Proposal
1) The emotions of pain and pleasure drive humans. An emotion is just a state of mind which is always caused for a reason. Robots need this pain and pleasure to be truly human.
2) Humans are driven by more then their pain and pleasure. They have other goals that can be more important. Also it might not be relevant for robots to experience pain and pleasure to be human.
3) Some articles I am thinking about using. Will get more comprehensive later.
“Pain” MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Koch, C. and F. C. Crick (2001) “The Zombie Within,” Nature (2001) 411, 893-893
Sloman, A. and M. Croucher (1981) “Why Robots Will Have Emotions,” Proceedings of IJCAI, Vancouver.Interview with Sherry Turkle “What Will Love Come to Mean?”
April 24, 2008 at 4:25 am
According to most theories, pain and pleasure are not themselves emotions, but qualities or aspects of emotions. Rather, they are sensations, and not the only sensations. The emotions we looked at in class were more like general dispositions or longer-term states, like anger, joy, fear, depression, etc., which can have both pleasurable and painful aspects to them (like eating ice cream when you are depressed).
Also, it would be much too simplisitic to say taht those are the only motives, as human motive can be very complex and not clearly about pain or pleasure, or necessarily derived from them. A cold shower can be painful in one sense, as an immediate sensation, but can also be motivated by a goal of waking up and being refreshed once it is over. Motives are really about goals, and those can have values other than pain and pleasure.
One way to approach the issue of robots, would be to consider whether there would be any way for a robot to know the difference between the “experience” of pain and pleasure, i.e. qualia, or whether it matters. Consider, for instance, if we had a robot that was trained by positive and negative rewards (functionally equivalent to pain and pleasure). What would happen if we reversed its wires? Would that robot now experience pain and pleasure differently, or would it just respond according to its new wiring? And moreover, what does this mean for emotions, values, and ethics, if there is nothing it is really like for the robot to experience “the good”?