Pleasure and Pain

10/25/13

Desire to experience pleasure and avoid pain are the elemental drives we have. All other drives can be reduce to this. Synthesis of the feeling and experience is the biggest puzzle to me. If the puzzle is solved, then we can synthesize consciousness in man made objects.
A thought experiment: Suppose a machine is given artificial intelligence and a goal. eg. self driving cars. Suppose it is given a goal of reaching a far away place. Suppose it is not endowed with ready answers to questions sush as - where to fill gas, how to pay for gas, how to fix when a part or process goes wrong, hot to be safe and so on. The car is given sensors to sense the world around it and algorithms to learn things by experimentation, simulations of potential scenarios, memory to save useful factual information. The computer will have to make use of all these resources to move towards it's goal. Will such a car be considered conscious? Feeling good or bad is the primary guiding force.