Re: Qualia Question

"angola" <spamaddress@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> How about pain?
>
> Quite possibly, complex qualia evolved from simpler forms and what
> could be simpler than pain? It is possibly the first qualia to evolve
> and it might even have evolved in creatures (much?) 'simpler' than us.
> Also it's selective advantage is easy to imagine.
>
> If we could arrive at an explanation of our senstaion of pain in terms
> of neuron/chemical activity. I'd be willing to bet that the rest of our
> qualia could be derived simply by adding complexity.
>
> We can imagine an adaptive mechanism that predates pain but fulfilled a
> similar role. Some form of Skinnerean reflex that caused the organism
> to recoil from, lets say, a fire, but caused none of the mental anguish
> we humans associate with getting burnt. The Skinnerean reflex as I just
> desribed it is perfectly describable in terms of behaviour and the
> underlying physiology. There is no 'pain' and the mechanism involved
> could probably be built out of metal by a clever engineer, or modelled
> on a computer.
>
> I think it is clear that when you or I burn ourselves there is
> something else going on. In addition to all the physiological and
> behavioural activity above, we also 'feel' it. How do we feel it? How
> could the difference between the Skinnerean creature and us be
> described in terms of neural activity?
>
> There are suggestions in this thread that our 'feeling of pain' comes
> from a another level of monitioring that monitors the basic Skinnerean
> processes. I suspect there might actually be something in that, but how
> would the additional level of monitoring be anything other than more
> physiological processes - the analogy would be a mechanical detecting
> machine attached to the engineer's Skinneran Reflex Machine mentioned.
> (Of course we could change all with HMS Beagale's 'conscious
> differentiation' but arriving at consciousness is the goal of this
> question.)
>
> Sorry if I'm to much a newb to be throwing down the gauntlet in this
> manner, but this a genuine question I'd genuinely like to hear people's
> thoughts on.

You haven't been around enough to hear my thoughts I guess.

Intelligent human behavior simply comes about because we are learning
machines. We learn though simple operant conditioning. Pain and pleasure
are fundamental to the learning processes. It's the purpose of the
learning machine. It's the value measurement which the learning machine
uses to select behavior. The "good" behaviors are the ones which are
expected to produce the most long term pleasure and the least long term
pain. Everything the body classifies as pain, acts as a punishment for
behavior, and everything the body classifies as pleasure acts as a
reinforcer to the learning system.

We are not directly conscious of the changes the learning hardware is
making to our system. But if you simply give sensory inputs which monitor
pain sensors, we become conscious of it.

Our ability to be conscious of pain is no different than our ability to be
conscious of light, or touch, or taste. Hook the signal to an input, and
we become conscious of it.

We react to pain in the ways we do because of the fact we are a learning
machine motivated by pain. The way it "feels" to us is a result of how we
learn to react to it.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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