Tyler Cowen quotes Richard Dawkins:
Isn’t it plausible that a clever species such as our own might need less pain, precisely because we are capable of intelligently working out what is good for us, and what damaging events we should avoid? Isn’t it plausible that an unintelligent species might need a massive wallop of pain, to drive home a lesson that we can learn with less powerful inducement?
There is an alternative to pain as an incentive mechanism: dispensing with incentives altogether and just programming the organism with instructions to follow. And if the organism doesn’t already have “feelings” as a part of its infrastructure then the instructions are the only alternative. The big question for theories of pain and pleasure as an incentive mechanism is why mother nature as Principal bothers with incentives at all.
Cheap Talk 
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July 7, 2011 at 1:41 am
Andrew
Without pain and pleasure (i.e. punishment and reward), the organism can’t learn to modify its behavior if certain external stimuli or actions by the organism lead to bad (pain) or good (pleasure) consequences. Alas, pain and pleasure are the inevitable result of a flexible nervous system.
July 7, 2011 at 8:41 am
zbicyclistz
I got here from Marginal Revolution, and will repeat my comment here:
Mother nature??? When you start to personalize natural phenomena, fuzzy thinking often follows.
July 7, 2011 at 9:03 am
jeff
Sorta like “the invisible hand”?
July 7, 2011 at 9:07 am
jeff
Andrew, please see my response to Adam Gurri below. The learning doesnt have to be implemented with pain and pleasure. It can be implemented equivalently with cold-hearted instructions.
July 7, 2011 at 9:07 am
Logical Fail
jeff — your comment has a fatal logical fallacy: the invisible hand isn’t a natural phenomenon.
July 7, 2011 at 9:17 am
Andrew
“The learning doesnt have to be implemented with pain and pleasure. It can be implemented equivalently with cold-hearted instructions.”
Let me put forward a functionalist / behavioralist perspective on this. Anything that causes negative reinforcement is pain and anything that causes positive reinforcement is pleasure. That is to say, there are no “cold-hearted instructions” – all reinforcement signals will be experienced as pain/pleasure to the extent that the animal is conscious / sentient / has experiences / qualia / whatever.
July 7, 2011 at 8:29 am
Sentences to ponder — Marginal Revolution
[…] From Jeff: There is an alternative to pain as an incentive mechanism: dispensing with incentives altogether and just programming the organism with instructions to follow. And if the organism doesn’t already have “feelings” as a part of its infrastructure then the instructions are the only alternative. The big question for theories of pain and pleasure as an incentive mechanism is why mother nature as Principal bothers with incentives at all. […]
July 7, 2011 at 8:58 am
Adam Gurri
Instructions only make sense if you’re dealing with an environment that is entirely fixed. If there’s any variation at all, it makes more sense to build in the tools for seeking out desired outcomes for scenarios that haven’t even occurred yet.
July 7, 2011 at 9:05 am
jeff
whatever tools you use they correspond to a function T(e) mapping the environment e into a new set of behaviors. The function T(e) can be implemented with pain and pleasure but it can also just be part of the instructions.
July 7, 2011 at 1:17 pm
k
an implicit assumption here is that one can define “e” with all its constituent elements beforehand, as well as a function that specifies what to do
perhaps this is inefficient compared to a (simpler?) pain/pleasure process?
maybe really ancient organisms had something like a T(e) in their “structure” and as life developed it gave way to pain/pleasure
this would be interesting to test, if it is at all possible.
July 8, 2011 at 6:00 pm
James
@k I think you have missed Jeff’s point. You suggest pleasure and pain as a mode of dealing with undefined events (because we couldn’t define e). In which case the agen responds to the pleasure or pan in the way that the organism is “programmed” to respond to pleasure or pain. However, this still requires that the undefined event be put into the category of pleasure and pain (along with intensities and location). Jeff wonders why it wouldn’t be just as easy for mother nature to program the pleasure/pain response to that particular stimuli without bothering with the pleasure or the pain.
July 7, 2011 at 9:06 am
You're raising the question of free will!?
With all due respect, this is really screwed up.
In the first instance, you now ascribe a person to “mother nature”.
You really think that there’s a “person” out there who has the opportunity to program each living creature before they’re born?
