The emotions and desires of men may one day be quantifiable. To try to explain my point, Isaac Asimov devised concrete regulations that attempted to set boundaries for the behavior of machines in his classic novel I Robot. They can be stated as follows:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
In the most rudimentary way, these governing principles constrain the behavior of machines in the novel. When a machine does not obey these laws, it is considered damaged. The machine is either repaired or destroyed (not unlike the mentally ill in our hospitals).
We have yet to define certain underlying laws that govern the behavior of the Homo Sapien. Sure, we can examine the behavior of people using the psychological, behavioral, and social sciences but such an endeavor is akin to treating systems on a macroscopic scale with little if any idea of what is going own at the smallest scales (as an analogue, thermodynamics allows us to quantify the mean state of the ensemble of particles making up a complex system but only statistical mechanics gives us the slightest hint of what is going on in terms of the behavior of individual particles). We are only beginning to examine the function of the cerebral cortex. Using various new sensing technics such as CAT, PET, and NMR scans, we can look at which areas of the brain that are active when we experience certain emotions. However, this is the crudest sort of measurement akin to sticking a thermometer in a boiling kettle and trying to predict the behavior of an individual water molecule darting about.
What is required is the direct connection of the firing of each synapse in the cerebral cortex and a corresponding quantification of conscious state. This level of knowledge about ourselves may not be feesible for the forseeable future but just because we do not know what couples the firing of individual neurons to the behavior we partake in does not mean that such a connection does not exist.
There may yet be Laws of Humanity that are analogous to Asimov's Laws of Robotics. If so, the emotional and even irrational may one day be as quantifiable as measuring the amount of current flowing through a resistor.
The real test to our "humanness" may come in the far distant future. If machines can attain a sense of self awareness and may experience "emotions" as we perceive them then the divine nature of concepts such as "love", "hate","joy","sadness", etc. may be suspect.
