modeling this, what allows us to be motivated in the face of pain, when it is logical to turn off, but pretty impossible, I believe, is the main question here, brothers and sisters, and the key to animal motivation, present in us all, to some degree, though very strong in some. There are hints, ever so slight, of unconscious systems trying to gain energy. the slightest of which, I believe is the key to modeling anything close to desire, given our technology and current understanding of chemistry. some of them include yawning (and accompanying stretching (both of which cause cell death, but also cause a bit of metabolism or blood flow or however you want to think about it) and shivering, an energy recycling response to cold (looks very similar to the shaking that occurs when yawning); the cell death present during thought, I believe, is the craziest of all, though. yes, every thought, every electrical impulse that travels through your brain terrorizes it, but also creates usable data structures, somehow. desires, I call them. **Destruction (of cells), in a robust system, like an animal, yields production on various levels, including cell replication*. These desires contain bits of all kinds of sensory data, chemically, and physically represented symbolic coding (probably more crazy chemical shit that will take a little bit of effort to comprehend). this phenomenon yields a really good data structure and the basis of what is called "learning" in AI. we can create really powerful learning systems, systems that can teach themselves with internal data structures, but this isn't intelligence worth shit. Watson (the jeopardy bot) will be a great tool once we figure out animal motivation schemes-- the motivation to use it, but before then, it's a lifeless gimmick. The biggest joke in AI is that one "ethical robot," NAO. Oh, jesus. calling that thing intelligent is like saying memory foam is intelligent. In order to even pursue a mildly intelligent machine we need to go the opposite route. early life, fuck, even late life is brutal and antiethical (it seeks to understand walls, rather than avoid them). it is selfish and about understanding the nature of electricity. if you didn't get that before, the energy, of which I speak is real electricity. it is harnessed by our bodies and used to pleasurably kill its own cells. and it's measurable with simple voltage meters.