Interesting discussion. And we brought up wireheading. It's kind of the ultimate example that shows that pursuing pleasure is different from pursuing the "good". It really is an area for the philosophers. What is the good, anyway?
But what I wanted to comment on was my understanding of the relationship between pleasure, and the "good". Pleasure is an evolved reward system that people and animals have that generally helps us learn to do things that are good for us. So we get pleasure from positive social interaction and romantic interaction and success and eating well and all sorts of things. So it's an aspect of learning to guide us toward things that help us. It has some characteristics shared with affect, like persistence over some limited amount of time. I'm guessing a little bit of this persistence is needed so we can remember it--it will pass to long term memory, and we have to have time to figure out what exactly was lead up to it, so we associate the pleasure with the proper behavior. And for this correct attribution, there probably has to be some backwards chain reaching back. I don't know, my psychology is kind of weak--they've probably figured a lot of this out. OK, so my understanding is not great, but it's enough for me to understand that pleasure is just our mechanism to guide us, not a highest good on its own. The human pleasure system can be an example, but an AGI will need something to satisfy similar problems. It may be that because some of the subtleties involved, and ability to enjoy play might be important for an AGI. andi ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=111637683-c8fa51 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
