🚀 go-pugleaf

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