Saturday, February 17, 2007

Reason, emotion, and the limits of computation

I listened today to a good Open Source podcast on Spinoza with António Damásio (Looking for Spinoza) and Rebecca Goldstein (Betraying Spinoza). I'm not qualified to comment on their readings of Spinoza, but I confirmed an impression I had from reading their books: they do not appear to recognize the role of the limits of computation on the evolutionary necessity of the reason-emotion linkage. To the extent that we equate equate reasoning with logical (or probabilistic) inference, computational complexity tells us that a reasoner cannot explore most of the consequences of its beliefs. The reasoner needs some means of directing limited computational resources to promising directions, otherwise it will not reach any conclusions useful to its well-being. By coloring beliefs with associations to bodily states, emotions provide those directions. Damásio explains the reason-emotion connection beautifully in his books, but he does not stress how it is a necessity driven by computational limits, not just an intriguing and useful accident of evolutionary history.

The computational limits of reason are a truly modern discovery that did not seem to be foreshadowed in the thought of the great 17th-century rationalists, and that even today is not taken seriously enough.

2 comments:

Tyler said...

"The computational limits of reason are a truly modern discovery that did not seem to be foreshadowed in the thought of the great 17th-century rationalists, and that even today is not taken seriously enough."

What do you mean "truly modern discovery".

Spinoza had no contemporary notions of computation when he devised his philosophy, Reason as far as he could tell is not limited by computation, it is quite the contrary.

Fernando Pereira said...

The discoveries I was referring to are undecidability and intractability. There were notions of computation (related to everyday educated practice in taxation, accounting, astronomy,...) around 17th century philosophy (Leibniz), which were not formalized but that seem no different from what is formalized with a Turing machine.