claim

active

claim:pain-and-suffering-are-not-physical-events-at-the-boundary-between-agent-and-world-but-representational-states-created-within-the-mind-as-an-expression-of-a-mismatch-between-regulation-targets-and-the-agent-s-model-of-its-present-state

Pain and suffering are not physical events at the boundary between agent and world but representational states created within the mind as an expression of a mismatch between regulation targets and the agent's model of its present state

Grounds the possibility that artificial conscious agents might be designed not to suffer

Source paper

extracted_from

cimcWhitepaper

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Hypotheses (1)

hypothesis

It may be possible to design artificial conscious agents that need not suffer
supports
Claim that since pain is a representational state, artificial conscious agents might be designed to lack it or control it

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

what constitutes suffering for an artificial entity capable of valence representation?question0.786
Central ethical research question for CIMC's welfare agenda
What degree of concern and care should we exhibit toward the many diverse agents around us, and what criteria do we use to identify sentience, capacity for suffering, and other properties that have moral implications?question0.763
Central question motivating the paper.
"Pain is a core component of adaptive learning...signals that encode internal evaluations that guide the agent through complex environments."quote0.756
Load-bearing motivation for using pain as a learning signal in the computational framework
Stress motivates care; care produces the alleviating structure. Visual and physical sense gates are different access points to the same care manifold.claim0.755
The boundary between agent and environment is not a physical object discovered in the world but a modelling choiceclaim0.751
Established via Zanardi (2002) and the Hamiltonian decomposition argument in §2.1; foundational for the emptiness formalisation
Given our body’s composition as a multi-scale system, it is not necessarily justified to assign consciousness (i.e., ability to suffer) only to one single ‘I’.claim0.747
Argues for distributed consciousness, supporting extension of care.
Consciousness and capacity for suffering may be distributed across multiple scales within composite beings, not limited to single 'I'.claim0.747
If we have built systems capable of experience, how do we ensure that experience is not predominantly constituted by suffering?question0.746
Ethical research priority raised by the thesis applied to deployed AI systems