I mean that people are free to decide if others feel pain.
Wow! You are one sick puppy, dude. Personally, you have just hit my "Do
not bother debating with" list.
You can "decide" anything you like -- but that doesn't make it true.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Mahoney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 4:44 PM
Subject: RE: FW: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of
consciousness--correction
--- 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]
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agi
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