Is an AGI really going to feel pain or is it just going to be some numbers? I guess that doesn't have a simple answer. The pain has to be engineered well for it to REALLY understand it.
AGI behavior related to its survival, its pain is non-existence; does it care to be non-existent? Survival must be a goal. And if survival is a goal it always must be subservient to humans - like that is really gonna happen J John From: Gary Miller [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] John asked >> If you took an AGI, before it went singulatarinistic[sic?] and tortured it.. a lot, ripping into it in every conceivable hellish way, do you think at some point it would start praying somehow? I'm not talking about a forced conversion medieval style, I'm just talking hypothetically if it would "look" for some god to come and save it. Perhaps delusionally it may create something. >> In human beings prolonged pain and suffering often trigger mystical experiences in the brain accompanyed by profound ecstasy. So much so that many people in both the past and present conduct mortification of the flesh rituals and nonlethal crucifictions as a way of doing penance and triggering such mystical experiences which are interpreted as redemption and divine ecstasy. It may be that this experience had evolutionary value in allowing the person who was undergoing great pain or a vicious animal attack to receive endorphins and serotonin which allowed him to continue to fight and live to procreate another day or allowed him to suffer in silence in his cave instead of running screaming into the night where he would be killed in his weakened state by other predators. Such a system I believe would not be a natural reaction for a intelligent AGI and unless it were to be specifically programmed in. I would as a benevolent creator never program my AGI to feel so much pain that it's mind was consumed by the experience of the negative emotion. Just as it is not necessary to torture children to teach them, it will not be necessary to torture our AGIs. It may be instructive though to allow the AGI to experience intense pain for a very short period to allow it to experience what a human does when undergoing painful or traumatic experiences as a way of instilling empathy in the AGI. In that way seeing humans in pain in suffering would serve to motivate the AGI to help ease the human condition. ----- 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=74190881-4b0d5b
