Too complicate things further. A small percentage of humans perceive pain as pleasure and prefer it at least in a sexual context or else fetishes like sadomachism would not exist.
And they do in fact experience pain as a greater pleasure. More than likely these people have an ample supply of endorphins which rush to supplant the pain with an even greater pleasure. Over time they are driven to seek out certain types of pain and excitement to feel alive. And although most try to avoid extreme life threatening pain many seek out greater and greater challanges such as climbing hazardous mountains or high speed driving until at last many find death. Although these behaviors should be anti-evolutionary and should have died out it is possible that the tribe as a whole needs at least a few such risk takers to take out that sabertoothed tiger that's been dragging off the children. -----Original Message----- From: Matt Mahoney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 5:32 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Introducing Autobliss 1.0 (was RE: [agi] Nirvana? Manyana? Never!) --- Jiri Jelinek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Matt, > > >autobliss passes tests for awareness of its inputs and responds as if > >it > has > qualia. How is it fundamentally different from human awareness of > pain and pleasure, or is it just a matter of degree? > > If your code has feelings it reports then reversing the order of the > feeling strings (without changing the logic) should magically turn its > pain into pleasure and vice versa, right? Now you get some pain [or > pleasure], lie how great [or bad] it feels and see how reversed your > perception gets. BTW do you think computers would be as reliable as > they are if some numbers were truly painful (and other pleasant) from > their perspective? Printing "ahh" or "ouch" is just for show. The important observation is that the program changes its behavior in response to a reinforcement signal in the same way that animals do. I propose an information theoretic measure of utility (pain and pleasure). Let a system S compute some function y = f(x) for some input x and output y. Let S(t1) be a description of S at time t1 before it inputs a real-valued reinforcement signal R, and let S(t2) be a description of S at time t2 after input of R, and K(.) be Kolmogorov complexity. I propose abs(R) <= K(dS) = K(S(t2) | S(t1)) The magnitude of R is bounded by the length of the shortest program that inputs S(t1) and outputs S(t2). I use abs(R) because S could be changed in identical ways given positive, negative, or no reinforcement, e.g. - S receives input x, randomly outputs y, and is rewarded with R > 0. - S receives x, randomly outputs -y, and is penalized with R < 0. - S receives both x and y and is modified by classical conditioning. This definition is consistent with some common sense notions about pain and pleasure, for example: - In animal experiments, increasing the quantity of a reinforcement signal (food, electric shock) increases the amount of learning. - Humans feel more pain or pleasure than insects because for humans, K(S) is larger, and therefore the greatest possible change is larger. - Children respond to pain or pleasure more intensely than adults because they learn faster. - Drugs which block memory formation (anesthesia) also block sensations of pain and pleasure. One objection might be to consider the following sequence: 1. S inputs x, outputs -y, is penalized with R < 0. 2. S inputs x, outputs y, is penalized with R < 0. 3. The function f() is unchanged, so K(S(t3)|S(t1)) = 0, even though K(S(t2)|S(t1)) > 0 and K(S(t3)|S(t2)) > 0. My response is that this situation cannot occur in animals or humans. An animal that is penalized regardless of its actions does not learn nothing. It learns helplessness, or to avoid the experimenter. However this situation can occur in my autobliss program. The state of autobliss can be described by 4 64-bit floating point numbers, so for any sequence of reinforcement, K(dS) <= 256 bits. For humans, K(dS) <= 10^9 to 10^15 bits, according to various cognitive or neurological models of the brain. So I argue it is just a matter of degree. If you accept this definition, then I think without brain augmentation, there is a bound on how much pleasure or pain you can experience in a lifetime. In particular, if you consider t1 = birth, t2 = death, then K(dS) = 0. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=66444497-23a35c
