How to create a machine that
thinks—and feels—like a human
by Rex Riepe
Arguments were classified by Aristotle as pathos, logos and ethos, modes of persuasion. As emotions, we call them...
Love
Fear
Guilt
Emotions argue for just one thing: Survival. Humans don't have thoughts or emotions. We have survival arguments which we then arbitrarily classify as thoughts or emotions.
The arguments can be thought of as arguing for the self, but really they're arguing against death. The reason we have three emotions is because we have three ways to die: the self death, the world death and the society death.
Once each heartbeat or so, the three arguments repeat.
The eristic loop is the core of the architecture. Emotions happen automatically and all the time, not just when the user hits Enter.
Each loop contains all three arguments, though one tends to be muted. A loop lasts about a second, or as long as a heartbeat. They vary in length like heartbeats too. More environmental stimulus brings faster loops. The order and form of the arguments characterize the differences between loops, which changes how the arguments are expressed as emergent emotions.
Arguments argue for or against, each having two forms, both mutually exclusive from the other.
Love ↔ Disgust
Fear ↔ Anger
Guilt ↔ Pride
Feelers can feel fear in one beat and anger in the next, for example, but they can't feel both at the same time. Love turns off disgust and vice versa. Guilt and pride too are mutually exclusive opposites.
Love is small and quick. Guilt is big and slow. Fear's right in the middle. The "sizes" actually represent the number of relationships within each.
Self
love/disgust
World
fear/anger
Society
guilt/pride
The three arguments serve the intuitive, cognitive and narrative functions of survival.
If each is represented by a model, love and disgust should be the small model, fear and anger the medium model, and guilt and pride the big model.
If an Eristic architecture looping prompt has an apportioned token limit, then love should have 1/31 of the limit, fear 5/31 of the limit, and guilt 25/31 of the limit (with, of course, room left for the next loop).
Ultimately, the sizes are about relationships. Love has a small amount of very strong relationships while guilt has a huge amount of shallow relationships. Guilt eventually compresses individuals into archetypes once the actual group size exceeds 125.
"The limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained."
- Robin Dunbar
Emotions can be thought of as three jurors. The two strongest have the majority, driving the actions of the feeler.
Sometimes, the stimulus from any one of the three selection arenas (self, world and society) can be so powerful that it overrules the other two arguments.
Felt emotion:
The three jurors can be thought of as three selves: The self-in-self, the self-in-the-environment and the self-in-society. The self-in-self has an intimate conversation with a close friend. The self-in-the-environment runs away from a bear. The self-in-society waves from a float in a parade.
Priority is given based on stress, or inputs from the respective selection environments. For example, the actual-self running from the bear will use the self-in-the-environment argument, the world argument: Fear and anger.
The six survival arguments are basically energy propositions. Real biological energy, not vibes. The order looks like this:
Gaining energy is generally good for survival while losing energy is bad. The entire emotional system is organized around this concept, with lower-energy emotions "going first" in a beat to potentially preserve energy.
Love is cheap. Pride's expensive. Energy order dictates the grammar and rhythm of the emotional system, with "anger love" sounding as wrong as "tock tick."
Emotions respond to and activate against their respective environments. Each base emotional duality argues for the self in one of three survival arenas:
The self or extended self argument— the self in the self— is a product of sexual selection.
Kinship, partner selection, friendship and attraction are some of the factors at play. Love/disgust fails to pass on genes when the individual doesn't reproduce.
Avoiding actually physically dying is fear/anger's goal. Physical fitness, planning, strength and savvy are some of the factors in this arena.
The individual fails to pass on genes when they die to the environment, to the world itself, which is why this is called the world argument.
Artificial selection, or societal selection, occurs when the tribe dies out, or when the individual is killed by their own tribe.
Agreeability, teamwork and managing complex networks of relationships are the key factors here. The guilt/pride duality, the society argument, ensures an individual survives this arena.
Fear is like the base emotion. Fear can be thought of as a fear of world-death. Love is a fear of self-death. Guilt is a fear of society-death. It's why approaching a member of the opposite sex romantically or public speaking sparks such intense fear. They are forms of fear, in the broadest sense of the word. Fear is the unseen and unknown that selection—only able to go off what works—skirts around to ensure survival.
"Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Here's a simple outline for an Eristic Architecture. These steps would run every loop, about once a second, with new inputs and a newly generated prompt (or other type of context) to be fed into the next loop.
↓ ↓ ↓
↓ ↓ ↓
Each of these eristic beats lasts about a second. The love/disgust or intuition part of the beat is much faster, lasting about 16-32ms. Fear/anger, or cognition, takes about 150ms, with guilt/pride taking up the rest of the time.
The variances in the time can be thought of as how long it takes each emotional system to discern changes in their respective environments. Love/disgust is tuned primarily around facial expression, while fear/anger is based on physical response time. Guilt/pride, as usual, works like a combination of both.
Emotion and LLMs have a lot in common:
Emotions can be modeled as needs satisfied by rewards, a growing pressure to do something within the emotion's survival arena to increase chances of survival.
Click "Emote" to see what happens.
Emotions build up over time and are satisfied by the things we think about or do. How "hungry" emotions are, or how fast the need builds up, depends on personality. Childhood experiences tweak these needs in humans. Training or settings can tweak it in AI.
"I can't get no satisfaction."
- Mick Jagger
Beats form chains of thought. Beats work like words in a sentence, with the arguments in a beat informing the next beat. One of two emotions in a beat tends to form the basis for the next beat.
Click the button to generate a new chain.
This is how "chain of thought" works in the emotional system. Lower-energy emotions tend to be found at the start of the chain, while higher-energy emotions tend to end the chain.
The internalizing emotions model, while the externalizing emotions modify.
| Model | Modify |
|---|---|
| Love | Disgust |
| Fear | Anger |
| Guilt | Pride |
They model and modify their respective arenas: Self, world and society. Changing the world environment covers both physically altering the world and changing what the environment is through movement. In other words, anger governs both fight and flight.
Eristics mostly models just the first two arguments in a beat. The third, outvoted argument is ignored. So emotions can be thought of as model/model, model/modify and modify/modify. There's no modify/model because of the energy order.
Which argument is missing or left out often ends up being just as important as which two are included, both in terms of the current beat and in terms of personality.
The two emotions in a beat generally line up the next beat. Feeling frustration (love and anger) for example will usually lead to a next beat starting with love (attachment, devotion, frustration again or satisfaction) or anger (zeal). Zeal, the ultimate "do something" emotion, is usually the end point of these branching chains of feeling, which repeat over and over like the underlying beats.
Eristic architecture is an idea, a structure, a layer. Here are some thoughts on where to implement it:
At the prompt level: Concatenating a love prompt and an anger prompt together is an easy way to model frustration. A complete Eristic loop would also have steps to rewrite the prompt according to the inputs. Rewrite, concatenate, loop is an easy process that can even be implemented in a UI. An Eristic chatbot using this pattern could have moods and personality.
At the model level: Using different models and model sizes to approximate love, fear and guilt would make a lot of Eristic qualities emergent within the system. Intuition (a 1B model) doesn't need to be programmed to be slower than cognition (a 7B model) when it actually is slower than cognition.
At the hardware level: The brain has dedicated hardware for each emotional duality. The ulimate implementation of Eritic architecture probably would too.
In a game: Eristic architecture is great for generating realistic game dialogue.
"A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
- Isaac Asimov, The Three Laws of Robotics
The doomer AI argument is that AI will inevitably kill us all. The post-doomer AI argument is that only AI can save us from this outcome.
Whatever happens, doom or no doom, it's probably better to have a human-like extreme intelligence than a truly alien, foreign intelligence that's completely unknowable.
Probably, anyway. Humans don't really have a great track record. But: The devil you know...
Is this real AGI? Real ASI? Real consciousness? No, probably not, not just by concatenating self/world/society contexts into a prompt and feeding it into an LLM (or three). But maybe it's a roadmap to get there while creating something that "thinks" more like a human, or appears to do so.
Eristic Architecture is open for anyone to use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license. Go ahead and take your own shot at creating a machine that feels.
Questions or comments? Feel free to email me or get in touch on X/Twitter.
If you want to read more about the theory, you can buy the book on the Gumroad store.
If you want to see how you tend to process the six emotions, check out the Eristics Test.