Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Evolutionary accounts of feelings, and in particular of negative affect and of pain, assume that creatures that feel and care about the outcomes of their behavior outperform those that do not in terms of their evolutionary fitness. Such accounts, however, can only work if feelings can be shown to contribute to fitness-influencing outcomes. Simply assuming that a learner that feels and cares about outcomes is more strongly motivated than one that does is not enough, if only because motivation can be tied directly to outcomes by incorporating an appropriate reward function, without leaving any apparent role to feelings (as it is done in state-of-the-art engineered systems based on reinforcement learning). Here, we propose a possible mechanism whereby pain contributes to fitness: an actor-critic functional architecture for reinforcement learning, in which pain reflects the costs imposed on actors in their bidding for control, so as to promote honest signaling and ultimately help the system optimize learning and future behavior.
Source: Neuroscience of Consciousness
DOI: 10.1093/nc/niab012
Authors: Oren Kolodny, Roy Moyal, Shimon Edelman
Institution: Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,032
Funder: Israel Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W3171159361