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Thought experiment: If there was a human that suffered an injury that left them unable to feel pleasure, or pain - some form of nerve damage, perhaps - I would

by feral 16y ago

Thought experiment: If there was a human that suffered an injury that left them unable to feel pleasure, or pain - some form of nerve damage, perhaps - I wouldn't think any less of that human's mental function. I wouldn't think they had lost any humanity, or argue they should be accorded any less human rights. I think that they'd still have hopes, and fears, would be much more important than their ability to feel pain or pleasure. Given this, how important is the ability to feel pleasure, or pain, really? I think you are focusing on the wrong thing, and disagree with this way of assessing humanity.

tgflynn 16y ago
I used pleasure and pain as examples of subjective experiences. Hopes and fears are other examples. If you believe that humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals and other physical phenomena (ie you're not a reductionist) then I'm surprised it's my side of the argument you're disagreeing with.
- sgrove 16y ago
  I disagree, but I do find it a very fascinating subject area. I would highly recommend reading through Valentino's "Vehicles"(http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valentino-Braitenberg/dp/0262521121 http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valent...). It's incredibly short, thought provoking, and somewhat humorous to boot. He goes over building very simple machines that appear to have emotions, hopes, plans, etc., and goes over they exact topic you're talking about.
- feral 16y ago
  It is hard to have this conversation on hacker news. The format works well for general discussion, but this is a particularly subtle topic - its hard to make conversational progress before several essays back and forth to pin down a set of agreed terminology. This is something I'm struggling with here. I don't want to get bogged down in a debate on good semantics, but without clarification its hard to have any meaningful discussion. Sometimes you need to spend some time discussing semantics, in order to move past them. I need a word to describe the sort of higher level awareness that we humans have in and of ourselves, that makes it not ok to 'switch off' another human. Normally, I'd say sapience, after 'wisdom' - but you are clearly using that in a different meaning, so I'll go with 'personhood', without limiting that necessarily to homo sapiens. While we still know relatively little about personhood, I would be happier to use hopes and fears as a defining criteria, over pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are very low-level sensory phenomena. Very simple life can feel pleasure and pain - pain particularly; to my mind, they are neither necessary, nor sufficient, criteria for personhood. Hopes are fears are, I think, the product of a much higher level reasoning process. For a start, they are not merely short term and reactive; they pre-suppose some model of the future. Further, I think they generally necessitate a model of self, and an awareness of self in that future. That makes them very different criteria, in general. If you were arguing that 'subjective experiences' were necessary for personhood, it'd have been better to state that explicitly. The post you were responding, when you mentioned pleasure and pain, said that 'humanity was fundamentally a function of our minds'. I agree with that post. If you require pleasure and pain - which clearly require some level of situatedness in a sensory apparatus which can communicate these sensations - for your definition of personhood, then I can see how you would argue against a machine 'simulating' personhood. However, with hopes and fears, no such situatedness is required. I see no reason why a machine couldn't potentially simulate/execute a program/consciousness that had hopes and fears, even without a body, or conventional sensory input. I see no reason why a simulated/executed (it is very important to realise that these two verbs have the same effective result in this context) program couldn't have subjective experience. >If you believe that humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals and other physical phenomena (ie you're not a reductionist) then I'm surprised it's my side of the argument you're disagreeing with. So many difficult (loaded?) words there: 'amounts', 'merely', 'reductionist', 'side'. I believe humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals, in the same way I believe the mona lisa 'amounts' to more than 'merely' a collection of oils on a poplar. Join the technological revolution: its not the atoms that are important - its the bits. The pattern things are in is much more important than the things themselves. A quicksort algorithm running on vaccum tubes, or transistors, or water pipes, or CPU simulated in minecraft, or rocks in an XKCD desert, is still a quicksort algorithm. Its not 'merely' a collection of electrical signals. Its become more than that, because the electrical signals are arranged in a certain pattern. But its still fully explainable in terms of electrical signals. >(ie you're not a reductionist) I do believe our minds are defined and explained (in theory) by physical phenomena, like everything else in the universe. I'm not a supernaturalist. How about you?
  - tgflynn 16y ago
    I'll try to explain my point of view on this to the extent that I myself understand it. First to me what you call "personhood", which you define as that which makes it wrong to kill (or I would assume as well cause suffering to) another human being, is based on the capacity of the being in question to experience suffering. I think that humans have a much higher capacity for suffering than most (if not all) other terrestrial animals due to their more complex nervous systems. Part of this increased capacity may be due to increased cognitive capacity per se (for example I will suffer if I think my life is in danger whereas an animal may not be able to conceptualize that danger and hence will not experience suffering in the same situation). Humans clearly have greater sapience than animals and this can lead to greater suffering. It is also possible that humans have a greater intrinsic capacity for subjective experience independently of any cognitive process. If this is true I would say that humans have greater sentience than animals. I don't know if it's true because I lack a conceptual model for understanding the nature of sentience and what physical processes may give rise to it. In the absence of such a model, I can only guess and my guess is that sentience somehow arises from the interaction between information and matter. I think it's likely that deterministic computers will achieve human level cognitive abilities in the relatively near future. I know of no cognitive function that humans perform which I can't imagine being executed on a sufficiently powerful computer. I would consider such machines to be sapient but as far as I can see they would have no sentience whatsoever (not even as much as lower animals). As for your last question: It seems to me that human beings are constantly falling into the same intellectual trap. That trap consists of believing that their scientific theories are not only accurate but also complete. At the end of the 19th century physicists believed they knew essentially everything there was to know about physics (except for a couple of pesky anomalies that could easily be swept under the rug). Ten years ago it was common wisdom that the majority of human DNA was junk which served no purpose. Only now are we beginning to understand the role that "junk" plays in regulating gene expression. I think that current scientific theories are not capable of explaining the nature of sentience or of predicting which physical systems will be sentient and which not. I'm not sure if that makes me a supernaturalist or not.
    - feral 16y ago

by feral 16y ago

tgflynn 16y ago

I used pleasure and pain as examples of subjective experiences. Hopes and fears are other examples. If you believe that humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals and other physical phenomena (ie you're not a reductionist) then I'm surprised it's my side of the argument you're disagreeing with.

