🚀 go-pugleaf

"Bob" -- bobd@saracon.com -- wrote on Mon, 20 Dec 1999:
>Arthur T. Murray wrote in message <385d988b.0@news.victoria.tc.ca>...
>>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:
>...>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.
>
>
> I think the point here is that if you assume all bumper switches
> are considered "pain" won't your robot soon learn to grind to a
> halt and sit perfectly still in order to avoid the pain?

ATM quondam Mentifex:
Here I must make perhaps my most theory-intensive post ever.

No robot-maker -- not even the great Steve Waltz -- can get away with
simply declaring that "all bumper switches shall register pain."

We animals experience pain when trauma happens to us in the world.
Even if trauma happens to a bumper switch, a few wires are not going
to re-create that trauma in the CP/R -- control program/robot.

Indeed, o ye neuroscientists and neurotheoreticians, how can we
re-create trauma, as felt in the mind of man or beast, in a robot?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind:  By doing
informational violence to the information grid of the mind, e.g.,
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/mind-fpc.html Mind.4th.

If the sensory wires from the bumper switch feed into a para-grid,
a pain-registering subset of the otherwise purely logical mindgrid,
then, by massively parallel associative tags, the pain grid
submerged within the logic grid can do violence to the mind
by screaming for attention, but not permitting mind-business-as-
usual until the beast or bot deals with the pain.

In other words, you can do violence to an immaterial mind,
but only in an immaterial manner: by the violence of forced
unrelenting attention seizure.

The incomplete theory is at:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/ntj1.html (naive)
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/ntj2.html (simple)
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/ntj3.html (eureka)

> Unless, of course, you can define your robot to be a masochist.
>
> Bob

--
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