--- On Mon, 11/17/08, Ed Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >First, it is not clear "people >are free to decide what makes pain "real"," at least >subjectively real.
I mean that people are free to decide if others feel pain. For example, a scientist may decide that a mouse does not feel pain when it is stuck in the eye with a needle (the standard way to draw blood) even though it squirms just like a human would. It is surprisingly easy to modify one's ethics to feel this way, as proven by the Milgram experiments and Nazi war crime trials. >If we have anything close to the advances in brain scanning and brain science >that Kurzweil predicts 1, we should come to understand the correlates of >consciousness quite well No. I used examples like autobliss ( http://www.mattmahoney.net/autobliss.txt ) and the roundworm c. elegans as examples of simple systems whose functions are completely understood, yet the question of whether such systems experience pain remains a philosophical question that cannot be answered by experiment. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
