[totalZero]

We are all machines. The idea that one type of machine or another cannot feel "pain" is simply a rationalization for human behavior that causes harm to other organisms, like hunting and fishing and killing wasps.

Pain is a sensation that drives an animal to quickly react to injurious situations. Consider a robot made with Brooks's subsumption architecture [1]. The basal level of behavior drive of the robot is its self-preservation. That level of behavior drive can halt all the higher-order behaviors to monopolize processing and locomotion. Imagine that this behavior drive is triggered when the ambient temperature approaches a level that can damage the battery, and attempts to move the robot to the lowest-temperature zone available. That is functionally no different than what happens to a person in a house fire.

All we have done with the word "pain" is to set up an arbitrary delineation based on the hormonal/neuronal response that links our sensory apparatus to our behavioral drive.

[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/representation.pd...

[ben_w]

Careful, or you might use a definition of pain too broad to be useful.

Plants, single-celled organisms, thermostats, and anti-lock braking systems meet your use of the word.

Almost all of us know what it means to be in pain. It’s the hard to put into words subjective experience of suffering that is worth making ethical decisions about, not the autonomous reflex that doesn’t come with conciousness-is-a-poor-word-but-I-lack-a-better-alternative.

[totalZero]

I disagree with the presented interpretation of pain as a concept. That's not the same as lacking an alternative word. Be careful not to make this discussion a semantic one.

I have no reason to believe that what a Roomba feels when it approaches a descending flight of stairs is any different in practice from what I feel when I approach a precipice. Our pathways are totally different, but ultimately there is a communication from our sensory organs to our processing architecture, where an ingrained drive toward self-preservation momentarily overrides other needs. In my case, I could call it "fear," or "anxiety," or "angst" if I'm feeling philosophical. In the Roomba's case, I have no knowledge of its subjective experience, but that doesn't mean that I should draw up a new word to construct a delineation between the Roomba and myself. We are both machines, and our response to the same situation is largely the same.

How useful is it to describe pain as a "subjective experience of suffering" when neither subjective experience, nor the feeling of suffering, is directly observable? (Also, I don't agree that pain and suffering are interchangeable concepts.)

A truly useful definition of "pain" would hold water without reliance on an anthropocentric tautology. I know what it feels like to slice my hand open while cutting tomatoes. That doesn't give me any power to understand what it feels like for an octopus to lose one of its arms, or for a tree to have its branches trimmed.

What's funny is that my way of considering "pain" is not even the most divergent from yours. Many Andean cultures believed that stones, rivers, and mountains have energy, thoughts, feelings, and souls. These ideas remain in the culture to this day.

What spurs an ABS to pulse the brake line pressure when the wheels begin to slip as the driver mashes on the brakes to avoid a collision? What spurs an ant to run away when it steps onto a hot radiator? What spurs a human to stop walking on a broken ankle? All of this is programmed in one way or another, all of it is self-preservation.

[ben_w]

All of our emotions are indeed programmed. Yet the humour axis does not feel like the pain axis, neither feels like the sexual arousal axis, and none of those feels like the fear axis — at least not to me.

Also, my knee-jerk reflex doesn’t feel like much at all.

If I read you correctly, you and I agree that we can’t tell if a Roomba’s avoidance algorithm more like anxiety, or more like a reflex, or more like lust. In the absence of evidence, I will assume that all its experiences are like a reflex, that there isn’t anything “that it’s like to be” a Roomba. I am aware I may be wrong.

While we indeed cannot directly observe subjective experiences, I sincerely hope that we figure out a good way to resolve this soon:

If we mistakenly assume AI cannot have qualia, then we risk condemning our creations to torment from which they are only released by their own destruction.

If we mistakenly assume we can create machines which have qualia, then brain uploads are death.

[tartoran]

I agree with you, pain is a useful signal or it could be a systemic damage that wrongly sends these signals. However, when we, humans, refer to pain we clump all the unpleasant things we experience together. One such pain is the emotional /psychological pain and this type of pain is more likely to occur in such a system without a body. This is also a signal/state and is also useful to delineate it from another state. If such system is to experience joy it better know what pain is or otherwise wouldn't be able to delineate.

[h0l0cube]

Are you a robot?

If you are at all in doubt of your qualia, to quote Sam Harris (who has many entertaining podcasts on this topic with people far more qualified to speak on it than I am):

> Unfortunately, many experiences suck. And they don’t just suck as a matter of cultural convention or personal bias—they really and truly suck. (If you doubt this, place your hand on a hot stove and report back.)

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/951276362387591169

The twitter thread was about moral realism, but the topics are very much intertwined. If there is no imperative for anyone to do less harm to other creatures, why should anyone care if you are in pain?

