I claim the first post in the Brains forum with my lifelong special interest: Funny Things, and Why They Are Such. A great book I've been re-reading on the subject is this one: http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Jokes-Using-Humor-Reverse-Engineer/dp/0262518694 It has an overview of most previous humor theories (superiority theory, Incogruity-Resolution theory, and a few others) and basically posits the following: 1) Just as there are feelings of hunger, nausea, taste, and fullness that help us guide our eating habits, there are feelings related to information-processing that guide our thinking habits: boredom, curiosity, confusion, and insight. These are the "epistemic emotions". 2) All emotions have valence, including the epistemic ones. Boredom is unpleasant and we look for things to think about to avoid it. Confusion is unpleasant and we look for ways to resolve it. Insight is pleasant and we want to chase it. 3) Humor comes from the emotion of mirth, which happens when new information makes us realise we've been making an erroneous covert assumption. This is essentially a debugging system. The high reward is to encourage the brain to look for mistakes to fix whenever it is thinking about something. 4) Like many human instincts, we have found a whole lot of ways to exploit this system to make the happy-brain-juice go. An interesting side-proposition of this theory is that a true AI might actually *necessarily* have a sense of humor!
I re-read your post like six times thinking "but that last bit can't possibly be right" but...it makes sense....
There's some really interesting implications for AI theory in the study of human counciousness. After all, evolution ran into the same problems making an intelligent self-aware agent and has managed to solve them (somewhat, well enough for survival). Even if we don't end up copying the process exactly, we can learn a lot from it.
Dang, that makes a great deal of sense. I'll look for a copy of this book and see what I think of the full thing.
That makes a lot of sense and now I want to write sci-fi. Thanks a lot it's not like I have time for that. (Seriously though, I'll put it on my list and write it at some point. Thank you)
Gonna go buy this book as soon as I have the money. Humor and comedy and what makes them work (usually from a more 'why is this joke better than that joke' standpoint) is one of the biggest interests of my life.
I got a happy feeling from the insight this thread has given me, haha. I've heard that things were funny because they were confusing and I never understood, but this makes perfect sense.
