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> How can one turn the sinking, horrified feeling when one loses a love into a function?"

The same way the brain does. Those complex feelings can eventually be resolved into dumb neurophysics. Love, fear, anxiety etc. al are just electrical impulses tickling chemicals. Is there anything in our brains that we could never approximate with technology?

We've had technology like poetry, art, and music for thousands of years, and yet no symbolic description of the feeling can contain the feeling of what it's uniquely like for me. Even though we could try and model the brain, say, functionalist models fail to capture qualia as it doesn't reduce to behaviour. To replicate the brain fully in a computer would need a full description of its chemistry and physics, along with that of the greater universe, which we don't have, and to describe it coherently to simulate it is a problem of the order of magnitude more difficult than ones we're going to be able to code for the foreseeable future.

I agree that it'll be while before we fully understand the brain but I don't have any doubts that we'll get there eventually. I am curious though, why would we need to understand the greater universe perfectly as well?

Where does the brain get its inputs from? These computational models are based on an ontology where the brain is an isolated box separate from the universe, which is only one of the many philosophical outlooks argued over. For example, most schools of Buddhist philosophy would regard this separation as entirely the wrong picture of the world.

This is my view as well. It's a little unnerving and it definitely starts to overlap with the whole "free will" debate, but yeah, I don't see any reason why we can't fundamentally replicate the behaviors exhibited by the brain. It doesn't violate any laws of physics.

Philosophers have debated this since at least ancient greece. It's hardly a solved question, and about a third do believe that there is something in our brain that we could never approximate with technology.

Have any of that third put up any testable theories about that something? Or are there leading theories as to what the something might be?

If a philosopher had a testable theory I don't think they'd be a philosopher anymore.

This assumes that there is no free will however :)

> How can one turn the sinking, horrified feeling when one loses a love into a function? Or describe in terms of a function, the blissful wonder of being in the arms of a lover?

Evocative questions but I have to challenge the premise. First, that things like emotions and qualia are design ends in themselves for a successful AGI rather than potential emergent properties of same.

For that matter, are they really necessary to the brief?

> An issue I have is the that there seem to be profound limitations to language, explored in the philosophy of language, that fail to capture much, if not most, of the world.

And how much of the world does a human mind capture?

The piece already accounts for this claim. The theory is that all language has to do is describe a sophisticated enough network. After that it's black boxes all the way down.

> Language is the only tool we have for programming a mind

And a darn good one. Formal languages can express a great deal when you find the right abstractions.

> How can one turn the sinking, horrified feeling when one loses a love into a function?

… or into electrical activity in the brain.

Can you point to a paper or website that contains this function, described in full? Yes, electromagnetism no doubt, but while we can postulate a function, we still don't have the function, and will somehow have to write it down for it to be a function.

> somehow have to write it down for it to be a function.

That’s not how AI is trained. You don’t need to know or even understand the resulting model to train it.

The training algorithms have little to do with the resulting model, and are certainly not themselves intelligent.

Why assume that the activity is purely electrical?

It's not purely electrical. It's also chemical, especially if you look at how synapses work. (But then again, chemical processes are driven by electric charges anyway.)

I don't think AGI is seeking to create a machine that can love, and I think it would be even less capable of it than "mere" logical intelligence.

Thank God too, the moral questions involved are truly terrifying (humanity as a Great Demiurge, birthing monstrosities).