--- Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Matt: I don't believe that the ability to feel pleasure and pain depends on > > consciousness. That is just a circular definition. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie > > Richard:It is not circular. Consciousness and pleasure/pain are both > subjective > issues. They can resolved together. > > Both of you, in fairly standard fashion, are approaching humans and animals > as if they were dissected on a table with consciousness/ emotions/ pleasure > & pain lying around. > > The reality is that we are integrated systems in which - > > a self > > is continually subjected to > > and feels (or to some extent may choose not to feel) > > emotions (involving pleasure/pain) > > via a (two-way) nervous system. > > The questions Matt has to answer is: > > 1) are the systems you envisage going to have a self (to feel emotions) - > and if so, why?
No, I am proposing a measure of reinforcement for intelligence in general, whether human, animal, or machine, all of which fall under Legg and Hutter's universal intelligence ( http://www.vetta.org/documents/ui_benelearn.pdf ), which is based on Hutter's AIXI model ( http://www.hutter1.net/ai/aixigentle.htm ). In this model, an agent and an environment are modeled by a pair of interactive Turing machines exchanging symbols. In addition, the environment sends a utility or reinforcement signal to the agent at each step. The goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated utility. The paper on universal intelligence (UI) proposes defining intelligence as the expected accumulated utility for a randomly chosen environment (from a Solomonoff distribution of environments, i.e. self delimiting Turing machines chosen by coin flips). Hutter's AIXI model shows that the most intelligent strategy is to guess at each step that the environment is simulated by the shortest program consistent with the observed interaction so far. However, AIXI is not computable. In humans, it is natural to think of positive utility or reinforcement as a "reward" signal or pleasure, and negative utility as a penalty, such as pain. In this respect, humans seek to maximize expected accumulated utility. But this is not quite right because utility has no scale in the AIXI/UI model. If you double a reward (e.g. food or money) or punishment (e.g. electric shock) to a human or animal, you approximately double the change in behavior. But in the AIXI/UI model, if you double the utility signal, the agent's strategy does not change. I propose a measure of a bound on reinforcement which is more consistent with our intuitive notion of pain and pleasure. The strength of a signal is bounded by the change in the state of the agent, the amount of information learned, as measured by Kolmogorov complexity. This bound is consistent with intuition. For example, a person under anesthesia feels no pain during surgery and also has no memory (learning) during this time. Drugs that increase the rate of learning (synaptic changes), such as hallucinogens, also heighten sensations of both pain and pleasure. Children learn faster than adults, and also react more strongly to pain and pleasure. Allow me to distinguish between utility and reinforcement as follows. An agent's goal is to maximize utility, but utility is independent of the agent's behavior, and has no scale. Reinforcement depends on the agent, such that if an agent's state changes from S1 to S2 as the result of reinforcement R, then |R| <= K(S2|S1), the number of bits needed to describe the state change. If you accept this definition then you could say that a human has 1000 times more capacity to experience pleasure or pain than a mouse because a human brain is 1000 times larger and therefore can learn 1000 times more. Likewise, if humans can learn 10^9 bits and autobliss ( http://www.mattmahoney.net/autobliss.txt ) can learn 10^2 bits, then autobliss experiences 10^-7 as much pain or pleasure as a human. You can interpret this how you wish. I make no claims about the morality of inflicting pain on animals or programs. Morality is an evolved cultural belief. We believe in compassion to other humans because tribes that practiced this belief (toward their own members) were more successful than those that didn't. Likewise, we eat animals. -- 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/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=75480193-5baaaa