sgrove 16y ago
I disagree, but I do find it a very fascinating subject area. I would highly recommend reading through Valentino's "Vehicles"(http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valentino-Braitenberg/dp/0262521121 http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valent...). It's incredibly short, thought provoking, and somewhat humorous to boot. He goes over building very simple machines that appear to have emotions, hopes, plans, etc., and goes over they exact topic you're talking about.
feral 16y ago
It is hard to have this conversation on hacker news. The format works well for general discussion, but this is a particularly subtle topic - its hard to make conversational progress before several essays back and forth to pin down a set of agreed terminology. This is something I'm struggling with here. I don't want to get bogged down in a debate on good semantics, but without clarification its hard to have any meaningful discussion. Sometimes you need to spend some time discussing semantics, in order to move past them. I need a word to describe the sort of higher level awareness that we humans have in and of ourselves, that makes it not ok to 'switch off' another human. Normally, I'd say sapience, after 'wisdom' - but you are clearly using that in a different meaning, so I'll go with 'personhood', without limiting that necessarily to homo sapiens. While we still know relatively little about personhood, I would be happier to use hopes and fears as a defining criteria, over pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are very low-level sensory phenomena. Very simple life can feel pleasure and pain - pain particularly; to my mind, they are neither necessary, nor sufficient, criteria for personhood. Hopes are fears are, I think, the product of a much higher level reasoning process. For a start, they are not merely short term and reactive; they pre-suppose some model of the future. Further, I think they generally necessitate a model of self, and an awareness of self in that future. That makes them very different criteria, in general. If you were arguing that 'subjective experiences' were necessary for personhood, it'd have been better to state that explicitly. The post you were responding, when you mentioned pleasure and pain, said that 'humanity was fundamentally a function of our minds'. I agree with that post. If you require pleasure and pain - which clearly require some level of situatedness in a sensory apparatus which can communicate these sensations - for your definition of personhood, then I can see how you would argue against a machine 'simulating' personhood. However, with hopes and fears, no such situatedness is required. I see no reason why a machine couldn't potentially simulate/execute a program/consciousness that had hopes and fears, even without a body, or conventional sensory input. I see no reason why a simulated/executed (it is very important to realise that these two verbs have the same effective result in this context) program couldn't have subjective experience. >If you believe that humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals and other physical phenomena (ie you're not a reductionist) then I'm surprised it's my side of the argument you're disagreeing with. So many difficult (loaded?) words there: 'amounts', 'merely', 'reductionist', 'side'. I believe humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals, in the same way I believe the mona lisa 'amounts' to more than 'merely' a collection of oils on a poplar. Join the technological revolution: its not the atoms that are important - its the bits. The pattern things are in is much more important than the things themselves. A quicksort algorithm running on vaccum tubes, or transistors, or water pipes, or CPU simulated in minecraft, or rocks in an XKCD desert, is still a quicksort algorithm. Its not 'merely' a collection of electrical signals. Its become more than that, because the electrical signals are arranged in a certain pattern. But its still fully explainable in terms of electrical signals. >(ie you're not a reductionist) I do believe our minds are defined and explained (in theory) by physical phenomena, like everything else in the universe. I'm not a supernaturalist. How about you?
- tgflynn 16y ago
  I'll try to explain my point of view on this to the extent that I myself understand it. First to me what you call "personhood", which you define as that which makes it wrong to kill (or I would assume as well cause suffering to) another human being, is based on the capacity of the being in question to experience suffering. I think that humans have a much higher capacity for suffering than most (if not all) other terrestrial animals due to their more complex nervous systems. Part of this increased capacity may be due to increased cognitive capacity per se (for example I will suffer if I think my life is in danger whereas an animal may not be able to conceptualize that danger and hence will not experience suffering in the same situation). Humans clearly have greater sapience than animals and this can lead to greater suffering. It is also possible that humans have a greater intrinsic capacity for subjective experience independently of any cognitive process. If this is true I would say that humans have greater sentience than animals. I don't know if it's true because I lack a conceptual model for understanding the nature of sentience and what physical processes may give rise to it. In the absence of such a model, I can only guess and my guess is that sentience somehow arises from the interaction between information and matter. I think it's likely that deterministic computers will achieve human level cognitive abilities in the relatively near future. I know of no cognitive function that humans perform which I can't imagine being executed on a sufficiently powerful computer. I would consider such machines to be sapient but as far as I can see they would have no sentience whatsoever (not even as much as lower animals). As for your last question: It seems to me that human beings are constantly falling into the same intellectual trap. That trap consists of believing that their scientific theories are not only accurate but also complete. At the end of the 19th century physicists believed they knew essentially everything there was to know about physics (except for a couple of pesky anomalies that could easily be swept under the rug). Ten years ago it was common wisdom that the majority of human DNA was junk which served no purpose. Only now are we beginning to understand the role that "junk" plays in regulating gene expression. I think that current scientific theories are not capable of explaining the nature of sentience or of predicting which physical systems will be sentient and which not. I'm not sure if that makes me a supernaturalist or not.
  - feral 16y ago