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>Humans don't receive infinite rewards because any "reward system" in our brain is implemented by receiving a finite amount of electrochemical pleasure signals
by xamuel 6y ago
>Humans don't receive infinite rewards because any "reward system" in our brain is implemented by receiving a finite amount of electrochemical pleasure signals over a finite amount of time.
This is like saying computers can't represent infinity because they have only finitely many bytes.
Suppose the treasury rewarded you a "superdollar", which is a special object that allows you to create any number of dollars that you want, on demand, as many times as you want. How many dollars would you say this superdollar is worth? Obviously, no finite number of dollars would be worth that one superdollar. The human mind can certainly understand the relative value of a superdollar vs. any number of dollars. That the human mind is implemented through finite electrochemical processes is irrelevant.
- PeterisP 6y agoThe worth of a superdollar is equal to as much dollars as you can spend per second times the seconds you can expect to live. Both numbers are large but finite, the first is bounded by the value of global economy (no matter how many dollars you create, the total purchasing power of these dollars can't grow beyond that), the second is bounded if not to a few hundred years then by the time until the heat death of the universe. In a similar manner, the total amount of reward that you might ever get is capped by the amount of pleasure your brain can perceive at any given moment (which is finite) times your lifespan (which is finite). You might reason and hypothesise about agents perceiving infinite rewards (as we are doing now), but this has nothing to do with the reality of homo sapiens rewards system(s), or, in fact, the rewards system of any agent existing in our physical reality, which is effectively bounded both in time and space.