[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.