Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
Brent Meeker writes:
>> Pain is limited on both ends: on the input by damage to the
physical >> circuitry and on the response by the possible range of
response.
> > Responses in the brain are limited by several mechanisms, such as
> exhaustion of neurotransmitter stores at synapses, negative feedback
> mechanisms such as downregulation of receptors, and, I suppose, the
> total numbers of neurons that can be stimulated. That would not be a
> problem in a simulation, if you were not concerned with modelling
the > behaviour of a real brain. Just as you could build a structure
100km > tall as easily as one 100m tall by altering a few parameters
in an > engineering program, so it should be possible to create
unimaginable > pain or pleasure in a conscious AI program by changing
a few parameters.
I don't think so. It's one thing to identify functional equivalents
as 'pain' and 'pleasure'; it's something else to claim they have the
same scaling. I can't think of anyway to establish an invariant
scaling that would apply equally to biological, evolve creatures and
to robots.
Take a robot with pain receptors. The receptors take temperature and
convert it to a voltage or current, which then goes to an analogue to
digital converter, which inputs a binary number into the robot's central
computer, which then experiences pleasant warmth or terrible burning
depending on what that number is. Now, any temperature transducer is
going to saturate at some point, limiting the maximal amount of pain,
but what if you bypass the transducer and the AD converter and input the
pain data directly into the computer? Sure, there may be software limits
specifying an upper bound to the pain input (eg, if x>100 then input
100), but what theoretical impediment would there be to changing this?
You would have to show that pain or pleasure beyond a certain limit is
uncomputable.
No. I speculated that pain and pleasure are functionally defined. So there could be a functionally defined limit. Just because you can put in a bigger representation of a number, it doesn't follow that the functional equivalent of pain is linear in this number and doesn't saturate.
Brent Meeker
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