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What are objective properties of "being fooled"? Getting convinced [by your brain] that an objectively wrong fact is true. For a example an optical illusion wh

What are objective properties of "being fooled"? Getting convinced [by your brain] that an objectively wrong fact is true. For a example an optical illusion where your brain decides that two objectively identical colors are different colors. And we can find out about this by just asking you about your perception. And you can stop getting fooled by learning about that optical illusion so that in the future some part of your brain might raise doubt about the difference the other part of your brain detects which will in turn change your answer when asked to something expressing less confidence about the two colors. Can you see something? Yes, you can. Can you reflect on your ability to see? Yes. Can you think? Can you reflect on what you are thinking now? Can you reflect on your ability to think? Yes. Yes. Yes. What you are being fooled about? I am too lazy to work through all of them, but I would tend to argue along the following line. The fact that I can see can be verified from the outside - you show me different things and then ask me about them. We do not even need something as complex as you, maybe just an LED changing brightness or color from time to time and a button I am supposed to press every time the visible state of the LED changes. After controlling for things like me sensing the current through the LED, the amount of correlation between the signals to the LED and from the button will be a pretty good indicator of my ability for some basic vision capability. But what when you claim to feel pain? How would you try to convince me that there is more to this than the pain bit getting set and in turn causing and affecting your actions? And you can of course not just appeal to me also being a human and therefore just knowing that there is more to the experience of pain.

red75prime 7y ago
> But what when you claim to feel pain? Decrease of performance on tasks unrelated to damaged area shows that something is going on beyond physical damage and usual stimulus processing. Worker ants, for example, continue to carry on their work even after fatal damage to their gaster. You will not continue to perform mental arithmetic with the same efficiency after your little toe has been struck by a hammer, despite it serves no purpose in doing mental arithmetic (or any purpose at all, for that matter). And if you will do, then you don't feel pain.
- danbruc 7y ago
  That is a good point I did not think about at all, even though it is probably one of the most universal consequences of pain, even - at least to some extend - carrying over to emotional pain. The first question I had - even if not really relevant for the topic - is what the reason might be. My bust guess would be conservation of resources and at least in some situations avoiding further damage. Also in some situations the reaction is at least initially the opposite, to suppress the pain and increase performance to help getting out of the situation. But more relevant to the topic, while generally reduced performance is strongly related to pain, I have no problem imaging a robot exhibiting degraded performance due to damage in somewhat unrelated functions for the purpose of resource conservation or something along that line. It could even be a kind of overreaction - if the damage and its consequences are not well known, then be conservative and reduce performance in general. But while building something like that into a robot makes it behave more like a human, I am pretty sure that this is not what people usually think of when they say that they feel pain, i.e. most people would still say that the robot still does not really feel pain.

red75prime 7y ago

> But what when you claim to feel pain? Decrease of performance on tasks unrelated to damaged area shows that something is going on beyond physical damage and usual stimulus processing. Worker ants, for example, continue to carry on their work even after fatal damage to their gaster. You will not continue to perform mental arithmetic with the same efficiency after your little toe has been struck by a hammer, despite it serves no purpose in doing mental arithmetic (or any purpose at all, for that matter). And if you will do, then you don't feel pain.

danbruc 7y ago
That is a good point I did not think about at all, even though it is probably one of the most universal consequences of pain, even - at least to some extend - carrying over to emotional pain. The first question I had - even if not really relevant for the topic - is what the reason might be. My bust guess would be conservation of resources and at least in some situations avoiding further damage. Also in some situations the reaction is at least initially the opposite, to suppress the pain and increase performance to help getting out of the situation. But more relevant to the topic, while generally reduced performance is strongly related to pain, I have no problem imaging a robot exhibiting degraded performance due to damage in somewhat unrelated functions for the purpose of resource conservation or something along that line. It could even be a kind of overreaction - if the damage and its consequences are not well known, then be conservative and reduce performance in general. But while building something like that into a robot makes it behave more like a human, I am pretty sure that this is not what people usually think of when they say that they feel pain, i.e. most people would still say that the robot still does not really feel pain.