Hypothesis: one type of valenced experience—specifically valenced experience as opposed to conscious experience in general, which I make no claims about here—is likely to only exist in organisms with the capability for planning. We can analogize with deep reinforcement learning: seems like humans have a rapid action-taking system 1 which is kind of like Q-learning, it just selects actions; we also have a slower planning-based system 2, which is more like value learning. There’s no reason to assign valence to a particular mental state if you’re not able to imagine your own future mental states. There is of course moment-to-moment reward-like information coming in, but that seems to be a distinct thing to me.
Hypothesis: one type of valenced experience—specifically valenced experience as opposed to conscious experience in general, which I make no claims about here—is likely to only exist in organisms with the capability for planning. We can analogize with deep reinforcement learning: seems like humans have a rapid action-taking system 1 which is kind of like Q-learning, it just selects actions; we also have a slower planning-based system 2, which is more like value learning. There’s no reason to assign valence to a particular mental state if you’re not able to imagine your own future mental states. There is of course moment-to-moment reward-like information coming in, but that seems to be a distinct thing to me.