Eric Baum wrote: >> ... I claim that it is the very fact that you are making decisions >> about whether to supress pain for higher goals that is the reason >> you are conscious of pain. Your consciousness is the computation of >> a top-level decision making module (or perhaps system). If you were >> not making decisions waying (nuanced) pain against higher goals, >> you would not be conscious of the pain. >>
Charles> Consider a terminal cancer patient. It's not the actual Charles> weighing that causes consciousness of pain, it's the Charles> implementation which normally allows such weighing. This, in Charles> my opinion, *is* a design flaw. Your original statement is a Charles> more useful implementation. When it's impossible to do Charles> anything about the pain, one *should* be able to "turn it Charles> off". Unfortunately, this was not evolved. After all, you Charles> might be wrong about not being able to do anything about it, Charles> so we evolved such that pain beyond a certain point cannot be Charles> ignored. (Possibly some with advanced training and several Charles> years devoted to the mastery of sensation [e.g. yoga Charles> practitioners] may be able to ignore such pain. I'm not Charles> convinced, and would consider experiments to obtain proof to Charles> be unethical. And, in any case, they don't argue against my Charles> point.) I agree it is running the program the way it is written, not specifically the fact that you are weighing it. Sorry if the above was confusing. What I meant was that, it's computations this decision making module is programmed to be able to report and weigh that you are conscious of. Those unimportant for decision making, or consigned for whatever reason below an abstraction boundary, are not conscious. Evolution does not produce optimal programs, only very good ones. Also the optimal solution for a complex problem will not on most complex problems do what might be thought the optimal thing on every instance. A simple example is the max flow problem, in which the optimal flow will usually not utilize the allowed flow along many edges. Evolution is probably above your ethics, but obviously if you could turn off pain, you would likely behave in ways that are less fit from evolution's point of view than the program it gave you. Recently people have discovered how to turn off pregnancy, and until evolution catches up, they have been widely doing things that are likely less "fit" than if they hadn't been able to turn off pregnancy. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
