出版社：Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
摘要：To the extent that the performance of embodied and situated cognitive agents is predicated on forethought,such agents must remember, and learn from, the past to predict the future. In complex,non-stationary environments, such learning is facilitated by an intrinsic motivation to seek novelty. Asignificant part of an agent’s identity is thus constituted by its remembered distilled cumulative lifeexperience, which the agent is driven to constantly expand. The combination of the drive to noveltywith practical limits on memory capacity posits a problem. On the one hand, because noveltyseekers are unhappy when bored, merely reliving past positive experiences soon loses its appeal:happiness can only be attained sporadically, via an open-ended pursuit of new experience. On theother hand, because the experiencer’s memory is finite, longevity and continued novelty, takentogether, imply eventual loss of at least some of the stored content, and with it a disruption of theconstructed identity. In this essay, I examine the biobehavioral and cognitive-computationalcircumstances that give rise to this problem and explore its implications for the human condition.