And of course this argument extends to our treatment of animals too. Countless number of living, feeling animals, suffer for scientific progress (and cosmetics), let alone factory farming and wet markets. But at least there's light at the end of the tunnel for some of these concerns (lab meat, improved in-vivo testing)

[totalZero]

Do you believe that a robot cannot have qualia?

I am a collection of interconnected units, each of which is itself a combination of different organelles and other purpose-serving features. My intelligence is itself a product of the interaction of simple, unintelligent parts. So I would say that I am a machine. I would describe a robot as a man-made machine where the interaction of various silicon parts and processors gives rise to intelligence. By that definition, I am not a robot.

I believe that we don't feel pain when we are truly in trauma. It is only when we can do something about the damaging stimulus that we feel pain. I once had a major accident where I experienced lung collapse and multiple fractures. I never lost consciousness but I don't remember feeling any pain until well after others came to my aid. Even when I tried and failed to pick myself up off the ground, I did not feel pain, only disability and relief that my fingers and toes still moved.

I believe that the question of "what is pain" and the question of "is pain a good criterion for deciding whether it is acceptable to do harm to something" are two totally different philosophical problems. They are connected only insofar as we have chosen pain as a proxy for harm. But that very relationship between pain and harm indicates that pain is not just some kind of soulful feeling, but rather a signal to help us evade harm now or in the future.

[h0l0cube]

> Do you believe that a robot cannot have qualia?

We're getting stuck on semantics here. I do, but then I'd cease to see it as a robot, and more a sentient being. One criterion of consciousness that I've encountered is, 'there is something what it is like to be <x>' (Thomas Nagel). If there's something 'what it is like to be' a robot, a bat, a mosquito, an ameoba, a rock... then it is conscious.

> I believe that the question of "what is pain" and the question of "is pain a good criterion for deciding whether it is acceptable to do harm to something" are two totally different philosophical problems. They are connected only insofar as we have chosen pain as a proxy for harm. But that very relationship between pain and harm indicates that pain is not just some kind of soulful feeling, but rather a signal to help us evade harm now or in the future.

Qualia is more broad than just pain, of course. I just picked this particular phenomenon for it's poignance :)

If it is conscious, ethically speaking, we should consider how we treat it in a manner different to something that isn't. So if a rock isn't conscious, and some interconnected neural/silicon device is, we should at least have some way to query whether it is in an undesirable state or not.. if feasible/practical.

Maybe if trees/plants/rocks/ameobas are conscious, we can't be consulting their feelings when we harvest crops, or use disinfectant, mine for precious metals etc. We can make decisions to treat livestock better, and change how we utilize our environmental resources - so we ought to, and we are. But if we were to go out of our way to make new conscious entities, don't you think we should extend our historical shifts in attitude to slavery and our growing shifts in attitude to animal welfare also to these new entities?

[skosch]

The one quibble is that computationalism – the idea that experience is simply what some kinds of computation feel like from the inside, regardless of the substrate – may or may not be correct. It could be that qualia can only arise in systems that are physically intertwined in particular configurations (see Tononi's IIT), and it could even be that quantum effects are required (I'm skeptical, but who knows). The jury is still out on those question.

Therefore, it may be true that using biological neurons, arranged in a certain configuration, would give rise to qualia like pain in a way that shifting electrons between CPU registers never could. We just don't know.

For more reading, here's a relevant whitepaper by the Qualia Research Institute: https://opentheory.net/PrincipiaQualia.pdf

[Der_Einzige]

Hahaha, no. There is no ghost in the Shell in AI powered robots and certainly not in inanimate objects. You sound like an object oriented ontology writer with this kind of post and will be treated as such because that's what you've advocated for.

The alternative is fear of hurting objects or machines everytime I act in the world. Physical objects themselves are not ethical actors. AI is not life and we are several hundred years away from being capable of creating life ourselves within an object (if it's at all possible) Your worldview would mean that if I move a machine (or rock) and it appears to "resist me", I must fear that the machine or rock doesn't want to be moved. I must believe that I have acted violently towards that object by "frustrating it's preferences".

What absurdity!

[totalZero]

Why are you linking pain and ethics? If I chop down a tree in the wintertime, I can reflect upon whether it felt pain from my chainsaw as I drag its trunk toward my house, happy to fuel my family's fireplace with its remains. If it felt pain, does that make my action less ethical than if it did not?

Is it wrong to slaughter a cow because that cow will feel pain?

Sometimes, people label ideas for the purpose of sorting and better considering them. Other times, people label ideas for the purpose of compartmentalizing them and rejecting them without really reflecting on them at all. I don't know what you mean when you say I will be "treated as such" but it sounds like a way of setting aside what I actually said in order to tussle with a preconceived, crystallized notion of something someone else said or wrote.

There are ancient cultures that believed it was wrong to do violence against a rock. Do you believe they, too, read Heidigger?