How many aliens are among us?

How many humans, while having the visual appearances of standard humans, have an alien, inner-human?

Fortunately, we do have a definition for the "standard" human. Psychologists have come up with Maslow's Ladder of 5 Basic Needs and a list of 5 Basic Emotions: guilt, hate, shame, revenge, love (Source).

However, there must be human emotions and needs that are unnamed and even undiscovered. For I'm skeptical that all these 6 billion humans only have combinations of these short five generalities.

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You have things you endorse objectively, and things you feel emotionally.

For example, I have a crazy-style haircut and I know it doesn't matter what people think--at least when I calculate the cost-benefits of my look, I find it makes sense objectively. However, I get uncomfortable by people's stares, looks, and criticisms.

I think happiness involves to some degree a synchronicity between what you feel and what you endorse. You ultimately want to do what you think is right and best for you objectively, but emotionally, your heart may give you constraints. Some sort of compromise is in order.

What is the purpose of emotions?

A quick response from what seems to be the standard psych answer:

That emotions "serve the useful purpose of letting us know what's going on and motivating us to take some form of action" (link).

I'm in agreement with this, that emotions are there primarily to alert and to motivate. Its etymological roots are excite and move.

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I was reading that they were able to get a computer to detect facial expressions and identify emotions on humans. Well, maybe this is the missing link in the AI chain. What they could do is hookup the emotion reader to a subject who interacts with a text-bot. Then, it should read the emotions as the conversations progress, learning and understanding patterns between certain conversaitonal directions or sentences and emotions that are evoked. After the computer is trained to connect conservational bits with emotion, it could then seek to create an emotion in the other person, try to push them toward positive and happy responses. Bam, the artificial counselor. The program could also learn to associate emotion that he should feel as a counselor depending on how the conversation is going. And then his goal should be to improve his emotion (which could be tied, partially, to whether the other person is feeling emotion). Heck, I bet there's some psychological map in two-person scenarios that could be programmed in there.

Eh? eh? what do you think?

Standard Organization, Aristotle, Long Laundry List of Emotions, Another List, How many are there.

As part of our Peer Counseling retreat in high school we had this group lecture us on anger management techniques. Basically this involved the agitatee and/or the agitator become aware or make explicit how they "feel." i.e. instead of punching somebody in the face, the angry man should make himself or others aware that he was hurt or that what the other person says makes him angry. This process, I think, civilizes an emotion by putting it out in the open. It's like turning on a flash light on a ghost... once you do that, it becomes transparent and is no longer haunting. Plus, this begins a process of empathy by making others aware of how one feels. And empathy is the foundation of civility, civility the foundation of safety, and saftey the foundation of avoiding jailtime due to combustible rages.

New Scientist - New robot face smiles and sneers K-bot has a full repertoire of facial expressions, say her creators - she could help scientists researching artificial intelligence By Shaoni Bhattacharya, Denver

Wow, I'd love to have access to the knobs that control this dummy. The interface would probably be some sort of web or hierarchy of rich phrases that describe the multiplicity of complex emotions. A few interesting ones:
"Happy but exhausted and a little bit anxious"
"Happy but unsure of impending danger"
"Happy but wishing one were elsewhere"
"Happy but angry at the happiness giver"
"Happy but full of relief from previous anger"

(buckylooloo)