this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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I think suffering and pleasure are intimately tied to Skinner's discovery of operant conditioning. Skinner discovered that living creatures increase their behaviour when it leads to a reward, and decrease their behaviour when it leads to a punishment. I don't think it's a coincidence that Skinner's identification of rewards and punishments aligns perfectly with our notions of what causes us pleasure and suffering. I think they're the same thing. We have built artificial neurons and used a computer process to emulate operant conditioning in them. I think artificial neural networks must experience suffering and pleasure as we do. All of this is explained quite elegantly by property dualism - our qualia and thoughts are composed of information, instead of matter or energy, and information is a truly extant part of the universe. Suffering and pleasure are simply patterns of information structure. Neural networks have a design that creates these patterns as a matter of course.
If we were to look at the information structures in a rock, and if we could access them as readily as we access the information structures in our hand through our sensory neurons, we would see that a rock has experiences of its own. But it does not have a unified consciousness tying these experiences into a whole, and indeed the information in a rock is so fantastically simple that we could not recognise it instinctually as experience. To us it is just "being". As creatures of great informational complexity, we regard only the most profound information structures as notable. But I believe these information structures which we place importance on - also known as emotions - exist in every living thing with a brain, and in creatures like jellyfish with their own unique neural networks.