🚀 go-pugleaf

I would say, pain and pleasure (physical sense, like an orgasm) are no
different than colors and sounds. They are just interpreted inputs,
not emotions.  They could be linked to emotions later on though . . .
smells could make you remember a loved one . ..

On 20 Dec 99 02:46:35 GMT, uj797@victoria.tc.ca (Arthur T. Murray)
wrote:

>Gordon McComb, gmccomb@gmccomb.com, wrote on Sun, 19 Dec 1999:
>
>> JimT9999 wrote:
>
>>> Pain & Fear
>>> Keep in mind that all bumper switches are now considered "painful."
>
>> <rest snipped>
>GMcC:   
>> How do you reconcile these "emotions" in a robot designed
>> specifically for making physical contact?  If a robot is
>> made to sense its environment via tactile feedback, how are
>> these senses then considered painful?
>
>ATM:
>http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/emotion.html is a sub-
>page on how eventually to code emotion into Mind.Forth Robot AI.
>
>A sensor for tactile feedback will only register *pain* if signals
>from the sensor enter the mindgrid and activate special grids that
>are *interpreted* as pain:  burning, or impact, or freezing, etc.
>
>It is theorized that physical pain and pleasure are not emotions,
>but are instead *translations* of specially dedicated neural signals
>into the *qualia* -- the phenomena -- of physical pain and pleasure.
>
>Personally I speculate that pain is evinced in a mindgrid when
>the interleaved neurons of the "quale" of pain fire at a faster
>frequency than the rest of the mindgrid, literally forcing the
>consciousness to be unshakeably aware of the cause of the pain.
>
>Pleasure, by the same token, is a slowing down of the rate of
>firing of the pain-pleasure intergrid, so that the rest of the
>mind diverts its attention from everyday concerns and notices
>-- because pain and pleasure are functions of *attention* --
>that a pleasurable sensation is saying, "Whoa! Savor the moment."
>Thus to slow reality down is pleasurable, but to speed it up is
>painful.  Most important here is the *translation* of signals.
>Why should a faster signal be painful?  Because we don't want to
>pay attention to a burn wound, or a cut, but we are forced to.
>Our consciousness tries to escape but cannot, so it feels pain.
>When consciousness indulges in a slow signal, it feels pleasure.
>
>GMcC:
>>                                        It seems to me that such
>> emotion is then dependent on the design of the robot.  But isn't
>> one of the chief values of emotions is that they are, to a great
>> extent, consistent (therefore they can be given understandable
>> terms we can all use so we know what we're talking about)?
>> For humans, touch can bring both pleasure and pain, not only
>> by degree, but by association with what was touched.
>
>> I understand there has been quite a bit of study and discussion
>> regarding a "light seeking robot" exhibiting either love, or
>> aggression, or maybe both.  Personally, I think it's all hokum.
>> I have to wonder if people like Braitenberg really intended their
>> works to be perceived as a Disneyesque literal interpretation of
>> human-like emotions applied to machines, rather than an attempt to
>> discover more about *human emotions* through the use of fictional
>> machine examples.
>  
>-- Gordon