TheWarOnEntropy t1_ite7ohy wrote on October 22, 2022 at 11:40 PM

>The former opinion—that we can have
intelligence that doesn’t feel—is popular among the scientifically
minded, despite its apparent incompatibility with emergentism.

You haven't really established that intelligence without feeling is incompatible with emergentism.

All current known examples of advanced intelligence got here through Darwinian processes and therefore have a high likelihood of having a goal set that prioritises maximising the well-being of the organism containing the intelligence. Most feelings experienced by that intelligent system are directly related to changes in well-being and challenges to that goal set.

A human-created intelligence need not have any self model, nor any interest in the well-being of its own hardware/software configuration, nor any reason to model changes in well-being via a system that we would consider to represent/instantiate feelings. We could give it those things, but it is not an automatic consequence of creating intelligence.

Similarly, I think it would be relatively easy, in theory, to select for organisms that had intelligence but no feelings. The circuitry of intelligence and the circuitry of feelings are not the same.

owlthatissuperb OP t1_itlf2ne wrote on October 24, 2022 at 2:47 PM

Yeah agreed--I kind of slid over this one. To be fair, I did say "apparent" incompatibility :)

> The circuitry of intelligence and the circuitry of feelings are not the same.

I'm pretty sure this is true, but a lot of the scientifically-minded folks I talk to don't seem to agree. They especially don't think you can have feeling without a certain level of intelligence (e.g. a concept of selfhood).

A lot of emergentists I've debated with speak of feeling as something that arises in sufficiently sophisticated information processing systems. I suppose you could treat this as a necessary, but not sufficient condition--but that begs the question, what else is necessary? Any extra requirement seems to break the emergentist approach to consciousness.

I think you're right though--there are other ways of describing emergentism (e.g. a description that isn't based entirely on information processing) which are not in direct conflict with "intelligence that doesn't feel"