Machine Intelligence and Human Ethics

[I_am_not_mafia]

First, let’s define “suffer”. Mind “Knowing it when you see it” makes you, not the alleged sufferer, central.

Conscious aversive emotional response to persistent sensory stimuli in an embodied agent that cannot be easily minimised by any actions available to it.

Memories of such a state or learned associations can also be considered suffering if they evoke the same aversive response in the agent.

Working definitions of the terms I am using:

Consciousness used here requires a sense of self as an agent embodied in an environment that it can sense and act within. This can be as simple as the agent sensing the internal state of its body and agent controller and being able to act to alter it.

Emotion is assumed here to be a counter balance to cognition whereby it narrows the range of behaviours or actions available to the agent, probably using some widespread modulatory effect. Whereas cognition on the contrary widens the range of possible behaviours or actions.