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I find the idea that pain is something profound and not just the reception of a signal strange and based in non-scientific beliefs. Your CPU has a temperature

by donatj 5y ago

I find the idea that pain is something profound and not just the reception of a signal strange and based in non-scientific beliefs. Your CPU has a temperature sensor, does that mean if you hold a flame to it and it can detect its own impending destruction, it deserves protection under the law? Just because something has sensors somehow makes it our contemporary?

tekromancr 5y ago
So according to your philosophy; you wouldn't object to being tortured, after all, it's just signals being registered by a biological computer in your head.
- donatj 5y ago
  Billions of years of evolutionary survival instinct would have my body grasping at all straws, releasing chemicals and likely having negative affects on my physiology and mental state for the rest of my life. Clearly that isn’t anything anyone wants. If I had no memories of the experience, and it had no long term physical affects on me, I would be indifferent, obviously, because I don't know about it. If I were to die from it, I see no advantage to a painless death over a painful death, other than for those around me. I will have no memory of the incident.
  - msravi 5y ago
    >> If I were to die from it, I see no advantage to a painless death over a painful death... Those minutes/hours/days spent experiencing pain do count. You speak as of the after-effects but make it seem that an advantage in living the process itself doesn't count. That's like saying that we're all going to die anyway and there's no advantage to how we live our lives. So why bother with anything?
    - donatj 5y ago
      > living the process itself doesn't count What reason do you have to believe otherwise. What does it count towards? What counts is in missed opportunity. Missed abilities to affect the world around you before you leave. Pain at the very end doesn't alter that much at all.
      - msravi 5y ago
        For all you know, the whole world around you might be a figment of your big and complex imagination, and nothing you do would, in the end, affect it. So what actually matters, (in fact the only thing that matters) is your perception of the world around you (and that includes pain).
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    By this logic that no suffering is actionable in any fashion because all who suffer suffer temporarily. This is trivially truth in a nothing actually matters in a long enough run sort of way but not philosophically meaningful.
- margalabargala 5y ago
  That's not their philosophy, it's the opposite of it. Their point is more in line with something like "the ability to sense pain is not related to sentience and is not special", not "if something can sense pain, it is therefore not sentient and is not special".
  - tekromancr 5y ago
    Uh, actually, it seems from their later posts that that is precisely their philosophy.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Are you suggesting that sentience is required to suffer from pain? Or that suffering isn't a problem unless you are sentient?
rblatz 5y ago
That’s actually an interesting thought experiment, and with modern processors you’ll see them throttle down and adjust trying to preserve themselves.
colordrops 5y ago
If your criteria is sentience and not ability to feel pain, then what are your thoughts on a newborn baby? Or someone with severe brain trauma? Is euthenasia ok for those born with the brain capacity of a cow or lobster? Or are you just being speciesist?
- donatj 5y ago
  I didn’t propose criteria, and certainly not those criteria. I don’t see sentience as anything more than highly evolved self preservation software. It’s not magic.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  I think that pain is different from suffering. To suffer is to hold an abstract mental model of a world that could be and a world that is and experience discomfort at what is rather than merely processing a pain signal and responding with a reflex action. To suffer requires a modestly complex brain while having a reflexive response to a signal doesn't require any sort of central nervous system at all. For context some approximations insofar as number of neurons for a rough and imperfect estimate of brain complexity - Lobster: 100,000 - Jumping Spider: 100,000 - Ant: 250,000 - honey bee or roach: nearly a million - cats, dogs, and octopi: hundreds of millions - Human: about 86 billion 1 1 https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/brain-metrics/are_there_really_as_many/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/brain-metrics/are_there... The apparent divergence of the first 2 entries whereas ants and roaches seem very stupid singly makes one wonder how many neurons exactly are needed to have a complex internal life. One would be hard pressed to imagine the single ant, roach, or bee suffers but the relatively complex behavior of the jumping spider makes it easier to imagine it suffering. It is however easy to see there is little similarity between lobster and octopus when the latter has 500 x as many brain cells.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    I was speaking against reductionism but while we are there, as your examples alude to, counting neurons to determine sentience is like counting GHz to determine computational power.

