From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Jul 18 2003 - 16:18:59 MDT
On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 12:10:17AM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
[A lot of stuff we agree on, and:]
>
> > We want to minimize irreversible information loss and unnecessary
> > pain, but there is a lot of useful information loss and pain too.
>
> Sorry, but you are sounding like one of the usual apologists
> for pain and suffering here. There really isn't anything that
> can be computed with pain that cannot be computed without it.
Yes, it does sound like the standard apology.
But evolution and similar time-assymetric complexity increases cannot
occur unless 1) some information is erased to produce selection or 2)
there is always more resources to encode information in. The first case
is the usual kind of evolution, or a M-brain doing error correction of
its knowledge. The second one would be an expanding technosphere never
erasing anything (but remember the error correction part! that is still
information erasure) but growing new memory to encode more and more
variants of the earlier information patterns. But the second approach is
limited by the speed of expansion and converts more and more matter into
static memory; it is rather inefficient compared to a system where
information is erased when it is no longer useful.
Second, pain might perhaps be replaced by non-pleasure. But in many
learning rules there is an inherent difference between non-pleasure and
aversive experience, and it could be that the most efficient learning
rules belong to this category. Then the issue becomes a choice between
pain or lesser learning abilities.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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