The mystery of pain and pleasure

I understand the type of criticism generally, but could you say more about this specific case?

I'm curious if the objection stems from some mismatch of abstraction layers, or just the habit of not speaking about certain topics in certain terms.

Tononi's Phi theory seems somewhat relevant, though it only addresses consciousness and explicitly avoids valence. It does seem like something that could be adapted toward answering questions like this (somehow).

Current models of emotion based on brain architecture and neurochemicals (e.g., EMOCON) are relevant, though ultimately correlative and thus not applicable outside of the human brain.

There's also a great deal of quality literature about specific correlates of pain and happiness- e.g., Building a neuroscience of pleasure and well-being and An fMRI-Based Neurologic Signature of Physical Pain.

In short, I've found plenty of plenty of research around the topic but nothing that's particularly predictive outside of very constrained contexts. No generalized theories. There's some interesting stuff happening around panpsychism (e.g., see these two pieces by Chalmers) but they focus on consciousness, not valence.

My intuition is valence will be encoded within frequency dynamics in a way that will be very amiable to mathematical analysis, but right now I'm seeking clarity about how to speak about the problem.

Edit: I'll add this to the bottom of the post

I had posted the original in 2013, and did a major revision today, before promoting it (leaving the structure of the questions intact, to preserve previous discussion referents).

I hope I haven't committed any faux pas in doing this.

I think you're right that the OP doesn't quite hit the mark, but you got carried away and started almost wilfully misinterpreting. Especially your answers to 4, 5 and 6.

We seem to be talking past each other, to some degree. To clarify, my six questions were chosen to illustrate how much we don't know about the mathematics and science behind psychological valence. I tried to have all of them point at this concept, each from a slightly different angle. Perhaps you interpret them as 'disguised queries' because you thought my intent was other than to seek clarity about how to speak about this general topic of valence, particularly outside the narrow context of the human brain?

I am not trying to "Learn how to manipulate people? Learn how to torture? Become a pleasure delivery professional?" -- my focus is entirely on speaking about psychological valence in clear terms, illustrating that there's much we don't know, and make the case that there are empirical questions about the topic that don't seem to have empirical answers. Also, in very tentative terms, to express the personal belief that a clear theory on exactly what states of affairs are necessary and sufficient for creating pain and pleasure may have some applicability to FAI/AGI topics (e.g., under what conditions can simulated people feel pain?).

I did not find 'necessary and sufficient', or any permutation thereof, in the human's guide to words. Perhaps you'd care to explicate why you didn't care for my usage?

Re: (3) and (4), I'm certain we're not speaking of the same things. I recall Eliezer writing about how creating pleasure isn't as simple as defining a 'pleasure variable' and incrementing it:

int pleasure = 5; pleasure++

I can do that on my macbook pro; it does not create pleasure.

There exist AGIs in design space that have the capacity to (viscerally) feel pleasure, much like humans do. There exist AGIs in design space with a well-defined reward channel. I'm asking: what principles can we use to construct an AGI which feels visceral pleasure when (and only when) its reward channel is activated? If you believe this is trivial, we are not communicating successfully.

I'm afraid we may not share common understandings (or vocabulary) on many important concepts, and I'm picking up a rather aggressive and patronizing vibe, but a genuine thanks for taking the time to type out your comment, and especially the intent in linking that which you linked. I will try not to violate too many community norms here.

Even if it turns out that there is no rigorously definable one-dimensional measure of valence we still need to search for physical correlates to pleasure and pain and find approximate measures to use when resolving moral dilemmas.

Regarding the response to (6), why don't you want to maximise hedons? Having a rigorous definition of what you are trying to maximise needn't mean that what you are trying to maximise is arbitrary to you, and that pleasure is complex (or maybe it is simple but we don't understand it yet) does not imply that we don't want it.

Right, absolutely. These are all things that we don't know, but should.

Are you familiar with David Pearce's Hedonistic Imperative movement? He makes a lot of the same points and arguments, basically outlining that it doesn't seem impossible that we could (and should) radically reduce, and eventually eliminate, suffering via technology.

But the problem is, we don't know what suffering is. So we have to figure that out before we can make much radical progress on this sort of work. I.e., I think a rigorous definition of suffering will be an information-theoretic one-- that it's a certain sort of pattern within conscious systems-- but we know basically nothing about what sort of pattern it is.

(I like the word "valence" instead of pain/pleasure, joy/suffering, eudaimonia, hedonic tone, etc. It's a term from psychology that just means 'the pleasantness or unpleasantness attached to any experience' and seems to involve less baggage than these other terms.)

I hope to have a formal paper on this out by this winter. In the meantime, if you're in the Bay Area, feel free to ping me and I can share some thoughts. You may also enjoy a recent blog post: Effective Altruism, and building a better QALY.

Right- good questions.

First, I think getting a rigorous answer to this 'mystery of pain and pleasure' is contingent upon having a good theory of consciousness. It's really hard to say anything about which patterns in conscious systems lead to pleasure without a clear definition of what our basic ontology is.

Second, I've been calling this "The Important Problem of Consciousness", a riff off Chalmers' distinction between the Easy and Hard problems. I.e., if someone switched my red and green qualia in some fundamental sense it wouldn't matter; if someone switched pain and pleasure, it would.

Third, it seems to me that patternist accounts of consciousness can answer some of your questions, to some degree, just by ruling out consciousness (things can only experience suffering insofar as they're conscious). How to rank each of your examples in severity, however, is... very difficult.

I don't understand your question. Do you actually dispute that pleasure could serve as the foundation for a consistent set of preferences? Or are you picturing "hedons" as much more concrete than I am?

Thank you- that paper is extremely relevant and I appreciate the link.

To reiterate, mostly for my own benefit: As Tegmark says- whether we're talking about a foundation to ethics, or a "final goal", or we simply want to not be confused about what's worth wanting, we need to figure out what makes one brain-state innately preferable to another, and ultimately this boils down to arrangements of particles. But what makes one arrangement of particles superior to another? (This is not to give credence to moral relativism- I do believe this has a crisp answer).