Many have subscribed to this concept. They call the concept God.
But in asking why we’re not simply programmed to do “right” you’ve stumbled into one of the oldest theological conundrums: free will. There’s a gigantic literature on that subject. If you’ve come to a point in life where you’re asking these questions, I recommend this literature to you highly — much of it is quite elegant, and satisfying.
In the meanwhile, let me give you a much more profane answer. We live in a stochastic universe in which it is impossible to program forevery contingency. That’s what rewards and pain are for: to provide “low-level” feedback to the efficacy of “higher level” actions.
While that sounds good, we’re still left with a problem. What about rewards/pleasant sensations that provide destructive (or alternatively stated, counter-productive) feedback? For example, the “high” from drugs.
July 8, 2011 at 6:06 pm
James
I think you should not start from the assumption that Jeff is a moron who thinks that there is a fantastical being called “mother nature” programming every living being in existence. Or that he is unaware of the debate on free will. In fact I suspect that he raises this point in part to bring up the question of why their is the phenomenon of experience when we might think that we could be functionally equivalent without the need for experience.
July 7, 2011 at 10:10 am
On Pain « Modeled Behavior
[…] second from Jeff at Cheap Talk There is an alternative to pain as an incentive mechanism: dispensing with incentives […]
July 7, 2011 at 10:38 am
Foster Boondoggle
Andrew +1
September 25, 2011 at 2:47 am
Florence
I actually found this more enetrtaining than James Joyce.
July 7, 2011 at 1:14 pm
Frank
This is your second recent post to attract complaints about discussing “Nature” as a person. Is it fair to say that you mean the same thing Dawkins does when he’s talking about our “selfish genes”? If so, stating as much might straighten out the discussion.
I agree with Adam (and Jeff also, I think): it’s set up that way so as to save computing power while still allowing the organism to adapt (in a way Nature would like) to unforeseen environments, developing heuristics to deal with “new” situations.
July 7, 2011 at 4:15 pm
jeff
yes about Nature as a reduced form, as in the selfish gene.
and yes i do think that complexity must be the root issue. i am sorta suggesting that we need a good model of that.
thanks frank
July 8, 2011 at 2:47 pm
Tracy W
Possible explanation – in some circumstances it is in the organism’s best interests to ignore the pain and do what needs to be done anyway. While some of these circumstances can be programmed for (eg perceived immediate life-threat can release adrenaline which blocks pain sensing, ) others can’t. Pain discourages ignoring but does not prevent.
July 8, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Anonymous
When making decisions, organisms generally need to weigh several different factors against one another. The pain/pleasure system allows for mental addition and comparison of the goodness/badness of different actions (at least, it seems that way to me introspectively). This means it can support something like expected-value calculations.
For instance, say I’m stalking an antelope through the bushes, trying to be very still. Then I notice that some flies are biting me. Also, my legs are exhausted. Deciding to stay there anyway involves weighing these two pains against the pleasure catching the antelope will bring me (probably a complex of pleasures).
(interestingly, I was having trouble coming up with examples from modern life that so directly involved weighing pleasure against pain – maybe our lives today involve less direct pain and more boredom, loneliness, anxiety, etc.)
July 8, 2011 at 6:17 pm
James
If the human brain and body is just a machine that mechanistically processes inputs and produces outputs then why is there a necessity for experience at all?
I have some sympathy for the view that experience is an epiphenomenon, and not a constituent part of the process of turning inputs into outputs. It just so turns out that the machine that is the brain gave rise to the mind, which feels like it is controlling but really it is just experiencing.
This sympathy is largely due to my complete inability to actually think about how consciousness can come out of matter: but this might just be a prejudice against non-sentient matter, I can think and therefore I’m fundamentally different. However, I think it is more likely due to the cognitive limitations of my monkey brain. I can’t imagine 5 dimensional objects and I can’t understand how consciousness can arise from matter.
July 8, 2011 at 6:18 pm
James
Note, I see the question that I pose as a mere generalization of Jeff’s question.
July 8, 2011 at 7:02 pm
jeff
+\infty james
August 10, 2011 at 11:10 pm
Carlie
Slam dunkin like Shaquille O’Neal, if he wrote inofmratvie articles.
August 14, 2011 at 6:58 am
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