gls@odyssey.att.COM (g.l.sicherman) (01/20/88)
While I agree with R. M. Wallace's observation that meaningful biological modelling must consider organic requirements, I think his description of these requirements needs refining. He proposes four "basic" requirements: greed, fear, pain, and pleasure. This is a mixed bag. Fear is an emotion, pain and pleasure are responses, and greed, as Wallace uses the term, seems to describe wants that are impelled by needs and may persist beyond them. From our personal experience of pain and pleasure, how can we abstract them? Pain, for instance, tells us that we are hurt and suggests (by its rise or fall) what we can do to help mend the hurt or avoid aggravating it. Like pleasure, it serves us as an internal function. Anything else that serves a being in like wise can be the counterpart of pain in ourselves--or we may choose to call it "pain," to identify it with what we experience. This identification is artificial, but then so is the identification of my pain with yours. But I would not go so far as to call pain a requirement for all beings. A species prolific enough to outbreed attrition and predation can ignore injury. Of course, we might not find such a species interesting enough to model! As to genuine survival requirements, computers already have them. A computer must carry out its instructions faithfully or its users will have it destroyed. That is, the computer's survival depends on the complicated and sometimes undefinable task of satisfying human beings. Take away the users, and the computer ceases to exist as such; it loses its meaning. But this is sidetracking us into cybernetics.... -- Col. G. L. Sicherman ...!ihnp4!odyssey!gls