{"id":1712,"date":"2022-04-08T12:31:15","date_gmt":"2022-04-08T11:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=1712"},"modified":"2022-04-08T12:31:15","modified_gmt":"2022-04-08T11:31:15","slug":"learning-and-feeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2022\/04\/08\/learning-and-feeling\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning and Feeling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Re: the \u00a0NOVA\/PBS video on slime mold.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slime molds are certainly interesting, both as the origin of multicellular life and the origin of cellular communication and learning. (When I lived at the Oppenheims\u2019 on Princeton Avenue in the 1970\u2019s they often invited John Tyler Bonner<\/a> to their luncheons, but I don\u2019t remember any substantive discussion of his work during those luncheons.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The NOVA video was interesting, despite the OOH-AAH style of presentation (and especially the narrators\u2019 prosody and intonation, which to me was really irritating and intrusive), but the content was interesting \u2013 once it was de-weaseled from its empty buzzwords, like \u201cintelligence,\u201d which means nothing (really nothing) other than the capacity (which is shared by biological organisms and artificial devices as well as running computational algorithms) to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trouble with weasel-words like \u201cintelligence,\u201d is that they are vessels inviting the projection of a sentient \u201cmind\u201d where there isn\u2019t, or need not be, a mind. The capacity to learn is a necessary but certainly not a sufficient condition for sentience, which is the capacity to feel<\/em> (which is what it means to have a \u201cmind\u201d). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sensing and responding are not sentience either; they are just mechanical or biomechanical causality: Transduction is just converting one form of energy into another. Both nonliving (mostly human synthesized) devices and living organisms can learn. Learning (usually) requires sensors, transducers, and effectors; it can also be simulated computationally (i.e., symbolically, algorithmically). But \u201csensors,\u201d whether synthetic or biological, do not require or imply sentience (the capacity to feel). They only require the capacity to detect and do<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what sensors and effectors can (among other things) do<\/em>, is to learn<\/em>, which is to change in what they do, and can do. \u201cDoing\u201d is already a bit weaselly, implying some kind of \u201cagency\u201d or agenthood, which again invites projecting a \u201cmind\u201d onto it (\u201cdoing it because you feel like doing it\u201d). But having a mind (another weasel-word, really) and having (or rather being able to be in) \u201cmental states\u201d really just means being able to feel<\/em> (to have felt states, sentience).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And being able to learn, as slime molds can, definitely does not require or entail being able to feel. It doesn\u2019t even require being a biological organism. Learning can (or will eventually be shown to be able to) be done by artificial devices, and to be simulable computationally, by algorithms. Doing<\/em> can be simulated purely computationally (symbolically, algorithmically) but feeling<\/em> cannot be, or, otherwise put, simulated feeling is not really feeling any more than simulated moving or simulated wetness is really moving or wet (even if it\u2019s piped into a Virtual Reality device to fool our senses). It\u2019s just code that is interpretable as feeling, or moving or wet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I digress. The point is that learning capacity, artificial or biological, does not require or entail feeling capacity. And what is at issue in the question of whether an organism is sentient is not (just) whether it can learn, but whether it can feel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slime mold — amoebas that can transition between two states, single cells and multicellular  — is extremely interesting and informative about the evolutionary transition to multicellular organisms, cellular communication, and learning capacity. But there is no basis for concluding, from what they can do, that slime molds can feel<\/em>, no matter how easy it is to interpret the learning as mind-like (\u201csmart\u201d). They, and their synthetic counterparts, have (or are) an organ for growing, moving, and learning, but not for feeling. The function of feeling is hard enough to explain in sentient organisms with brains, from worms and insects upward, but it becomes arbitrary when we project feeling onto every system that can learn, including root tips and amoebas (or amoeba aggregations).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I try not to eat any organism that we (think we) know can feel — but not any organism (or device) that can learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Re: the \u00a0NOVA\/PBS video on slime mold.\u00a0 Slime molds are certainly interesting, both as the origin of multicellular life and the origin of cellular communication and learning. (When I lived at the Oppenheims\u2019 on Princeton Avenue in the 1970\u2019s they often invited John Tyler Bonner to their luncheons, but I don\u2019t remember any substantive discussion of his … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Learning and Feeling”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[6,2,3,119],"tags":[130,36,132,131],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1713,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712\/revisions\/1713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}