Whatever positive valence stopped when you were injured would need to be as extremely strong a motivator as pain is. So somewhere on the level of “I orgasm continuously unless I get hurt, then it stops!” That’s just shifting the valence scale: I think by default it would fail due to hedonic adaptation — brains naturally reset their expectations. That’s the same basic mechanism as opiate addition, and it’s pretty innate to how the brain (or any complex set of biochemical pathways) works: they’re full of long-term feedback loops evolved to try to keep them working even if one component is out-of-whack, say due to a genetic disease.
This is related to a basic issue in the design of Utilitarian ethical systems. As is hopefully well-known, you need your AI to maximize the amount of positive utility (pleasure) not minimize the amount of negative utility (pain), otherwise it will just euthanize everyone before they can next stub their toe. (Obviously getting this wrong is an x-risk, as with pretty-much everything in basic ethical system design,) So you need to carefully set a suitable zero utility level, and that level needs to be low enough that you actually would want the AI to euthanize you if your future utility level for the rest of you life was going to be below that level. So that means the negative utility region is the sort of agonizing pain level where we put animals down, or allow people to sign paperwork for voluntary medical euthanasia. That’s a pretty darned low valence level, well below what we start calling ‘pain’. On a hospital numerical “how much pain are you in?” scale, it’s probably somewhere around spending the rest of your life at an eight or worse: enough pain that you can’t pay much attention to anything else ever.
So my point is, if you just stubbed your toe and are in pain (say a six on the hospital pain scale), then by that offset scale of valence levels (which is what our AIs have to be using for utility in their ethical systems), your utility is still positive. You’re not ready to be euthanized, and not just because you’ll feel better in a few minutes. So by utility standards, our normal positive/negative valence scale has a lot of hedonic adaption already built into it. So what I think you’re suggesting is to reengineer humans and animals so the valence scale matches the utility scale, moving the zero point down to what was previously −8 (pain level 8), lock it there by removing hedonic adaption, and then truncate the remaining part of the scale below the new 0 (i.e. hospital pain levels 9 and 10). Possibly by having the animal pass out?
I can’t immediately tell you why that wouldn’t work, but I note that it’s not the solution evolution came up with, so it’s clearly not optimal. Hedonic adaption basically alters the situation the animal is motivated by to “try to do better than I expected to”. Which is (as various people have observed of consumerism) basically a treadmill. Presumably evolution did this for efficiency, to minimize the computational complexity of the problem. But if the resulting increase in complexity wasn’t that bad, maybe we wouldn’t need to enlarge the pre-frontal cortex (assuming that’s where this planning occurs in most mammals) that much?
Yeah, it’s hard to say whether this would require restructuring the whole reward center in the brain or if the needed functionality is already there, but just needs to be configured with different “settings” to change the origin and truncate everything below zero.
My intuition is that evolution is blind to how our experiences feel in themselves. I think it’s only the relative differences between experiences that matter for signaling in our reward center. This makes a lot of sense when thinking about color and “qualia inversion” thought experiments, but it’s trickier with valence. My color vision could become inverted tomorrow, and it would hardly affect my daily routine. But not so if my valences were inverted.
Whatever positive valence stopped when you were injured would need to be as extremely strong a motivator as pain is. So somewhere on the level of “I orgasm continuously unless I get hurt, then it stops!” That’s just shifting the valence scale: I think by default it would fail due to hedonic adaptation — brains naturally reset their expectations. That’s the same basic mechanism as opiate addition, and it’s pretty innate to how the brain (or any complex set of biochemical pathways) works: they’re full of long-term feedback loops evolved to try to keep them working even if one component is out-of-whack, say due to a genetic disease.
This is related to a basic issue in the design of Utilitarian ethical systems. As is hopefully well-known, you need your AI to maximize the amount of positive utility (pleasure) not minimize the amount of negative utility (pain), otherwise it will just euthanize everyone before they can next stub their toe. (Obviously getting this wrong is an x-risk, as with pretty-much everything in basic ethical system design,) So you need to carefully set a suitable zero utility level, and that level needs to be low enough that you actually would want the AI to euthanize you if your future utility level for the rest of you life was going to be below that level. So that means the negative utility region is the sort of agonizing pain level where we put animals down, or allow people to sign paperwork for voluntary medical euthanasia. That’s a pretty darned low valence level, well below what we start calling ‘pain’. On a hospital numerical “how much pain are you in?” scale, it’s probably somewhere around spending the rest of your life at an eight or worse: enough pain that you can’t pay much attention to anything else ever.
So my point is, if you just stubbed your toe and are in pain (say a six on the hospital pain scale), then by that offset scale of valence levels (which is what our AIs have to be using for utility in their ethical systems), your utility is still positive. You’re not ready to be euthanized, and not just because you’ll feel better in a few minutes. So by utility standards, our normal positive/negative valence scale has a lot of hedonic adaption already built into it. So what I think you’re suggesting is to reengineer humans and animals so the valence scale matches the utility scale, moving the zero point down to what was previously −8 (pain level 8), lock it there by removing hedonic adaption, and then truncate the remaining part of the scale below the new 0 (i.e. hospital pain levels 9 and 10). Possibly by having the animal pass out?
I can’t immediately tell you why that wouldn’t work, but I note that it’s not the solution evolution came up with, so it’s clearly not optimal. Hedonic adaption basically alters the situation the animal is motivated by to “try to do better than I expected to”. Which is (as various people have observed of consumerism) basically a treadmill. Presumably evolution did this for efficiency, to minimize the computational complexity of the problem. But if the resulting increase in complexity wasn’t that bad, maybe we wouldn’t need to enlarge the pre-frontal cortex (assuming that’s where this planning occurs in most mammals) that much?
Yeah, it’s hard to say whether this would require restructuring the whole reward center in the brain or if the needed functionality is already there, but just needs to be configured with different “settings” to change the origin and truncate everything below zero.
My intuition is that evolution is blind to how our experiences feel in themselves. I think it’s only the relative differences between experiences that matter for signaling in our reward center. This makes a lot of sense when thinking about color and “qualia inversion” thought experiments, but it’s trickier with valence. My color vision could become inverted tomorrow, and it would hardly affect my daily routine. But not so if my valences were inverted.