I find fascinating the idea o sensations and I think there's so much more about them as a stepping stone to intelligence; maybe machines will find something better than sensations, but I doubt it.
Why are sensations necessary?
Why do I need to feel hungry in order to eat?
Certainly an automatic feeding mechanism could exist where I eat without the sensation of hunger, sex without the sensation of lust, kill without anger and so on.
Certainly an automatic feeding mechanism could exist where I eat without the sensation of hunger, sex without the sensation of lust, kill without anger and so on.
Because that's an incredibly brittle solution. Imagine yourself in an environment where you have to track your prey for hours or days at a time in order to hunt. How are you going to accomplish that if your "automatic feeding mechanism" takes over as soon as it decides you need food?
Our sensations and emotions combine to regulate our behaviour, not control it absolutely. The ability to make short-term sacrifices in order to achieve long-term goals is dependent on our ability to ignore or override these sensations.
I think emotions, impulses, short and long term desires, and the like are felt across many forms of life, to various degrees. I base this on my experiences with life directly. Thought definitely advances evolutionary success more than simple unthinking behaviors would - if only for the flexibility afforded. A state machine might flip between billions of possible states in reactions to things, whereas evolved brains flip through their past experiences, emotions (as a representative of external and internal factors), and so on to arrive at some perceived preferencial act/outcome. My bet is the organic model winds up taking fewer resources to achieve more robust results.
I follow the same line of thought as yours - that sensations could be just a hint and you utimately wheigh all your sensations and intentions; BUT just as machines don't have sensations and they can do just fine with planning, so too could animals. "Automatic" doesn't mean right now.
My point is sensations/emotions are an incredible information processing paradigm wich we are largely ignoring when we think of AI.
I think it's not entirely clear what sensations even are and, if you follow this line of reasoning more thoroughly, you arrive at the classic problem of qualia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia).
Why are sensations necessary?
Why do I need to feel hungry in order to eat?
Certainly an automatic feeding mechanism could exist where I eat without the sensation of hunger, sex without the sensation of lust, kill without anger and so on.