We propose that the most important property of pain is this: When living beings feel pain, their performance degrades.
If this was generally true, then wouldn’t we have expected evolution to optimize it out of us? Sure, performance degrades in many of the things we consciously care about, but that seems more like a trade-off with increased performance at protecting ourself from the immediate situation.
Good observation. I would bet that the trade-off you suggest is indeed the original reason, however, our social structures have evolved around our pain, physical and emotional. One way to put it is that degraded performance is a bug on the individual level but a feature on the social level. It would be difficult to have a friend who doesn’t have insecurities.
Yes—and a critical point here is that if you’re learning only by positive example, you won’t learn as well.
Focus on a reward function is pointing towards what to do, which as previous posts point out, have lots of failure modes, and not as much learning what not to do, which is a critical issue.
If this was generally true, then wouldn’t we have expected evolution to optimize it out of us? Sure, performance degrades in many of the things we consciously care about, but that seems more like a trade-off with increased performance at protecting ourself from the immediate situation.
Good observation. I would bet that the trade-off you suggest is indeed the original reason, however, our social structures have evolved around our pain, physical and emotional. One way to put it is that degraded performance is a bug on the individual level but a feature on the social level. It would be difficult to have a friend who doesn’t have insecurities.
Pain in supposed to be a signal that the animal is in a bad state. Evolution drove animals to avoiding pain, not to feeling no pain.
Yes—and a critical point here is that if you’re learning only by positive example, you won’t learn as well.
Focus on a reward function is pointing towards what to do, which as previous posts point out, have lots of failure modes, and not as much learning what not to do, which is a critical issue.