The Illusion of Internal Joy

Claude Touzet (1)

1 LNIA - Laboratoire de Neurosciences intégratives et adaptatives

J. Schmidhuber proposes a "theory of fun & intrinsic motivation & creativity" that he has developed over the last two decades. This theory is precise enough to allow the programming of artificial agents exhibiting the requested behaviors. Schmidhuber's theory relies on an explicit 'internal joy drive' implemented by an 'information compression indicator'. In this paper, we show that this indicator is not necessary as soon as the 'brain' implementation involves associative memories, i.e., hierarchical cortical maps. The 'compression factor' is replaced by the 'smallest common activation pattern' in our framework, with the advantage of an immediate and plausible neural implementation. Our conclusion states that the 'internal joy' is an illusion. This remind us of the eliminative materialism position which claims that 'free-will' is also an illusion.

Keywords: theory of neural cognition; internal joy drive; motivation; consciousness; cortical maps; unsupervised learning; associative memories

Domains: Cognitive science; Neuroscience; Cognitive science; Computer science; Cognitive science; Psychology

Claude Touzet. The Illusion of Internal Joy. Artificial general intelligence. 4th International Conference, AGI 2011, Mountain View, CA, USA, August 3-6, 2011. Proceedings, 6830, Springer, pp.357-362, 2011, LNAI, ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-22887-2_43⟩. ⟨hal-01338041⟩