Feeling

04/09/2016

Feeling is the ultimate mystery. We have machines that can compute, sense, move, play back memories. But the ability to experience feeling has not been artificially produced, problem solved by evolution. We can program a machine to make precise movements to follow a path and reach a destination. The path will have to broken down to a sequence of basic steps that the machine can do. The basic steps will then have to be stored in the machines memory and executed in the correct order. We can also make a machine that is just give it's objective as to reach a destination.. The machine can then move at every point of time to reduce the distance to destination. Now it does not have to store the entire path in memory. But, just the algorithm to move towards it's goal. This is done in Artificial Intelligence systems. In a  being that can experience feeling, the algorithm can be further simplified - move, when you move you will feel good if moving towards goal, feel bad when moving away from goal. Now the machine does not have to be hard wired to a predefined algorithm. It can try random things. It will repeat moves that makes it feel good. So, computationally a machine with feeling looks to be the most versatile in coping with unknown environments. So, I see why clusters of molecules that can feel won in the game of natural selection.

 Yet, the mechanism that produces feeling remains a mystery. If that is solved, then machines that are self aware and conscious will follow.

Consider sleep. To me sleep is a state with no content, perhaps my understanding is limited. When we go to sleep, contexts of our waking moments are stored in memory. When we wake up, we recognize the contextual world by way of memory. The self that is awake connects periods remembered and imagination fills the voids. Is that not plausible for the nature of self? Can we not think of X going to sleep as her death. Coming out of sleep, as the birth of a new person Y. But Y is equipped with and no more than the biographical memory of X. Thoughts of Y are framed by the biographical memory of X and all others that similarly preceded X. Now Y experiences a stream of biographical memories of all her predecessors, giving her the illusion of an atomic continuous self.