Pleasure Map

[jporter]

Tom offers:

>Consciousness as a neural wiring harness? Hmm. It might suggest "will"
>is nothing
>more than a biological imparative being actualized by some hapless sack
>of cells
>unaware they are the experiment. I like it.


Yes, and but also, it seems that consciousness is meaningless without a
"self" to base it around, and without the capacity to feel pleasure/pain
there is no hierarchy of preferences for a self to be built around, and so,
without the pleasure/pain circuitry there is no thought (or reason for
thought). It's got to feel meaningful or else it isn't, and maybe it isn't
even if it feels like it is, but at least it feels like it is, and that's
something.

It's the thing the Artificial Intelligence crowd doesn't acknowledge.

So what if some massively parallel and powerful computer could shuffle
Chinese symbols around in an apparently meaningful way, or even speak
Chinese.

Even if it could think why would it want to? Or continue to once it had started?

Andrew adds:

>>...How would it be useful to an animal to be `satisfied' yet not be aware
that it is satisfied i.e. have its behaviour thereby modified?
Contrariwise, if its behaviour is modified then it is in some sense
`aware' of it's own `satisfaction'. So, you could never have a
`pleasure circuit' which was not also involved in `mediating' the
effcts of pleasurable stimuli.<<

The "in some sense 'aware'" is the rub. I'm assuming the "pleasure circuit"
goes way back and down (or up if you prefer) the evolutionary ladder. But
we are in synch: as long as there is a "pleasure circuit" there is
mediation. At some level, though (?bacterial?) there is just reintroduction
of homeostasis, or some such descriptor of needs met, without mediation and
recognition of "Miller Time," or, time for a post-pleasure smoke, etc.


>>I choose to characterise the nett result in behavioural terms but, of
course, the neural plumbers amongst us may equally dream of
transmitters sluicing down CNS pathways. Whichever, the dilemma is
either that your `satisfaction' is - to quote LW - `a wheel that does
not turn' or *by definition* part of a neural control mechanism.<<

Right. There is always that dilemma in trying to pinpoint "where" the
pleasure "is" and recognizing the futility of attempting to descibe it as a
meaningful entity apart from its outside sources or even its opposites-
pain, need, etc.

But the discovery that there is an actual common pathway mediating
gratification, which probably evolved to be activated by self-gratifying
"normal," health maintaining, needfulfilling behaviors but coincidentally
is capable of being short-circuited by, e.g., heroin, is fascinating. It
raises questions of meaning as it relates to emulation vs. simulation of
consciousness.

I'm thinking here, e.g., of an addict "just going through the motions" for
the first year or so of AA meetings. The AA slogans and cliche's are not
meaningful to the newbie, because his/her affective apparatus (pleasure
circuitry) has been disassociated from "normal" means of obtaining
gratification by drugs, alcohol, etc. But at some point, after a period of
simulation of normal behavior, the virtual becomes real, becomes emulation-
it feels right. They are meaningful. At what point does that occur? How?
Why?

A more standard example might be the group of non-Chinese speaking symbol
shufflers passing intellible Chinese notes through the door in Searle's
Chinese Room thought experiment. They are also "just going through the
motions" without it being meaningful to them, but making sense to the
Chinese speakers outside. Searle would say the symbol shufflers are always
only simulating a semantical Chinese-based conversation (thought). An AI
believer might say that the room-as-a-whole was thinking. My sort of semi
pro-Searle  position is: why would the room-as-a-whole want (need, desire,
crave) to "just go through the motions" to emulate thought in the first
place? (Why or how would it want anything?) It seems pointless. Especially
given the fact that the room-as-a-whole has no evolved "pleasure circuitry"
with which to connect its symbol shuffling behavior, and certainly no
reason or needs of its own to remain intact over time, healthy, or
reproduce itself, in toto. I.e., it has not evolved a self defined by
desires, so why suffer the slings and arrows?

Jody