I like the topics you’re touching on here, and have a few thoughts that might spur you on.
It seems that R in some sense exists only in the ontology. By this I mean that R can only be conceptualized as a thing because we observe changes in our lifeworlds and can have a meta-experience of those changes as being caused by (or as evidence of) some reward R. If we go looking for R in the metaphysical though it seems unlikely we will find it because reward only makes sense in terms of some subject/observer experiencing an experience it identifies as having valence (so a negative or positive reward).
In this sense R has an etiology rooted in P and so it can never be that P does not produce R because R is defined by P. We can view the confusion over this as seeing an approximation of R, R’, and then trying to use it to construct some approxiation of P, P’, that produces R’. We do this because it’s easier to construct R’ than P’ and because for decidable Ps and P’s we can prove P’ produces R’, but for phenomenological consicious processes it seems likely they will be undecidable (cf. integrated information theory), and so we cannot really presume to know much about R’ let alone R because of the difficulty of computing P’ without actually computing P directly.
And in this sense acting as if R does not exist is probably the right choice because neither R’ nor even R allows us to construct a P in the general case such that P generates R.
I like the topics you’re touching on here, and have a few thoughts that might spur you on.
It seems that R in some sense exists only in the ontology. By this I mean that R can only be conceptualized as a thing because we observe changes in our lifeworlds and can have a meta-experience of those changes as being caused by (or as evidence of) some reward R. If we go looking for R in the metaphysical though it seems unlikely we will find it because reward only makes sense in terms of some subject/observer experiencing an experience it identifies as having valence (so a negative or positive reward).
In this sense R has an etiology rooted in P and so it can never be that P does not produce R because R is defined by P. We can view the confusion over this as seeing an approximation of R, R’, and then trying to use it to construct some approxiation of P, P’, that produces R’. We do this because it’s easier to construct R’ than P’ and because for decidable Ps and P’s we can prove P’ produces R’, but for phenomenological consicious processes it seems likely they will be undecidable (cf. integrated information theory), and so we cannot really presume to know much about R’ let alone R because of the difficulty of computing P’ without actually computing P directly.
And in this sense acting as if R does not exist is probably the right choice because neither R’ nor even R allows us to construct a P in the general case such that P generates R.