
> I keep fumbling around trying to answer this.  Now that I have read
> the "affective lexicon" article, I sense how to press forward.  Thank
> you for bringing this extremely important article to my attention!
> Before I get started, I need to highlight the basic structural
> difference between "affective lexicon" & Aleader.
>
> OCC appraisal theory _starts_ with emotion terms, from which appraisal
> rules are developed (correct?).

Sounds good to me.  I might want to re-read OCC again before endorsing
that fully.  But in the inevitable all-nighter before the conference paper
is due, I'd just say, yes.

> OCC discusses, for example, what are
> the cognitive conditions preceeding the emotion X?  To contrast,
> Aleader _starts_ with a "unified ancestor affective state" (_without_
> any emotion targets). The appraisal rules sub-divide the affective
> state space.  That's why I was describing the Aleader appraisal in
> terms of a decision tree.  As we keep splitting the affective state
> space then eventually we reach one of these leaf cases:
>
> + An affective state which seem to correspond to an OCC emotion.  For
> example, your description of OCC admiration closely mirrors one of the
> Aleader appraisals.  I am still waiting for my copy of OCC to identify
> more instances of overlap.[*]
>
> + An affective state which corresponds to a word which is not an OCC
> emotion.  I already offered some examples above which I repeat here:
> curiosity, abandoned, criticizing or invitation.
>
> + An affective state which does not correspond with an OCC emotion and
> also lacks a similar English word.  Consider the affective state: "I
> am relaxed after you admire me."  Which succinct label should we
> assign to this affect?  "Soothed"?  I'm not sure.

Or smug, perhaps.  But, yeah, there are many experiences which have
no such clear linguistic label.  In French they love to say "Ju no say
qua?" right (pardon my incredibly bad attempt to spell French).

>
> OK, I don't want to go into more detail at the moment.  However, one
> thing I want to point out is that the whole "pre-conceptual
> definition" discussion so far is _not_ Aleader specific.  Any affective
> model may be able to benefit by a pre-conceptual style of definition.
> In fact, I do _not_ care about the details of the Aleader model per se.
> To me, what is important is using pre-conceptual definition.

Okay, I think I am with you here.

>
> Perhaps you said it best: "So far, the chief value of your system
> seems to me to be able to provide a vivid and reliable depictor of
> emotions."  Yes, absolutely!
>
> [*] I think you suggested email'ing Gerald Clore about an electronic
> version of OCC since I am not receiving quick service from the
> bookstore.  I do not feel comfortable making this request.  I prefer
> to wait.  If you really think that he will respond positively then you
> are welcome to try.  (After one month, shipping status is:
> "Unavailable in primary warehouse, being procured from secondary
> warehouse" -- Ugh!)

If I am not hallucinating, I believe you have already received a copy.

>
> > > > One important
> > > > question is, is there more heterogenetiy between categories than within
> > > > categories?  One way you could test this is ask people to view pairs of
> > > > scenes and rate their affective similarity on a scale of 1-5.
> > >
> > > I have already done most of the work to automate this type of test.
> > > I will get busy and make a few more preparatory changes to the software.
> > > Perhaps within a week, we'll be ready (software-wise) to get started
> > > testing human subjects.
> >
> > Cool.  Howz that gone?
>
> [I might have mentioned some of this already.]
>
> 12 Aug: I met Dr. Shubhada Pange, one of the top psychologists in
> Nashik.  It was pretty cool.  She doesn't know much about _cognitive_
> psychology, but she does a lot of psychological testing in large
> companies and seems interested in being helpful.  For example, I think
> we can get 100s of English speaking subjects for testing once
> everything is ready.  She asked for a bunch of background research
> articles which I email'd today.  Let us see what happens.

Yep, I at least sort of remember this remember but appreciate the summary
even if it is a repeat.

>
> 22 Aug: Dr. Pange didn't reply to any emails.  I remember that she
> said that she is not very comfortable with computers.  Typical
> psychologist!  Oh well.  What I predict is that nothing will happen
> until I go back to her office with the whole experiment 100% ready for
> human subjects testing.

Ditto.

>
> By the way, you keep mentioning that our experiemental strategy may
> change.

Yeah.  Part of what you are sensing may be wise caution.  Part of it
is my undoubtedly non-committal nature - fear of action, fear of
decision....I press forward...

> That's why I have not put much effort into molding the
> software to present any kind of specific test.  I have work on:
>
> + A preliminary KR model of the Aleader appraisal.  PowerLoom looks
> like a good option (at least when the next version becomes available).
> I can forward you an article about connecting PowerLoom & Cyc.

Yes.  I interested with strengthOfInterest HighToVeryHigh.

>
> + Brainstorming.  Maybe we can do an experiment only to test whether
> pre-conceptual definition is more re-test reliable than conceptual
> definition?  Or, who knows, maybe "pre-conceptual definition" is not
> as innovative as I presume?

The emotion literature is vast.  I'm sure many have waxed on about it.
The new stuff involves doing it with computers.

>
> + Waiting for stuff to happen.  The whole project seems stuck at
> the moment.

Yes.  Sorry.

>
> Before writing any more, I await your reaction with respect to
> "pre-conceptual definition".

Done.

Bill

>
> --
> A new cognitive theory of emotion, http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/aleader
>