by donatj 5y ago

tekromancr 5y ago

So according to your philosophy; you wouldn't object to being tortured, after all, it's just signals being registered by a biological computer in your head.

donatj 5y ago
Billions of years of evolutionary survival instinct would have my body grasping at all straws, releasing chemicals and likely having negative affects on my physiology and mental state for the rest of my life. Clearly that isn’t anything anyone wants. If I had no memories of the experience, and it had no long term physical affects on me, I would be indifferent, obviously, because I don't know about it. If I were to die from it, I see no advantage to a painless death over a painful death, other than for those around me. I will have no memory of the incident.
- msravi 5y ago
  >> If I were to die from it, I see no advantage to a painless death over a painful death... Those minutes/hours/days spent experiencing pain do count. You speak as of the after-effects but make it seem that an advantage in living the process itself doesn't count. That's like saying that we're all going to die anyway and there's no advantage to how we live our lives. So why bother with anything?
  - donatj 5y ago
    > living the process itself doesn't count What reason do you have to believe otherwise. What does it count towards? What counts is in missed opportunity. Missed abilities to affect the world around you before you leave. Pain at the very end doesn't alter that much at all.
    - msravi 5y ago
      For all you know, the whole world around you might be a figment of your big and complex imagination, and nothing you do would, in the end, affect it. So what actually matters, (in fact the only thing that matters) is your perception of the world around you (and that includes pain).
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  By this logic that no suffering is actionable in any fashion because all who suffer suffer temporarily. This is trivially truth in a nothing actually matters in a long enough run sort of way but not philosophically meaningful.
margalabargala 5y ago
That's not their philosophy, it's the opposite of it. Their point is more in line with something like "the ability to sense pain is not related to sentience and is not special", not "if something can sense pain, it is therefore not sentient and is not special".
- tekromancr 5y ago
  Uh, actually, it seems from their later posts that that is precisely their philosophy.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Are you suggesting that sentience is required to suffer from pain? Or that suffering isn't a problem unless you are sentient?

rblatz 5y ago

That’s actually an interesting thought experiment, and with modern processors you’ll see them throttle down and adjust trying to preserve themselves.

colordrops 5y ago

If your criteria is sentience and not ability to feel pain, then what are your thoughts on a newborn baby? Or someone with severe brain trauma? Is euthenasia ok for those born with the brain capacity of a cow or lobster? Or are you just being speciesist?

donatj 5y ago
I didn’t propose criteria, and certainly not those criteria. I don’t see sentience as anything more than highly evolved self preservation software. It’s not magic.
michaelmrose 5y ago
I think that pain is different from suffering. To suffer is to hold an abstract mental model of a world that could be and a world that is and experience discomfort at what is rather than merely processing a pain signal and responding with a reflex action. To suffer requires a modestly complex brain while having a reflexive response to a signal doesn't require any sort of central nervous system at all. For context some approximations insofar as number of neurons for a rough and imperfect estimate of brain complexity - Lobster: 100,000 - Jumping Spider: 100,000 - Ant: 250,000 - honey bee or roach: nearly a million - cats, dogs, and octopi: hundreds of millions - Human: about 86 billion 1 1 https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/brain-metrics/are_there_really_as_many/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/brain-metrics/are_there... The apparent divergence of the first 2 entries whereas ants and roaches seem very stupid singly makes one wonder how many neurons exactly are needed to have a complex internal life. One would be hard pressed to imagine the single ant, roach, or bee suffers but the relatively complex behavior of the jumping spider makes it easier to imagine it suffering. It is however easy to see there is little similarity between lobster and octopus when the latter has 500 x as many brain cells.
- colordrops 5y ago
  I was speaking against reductionism but while we are there, as your examples alude to, counting neurons to determine sentience is like counting GHz to determine computational power.