The Logic of Pain and the Poverty of Punishment

... and an argument why pain can be reduced near zero post-Singularity

I’ve been thinking a bit about the logic of pain, and why training humans and dogs using punishment works erratically and suboptimally, whereas training cockroaches and wasps using punishment seems to work perfectly well (and roughly symmetrically to training them via positive reward, from what I gather from the insect learning literature).

I wrote a post a few years ago arguing for the desirability and feasibility of the abolition of pain. I remain totally behind this … and perhaps the more analytical thought-train about pain whose outline I sketch here can play a small role in making it happen.

A Conceptual Model of Pain

Starting with a few simple definitions (which I could make more rigorous but that’s not my purpose here)

• Proto-consciousness: the raw (Peircean) Firstness of any process

• Reflexive process: a process that includes an OK-ish (implicit or explicit) model of itself

• Consciousness: The Firstness of a reflexive process

(See my old article on human-like consciousness for more color on these notions.)

We can then make the parallel distinctions:

• Proto-pain: the proto-consciousness associated with the separation of a pattern from a substrate (I.e. a decrease in the degree to which that pattern is indeed a pattern in that substrate)

• Reflexive transition: a transition in the condition of reflexive process, which involves the process richly modeling said transition

• Pain: the consciousness associated with the non-reflexive separation of a reflexive pattern from a substrate (i.e. the transition embodying the separation is not a reflexive one, though the pattern is a reflexive process)

So why might a reflexive process undergo a non-reflexive transition?  Well I’m glad you asked… for instance

• Scarcity: Lack of resources to support reflexiveness in the instance of the transition could be one reason.

• Danger: Cases of extreme perceived danger to an organism will often result in a sudden change of course, thus a sudden cutoff of processes underway.   If a berry that an animal puts into its mouth tastes poisonous, they had better spit it out fast, regardless of how uncomfortable this sudden process may be.

• Heaven: Cases of extraordinary perceived benefit may result in an organism dropping everything else it was doing to pursue, resulting in pain for the abandoned subsystems.

Somewhat symmetrically to this analysis of pain we could say

• Proto-joy (raw pleasure): the consciousness associated with the union of a pattern with a substrate (the increase in the pattern-ness of the pattern in the substrate)

• Joy: the consciousness associated with the reflexive union of a reflexive pattern with a substrate

The paraconsistent solution to the sorites paradox would suggest that, when dealing with faint patterns that are at the border of being recognizable in a substrate, one will have paraconsistent pattern/non-pattern status and thus -- in the absence of thorough reflexiveness -- paraconsistent joy/pain status.   This is the superposed joy/pain of encountering novelty or learning new things in ordinary human states of consciousness.

The subtlety of training via punishment etc. in dogs and humans and so forth (it can have all sorts of strange side effects including depression, vengefulness and etc. etc.) seems related to the fact that for dogs and humans, the goal-set has a high weight to "max pleasure, min pain" rather than just "max proto-pleasure, min proto-pain" as in say cockroaches.

I.e.: We mammals and other complex beasts are not configured to actually literally work toward a raw reward signal, we are configured to take raw reward signals as parameters in our own self-organized intrinsic-reward functions

Given that a "mindful death" is basically a reflexive transition from alive to dead, and a reflexive transition between successive selves is basically the meaning of "continuity of self"  — we could then say that pain is basically "the mindless death of a self-aware pattern-system"

Must Pain Continue Post-Singularity?

One may also ask whether, based on this analysis, pain is actually a necessary aspect of a complex mind’s experience. Clearly we humans and other animals have evolved so that pain is a key aspect of our experience, and interwoven joy and pain is characteristic of our experience. But must post-Singularity minds — AGI minds or uploaded improved humans — also suffer as we do?

The short answer seems to be: No.

I wrote a short story once — called The Last Aphrodisiac — about a future human world where pain had been essentially eliminated. I think it’s realistic in essence.

Proto-pain seems perhaps unavoidable in the presence of dynamics. If a pattern system is evolving over time, then some patterns are going to get more intense and others less so, in this or that substrate, as change occurs.

But full-on pain as characterized here could, it seems, be avoided by adequate resource allocation to reflexive modeling, and avoidance of environments marked by severe dangers or radically incommensurate heaven situations. Post-Singularity minds and environments will be able to massively increase joy and massively decrease pain. I can’t wait! Except, well, I have to wait. But hopefully not too long…

Exactly how folks with brain peculiarities like pain asymbolia avoid the amplification of proto-pain into full-scale pain is not yet understood, but potentially the ideas sketched here can help understand the cognitive aspects. The existence of these disorders, combined with conceptual analysis like the one given here, do suggest that the large role played by significant degrees of pain in current standard human states of consciousness is an unfortunate indirect result of our evolutionary history rather than a necessary property of our experience. Radically reducing pain would change the nature of our humanity — mainly, I believe, for the better — but would by no means render us inhuman. Bring on the post-pain reality I say … (and I say this as someone privileged to have a mostly joyful life and no serious medical conditions etc. …).

But Still, is Pain in Some Sense Necessary?

I’m aware there are folks who argue that pain, like death, is a critical aspect of what makes life meaningful and what makes us human. But … well … this is plumb crazy and our post-Singularity descendants will look back on such views with horror and hilarity.

However — Whether it is in some sense necessary to go through a period of suffering in order to ultimately get to a relatively pain-free condition, is a subtler matter.

There is a sense in which many minds are in pain because they choose to be in pain — because they don’t understand yet how or why to make a different choice. Much of the process of human-consciousness-advancement — of progressing to the self-actualization and self-transcendence levels of the Maslow hierarchy — is about untangling the knots and dropping the assumptions that less advanced minds use to self-generate their suffering.

Thinking about the three core values of Joy, Growth and Choice I articulated in the Cosmist Manifesto, we would say that, in these cases, pain is basically a result of having a relatively high degree of choice in systems at an early stage of growth. Many minds are in pain in large part because they place large value on things that are tangled up with the pain. Once enough growth/advancement of the mind has occurred, values shift and this sort of choice comes to seem less appealing

So a tough and important question is then: If this choice were removed from the palette available to minds at an early stage of growth, what would be lost?  Would a bunch of potential for diverse flourishing growth be lost?  Is the spectrum of early-stage pre-Singularity minds more effective at exploring the space of possible minds, or possible Singularities, if allowed to choose pain?

It’s hard to argue that a dog chooses suffering. But for humans feeling suffering in most ordinary life conditions it’s a fairly clear argument to make. Choosing not to suffer over the end of a love relationship or a monetary loss are, for instance, clearly within the palette of human intelligence. Valuing choice among pre-Singularity minds highly seems to imply accepting the prevalence of pain among such minds.