X-Message-Number: 12726
From: 
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 22:25:21 EST
Subject: feeling & time binding

The confusion about "feeling" stems in part from differing uses of language 
and in part from lack of basic information, but also in some cases just from 
bad habits of thought and failure to pay attention to what other people are 
saying.

I agree with Mike Perry that a robot can have "goals" irrespective of whether 
the program is analog or digital, onboard or off, evolved or designed. But 
one must be extremely careful and explicit in deciding what constitutes a 
goal, or what constitutes goal-seeking behavior-and even more careful in 
relating goals to feelings. 

As an example, someone in a recent post said in effect that pleasure is in 
achieving your goals. Although there may be a correlation, this is clearly 
untrue in many cases. It is notorious that reaching the "goal" sometimes 
brings a let-down or even bitter disappointment. 

More basically, other recent posters have just assumed, in effect, that the 
ACT of doing something is the SAME THING as the FEELING that may accompany 
(or precede or follow) it. Again, we do lots of things that are goal-directed 
in some reasonable sense, but purely unconscious and therefore unfelt in any 
ordinary sense of that term. 

Further, we experience feelings that are unrelated to goals in any ordinary 
sense. Our senses provide us (through some unknown mechanism) with subjective 
experiences that in many cases are entirely unexpected and unrelated to any 
previous structure of values or goals. They are feelings-qualia-all the same. 
The impression of a color might be one such.

Does a robot have a degree of primitive feeling just because it has a 
goal-seeking design? I can think of no reason to assert such a thing, except 
the apparent need some people have to defend the "strong AI" position as an 
article of faith. (The "strong AI" position, as I understand it, is 
epitomized by the claim that a furnace thermostat "thinks" and "feels" at a 
primitive level.) 

Look yet again at the robot that seeks an electric outlet that will allow it 
to recharge itself. Notice that I did NOT say, "in order to recharge itself." 
The robot knows nothing, feels nothing, and has no purpose in any ordinary 
sense. It anticipates nothing, remembers nothing (although a more advanced 
robot might), and in the act of recharging it experiences nothing. To claim 
that the ACT of being recharged is the same as the FEELING of being recharged 
is just blowing smoke, abusing language, and totally ignoring major features 
of our own experience.   

Finally, again consider time-binding. WHEN do you have an experience? Surely 
not at a mathematical instant of time, if time is continuous; not at an atom 
of time, if time is quantized. A single subjective impression apparently must 
stretch over many milliseconds. It probably encompasses a relatively large 
region of the brain, so it is also space-binding. 

Feeling-subjective experience based on qualia-is a distinct physical or 
biological phenomenon. It cannot be dealt with by philosophy or word games; 
it can only be understood and dealt with by experiment and theory in the 
usual manner-despite its unique character and the entanglement with cognition 
and representation. But "philosophy" can help show the way.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12726