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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

>> 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?

> 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.

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).

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".

Are you suggesting that sentience is required to suffer from pain? Or that suffering isn't a problem unless you are sentient?

Uh, actually, it seems from their later posts that that is precisely their philosophy.

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

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?

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.

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...

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.

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.

It's really not. Frequency is nearly meaningless as you can have as many computational elements as you like operating at a given frequency meaning it tells you nearly nothing. It's like counting transistors which actually DOES work even if imperfectly.

But neurons are like compitational elements. There are different sorts with different power. In fact some human neurons have features that no other neurons have.

This is actually true of chips as well but there seems to be a fairly good correlation between number of elements and capability.

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