Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

6 perspectives
EDISON: Tinkering! Yes! This is what evolution has done for us! Look at
the amount of noise in the system! The problem of understanding the
brain is a problem of differentiating signal from noise and achieving
robustness and efficiency! Not that the brain is the perfect organ, but it
is one pretty good solution given the constraints!
Ideally, I would really want to see this happen. The neuroscientist
would say “For rats, the fear at the sight of a cat is for the
preservation of its self but the fear response to a conditioned tone is
to prepare for inescapable pain.” And note, different kinds of fear,
different neural substrates, but same word!
RUSSELL: Completely unsatisfactory! How do we define self and pain in
ways that even begin to be meaningful for a machine? For example, a
machine may overheat and have a sensor that measures temperature as
part of a feedback loop to reduce overheating, but a high temperature
reading has nothing to do with pain. In fact, there are interesting neurological
data on people who feel no pain, others who know that they are
feeling pain but do not care about it, as well as people like us. And then
there are those unlucky few who have excruciating pain that is linked to
no adaptive need for survival.
EDISON: I disagree! Overheating is not human pain for sure (but what
about fever?) but certainly “machine” pain! I see no problem in defining
self and pain for a robot.
The self could be (at least in part) machine integrity with all functions
operational within nominal parameters. And pain occurs with input from
sensors that are tuned to detect nonnominal parameter changes (excessive
force exerted by the weight at the end of a robot arm).
RUSSELL: Still unsatisfactory. In psychology, we know there are people with
multiple selves—having one body does not ensure having one self. Conversely,
people who lose a limb and their vision in a terrorist attack still
have a self even though they have lost “machine integrity.” And my earlier
examples were to make clear that “pain” and detection of parameter
changes are quite different. If I have a perfect local anesthetic but smell
my skin burning, then I feel no pain but have sensed a crucial parameter
change. True, we cannot expect all aspects of human pain to be useful for
the analysis of robots, but it does no good to throw away crucial distinctions
we have learned from the studies of humans or other animals.
EDISON: Certainly, there may be multiple selves in a human. There may
be multiple selves in machines as well! Machine integrity can (and
should) change. After an injury such as the one you describe, all parameters
of the robot have to be readjusted, and a new self is formed. Isn’t it
the case in humans as well? I would argue that the selves of a human
before and after losing a limb and losing sight are different! You are not
“yourself” anymore!