Russ,
I am torn between judging your cartoon comment as silly or profound. I have said that if a robot could be devised that was embedded in a social network of other robots, that systematically avoided injurious events and stimuli, that engaged in some communicative behavior when injured to which other robots responded by coming to its rescue, then I would have to entertain the notion that these robots experience pain. To me, pain is all of that. Hard to imagine a cartoon doing that. Hence my first judgment that the idea is frivolous. (But probably not a lot more frivolous than my idea that motivation is like the first derivative of behavior.) I think perhaps the comment confuses the map with the territory, as Bateson used to say. So, now I am stuck with trying to figure out why I might possibly think it profound. But let’s make the example as favorable to your case as we can. Let it be the case that you experience me being horrible tortured by the CIA. Do you experience pain. If you are not a psychopath, probably yes. Do you experience MY pain. No, because my pain occurs against an entirely different history of experiences, including, by the way, the occlusion of my airway by the wet washcloth and the poured water. . Something like that. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2016 10:12 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and cartoons Nick (and I think Eric) said that a sufficiently convincing performance of pain behavior by a robot is pain. I asked whether a sufficiently convincing animated depiction of pain behavior via a cartoon is also pain? In other words, can a cartoonist create pain by drawing it? In asking that I don't mean the cartoonists own pain or pain in the viewer, but pain in the world in the same way that some third party has pain whether or not someone sees his pain behavior.
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