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Pain and pleasure, which are qualitative experiences, are the basis of operant conditioning (unsupervised learning ala behavioral psychology). This covers the m

Pain and pleasure, which are qualitative experiences, are the basis of operant conditioning (unsupervised learning ala behavioral psychology). This covers the massive domain of behavior that's informed/dictated by reinforcement/punishment. So they are pretty fundamental if you care about building something that's analogous to biological life, depending of course on how deeply you want that analogy to extend.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> Pain and pleasure, which are qualitative experiences, are the basis of operant conditioning The behaviors of attractive and aversive reinforcement are the basis of operant conditioning. The whole issue about qualia is that exhibiting behavior to which subjective internal experience is usually attributed does not demonstrate the subjective internal experience. The people arguing for the importance of qualia and it's unattainability for AI aren't arguing that it is particularly challenging for AI to exhibit attractive and aversive reinforcement, or any other external behavior, they are building a castle they can retreat to in the face of any observable behavior.
- blueadept111 8y ago
  You haven't actually said anything I disagree with, even though I'm in the castle. "Retreat" sounds a little harsh. I would say "Comfortably ensconced". Even if an AI nails down the behavioral/functional aspects of a biological brain, that doesn't necessarily mean that the qualia have come along for the ride. Does it matter if they have? That seems to be the real question. Allow me to propose a thought experiment: I'm a traveller from the future, where the notion of 'qualia' is understood and engineered (maybe using techniques we would somewhat recognize today, maybe not). I present you with a machine that has a single red button. When the button is pressed, there is no observable behavior, except that 10,000 AI's are instantly created and subjected to extreme agony until the button is pressed again. What are your thoughts on pressing this button?
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Allow me to propose a thought experiment: I'm a traveller from the future, where the notion of 'qualia' is understood and engineered This is incoherent: qualia by definition cannot be engineered, or even validated by external observers. This isn't a technical limitation that can be overcome with progress, it's inherent in the definition.
    - blueadept111 8y ago
      Maybe the future involves direct brain interfacing between humans via biological interconnects, and a new kind of engineering will evolve, defined not by behavior/functionality in the objective world, but in a realm of shared consciousness that is only subjectively accessible to biological entities that have a similar level of brain evolution. In fact our own brains probably already work this way, with different parts of the brain acting as loci of lower-level consciousness, but also somehow becoming more than the sum of their semi/sub-conscious parts when acting in concert. And maybe computers just can't participate in this shared consciousness, even in principle, because they're made out of the wrong 'stuff' along a dimension of reality we don't yet understand (or may never understand).

dragonwriter 8y ago

> Pain and pleasure, which are qualitative experiences, are the basis of operant conditioning The behaviors of attractive and aversive reinforcement are the basis of operant conditioning. The whole issue about qualia is that exhibiting behavior to which subjective internal experience is usually attributed does not demonstrate the subjective internal experience. The people arguing for the importance of qualia and it's unattainability for AI aren't arguing that it is particularly challenging for AI to exhibit attractive and aversive reinforcement, or any other external behavior, they are building a castle they can retreat to in the face of any observable behavior.

blueadept111 8y ago
You haven't actually said anything I disagree with, even though I'm in the castle. "Retreat" sounds a little harsh. I would say "Comfortably ensconced". Even if an AI nails down the behavioral/functional aspects of a biological brain, that doesn't necessarily mean that the qualia have come along for the ride. Does it matter if they have? That seems to be the real question. Allow me to propose a thought experiment: I'm a traveller from the future, where the notion of 'qualia' is understood and engineered (maybe using techniques we would somewhat recognize today, maybe not). I present you with a machine that has a single red button. When the button is pressed, there is no observable behavior, except that 10,000 AI's are instantly created and subjected to extreme agony until the button is pressed again. What are your thoughts on pressing this button?
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Allow me to propose a thought experiment: I'm a traveller from the future, where the notion of 'qualia' is understood and engineered This is incoherent: qualia by definition cannot be engineered, or even validated by external observers. This isn't a technical limitation that can be overcome with progress, it's inherent in the definition.
  - blueadept111 8y ago
    Maybe the future involves direct brain interfacing between humans via biological interconnects, and a new kind of engineering will evolve, defined not by behavior/functionality in the objective world, but in a realm of shared consciousness that is only subjectively accessible to biological entities that have a similar level of brain evolution. In fact our own brains probably already work this way, with different parts of the brain acting as loci of lower-level consciousness, but also somehow becoming more than the sum of their semi/sub-conscious parts when acting in concert. And maybe computers just can't participate in this shared consciousness, even in principle, because they're made out of the wrong 'stuff' along a dimension of reality we don't yet understand (or may never understand).