RE: Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
May 15, 2015 at 5:46 pm
(This post was last modified: May 15, 2015 at 5:48 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(May 15, 2015 at 11:37 am)AFTT47 Wrote:How do you know the fly had any actual feelings when it behaved this way?(May 15, 2015 at 10:24 am)Chuck Wrote: Computer can, and has been, programmed to respond exactly like that. It's a simple program too. Does a computer so programmed experience emotion?
Right, but I think you're talking about a program deliberately designed to give such an appearance. Mimicking the behavior is one thing but reproducing the actual feeling that drives it is quite another. It's safe to say evolution didn't equip the fruit fly with emotional mimicry capabilities.
Using the computer analogy though, we all know a computer can be programmed to respond in quite complex ways for practical purposes. I wouldn't expect a programmed behavior to necessarily be immediately recognizable as such.
But if behavior is indication of feeling, what about the behavior of the computer?
Whether the program is deliberated designed is besides the point. For sake of argument one could easily postulate a process where a set of code calculated to replicate itself through accumulating generations of more or less random error inserted into themselves code bits that taken together cause the machine running the code to produce the said behavior.
The codes that resulted from this process needn't in principle be different by even a single byte from a code designed to achieve the effect. So is the identical codes, one designed, one arrived at by chance, that both does exactly the same thing, capable of emotion?
