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I think of it more as a (negative) reward signal in RL. When a human touches a hot stove, there's a sharp drop in dopamine (our reward signal). Neural circuits adjust their synapses to betterpredict future (negative) reward, and subsequently they take actions that don't do it. There's a bit of a sleight of hand here--do we actually know our experience of pain is equivalent to a negative reward signal--but it's not too wild a hypothetical extrapolation.
How do atoms fit in? Well, it's a stretch, but one way to approach it is to treat atoms as trying to maximize a reward of negative energy, on a hard coded (unlearned) policy corresponding to the laws of physics. E.g. burning some methane helps them get to a lower energy state, maximizing their own reward. Or, to cause "physical" pain, you could put all the gas in a box on one side of the box: nature abhors a vacuum.
Neither psychologist nor RL people I talked with seem to believe that this is literally how the human mind works, because this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring. Yes there is a vaguely RL-like layer of our brain, but RL itself does not conscious experience make. Unless of course you have some very heavy philosophical machinery to convince us otherwise...
That's the sleight of hand I mentioned: because qualia are so mysterious, it's a leap to assume that RL algorithms that maximize reward correspond to any particular qualia.
On the other hand, suffering is conditioned on some physical substrate, and something like "what human brains do" seems a more plausible candidate for how qualia arise than anything else I've seen. People with dopamine issues (e.g. severe Parkinson's, drug withdrawal) often report anhedonia.
That heavy philosophical machinery is the trillion dollar question that is beyond me (or anyone else that I'm aware of).
Maybe they are? I don't believe this, but I don't see how we can simply dismiss it out of hand from an argument of sheer disbelief (which seems just as premature to me as saying it's a fact). Agnosticism seems to be the only approach here.
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