This all seems to be about the “qualia” problem. Take another example. How would you know if an alien was having the experience of seeing the color red? Well, you could show it red and see what changes. You could infer it from its behavior (for example if you trained it that red means food—if indeed the alien eats food).
Similarly you could tell that it’s suffering when it does something to avoid an ongoing situation, and if later on it would very much prefer not to go under the same conditions ever again.
I don’t think there is anything special about the actual mechanism and neural pattern that expresses pain or suffering in our brains. It’s that pattern’s relation to memories, sensory inputs and motor outputs that’s important.
Probably you could even retrain the brain to consider a certain fixed brain stimulus to be pleasure even though it was previously associated with pain. It’s like putting on those corrective glasses that turn the visual input by 180° and the brain can adapt to that situation and the person is feeling normal after some time.
I see the argument, but I’ll note that your comments seem to run contrary to the literature on this: see, e.g., Berridge on “Dissecting components of reward: ‘liking’, ‘wanting’, and learning”, as summed up by Luke in The Neuroscience of Pleasure. In short, behavior, memory, and enjoyment (‘seeking’, ‘learning’, and ‘liking’ in the literature) all seem to be fairly distinct systems in the brain. If we consider a being with a substantially different cognitive architecture, whether through divergent evolution or design, it seems problematic to view behavior as the gold standard of whether it’s experiencing pleasure or suffering. At this point it may be the most practical approach, but it’s inherently imperfect.
My strong belief is that although there is substantial plasticity in how we interpret experiences as positive or negative, this plasticity isn’t limitless. Some things will always feel painful; others will always feel pleasurable, given a not-too-highly-modified human brain. But really, I think this line of thinking is a red herring: it’s not about the stimulus, it’s about what’s happening inside the brain, and any crisp/rigorous/universal principles will be found there.
Is valence a ‘natural kind’? Does it ‘carve reality at the joints’? Intuitions on this differ (here’s a neat article about the lack of consensus about emotions). I don’t think anger, or excitement, or grief carve reality at the joints- I think they’re pretty idiosyncratic to the human emotional-cognitive architecture. But if anything about our emotions is fundamental/universal, I think it’d have to be their valence.
Yes, this is the qualia problem, and, no it isn’t easy to imagine pain and pleasure being inverted. Spectrum inversion isn’t a necessary criterion for something being a quale. You seen to have landed on the easy end of the hard problem.
I don’t know how limited plasticity is. Speculation: maybe if we put on some color filter glasses that changes red with green or somehow mixes up the colors, then maybe even after a long time we’d still have the experience of the original red, even when looking at outside green material. Okay, let’s say it’s not plastic enough, we’d still feel an internal red qualia. But in what sense?
What if the brain would truly rewire to recognize plants and moldy fruit etc. in the presence of “red” perception and the original “green” pattern would feed into visceral avoidance of “green” liquids (blood) and would wire into the speech areas in such a way that nominal “green” sensation is extremely linked to the word “red” (for example as measured by these experiments where the words meaning colors are colored with different colors, for example the word blue written in yellow). In this case, how could we say that the person is still “seeing green” when presented with objectively red things? What would be our anticipation under this hypothesis?
Now, I think emotions are the same thing. Of course it could be that the brain architecture cannot rewire itself to start sweating and shouting and producing adrenaline in the presence of the previously pleasure associated pattern. Maybe the two modules are too far away or there is some other physical limitation. Then the question is pointless, it’s about an impossible scenario. If the brain can’t rewire itself then it still produces the old kind of behavior that is inconsisent with reality so it is observable (e.g. smiling when we would expect a normal person to should actually shout in pain).
I don’t think we can view pleasure as simply existing inside the brain without considering the environment. Similarly, the motor cortex doesn’t contain the actual information of what the limbs look like. It’s a relay station. It only works because the muscles are where they are. You can’t tell what a motor neuron controls unless you follow its axon and look at what muscle it is attached to. The neuron by itself isn’t a representation of the muscle or that muscles movement. An emotional neural pattern is also only associated with that emotion to the extent that it results in certain responses and is triggered by certain stimuli. Things are not labeled up in the universe. Does the elephant feel like it’s using its nose when it’s lifting things up? Or does it rather feel like an arm? It isn’t a productive line of thinking. If it quacks… It’s like asking whether abortion is really a sin, whether “irregardless” is really an English word, whether a submarine can really swim.
When you replace the pattern but keep all behavior and physiological responses normal, then I’d say the person is having the usual emotions that we associate with the responses and behavior that we can observe. The problem isn’t about what we anticipate but the fact that we are at edge cases that we haven’t encountered yet and we don’t have an intuitive idea of how we should interpret such a situation.
I think you should start smaller and slower. Try thinking about animals with simpler brains like worms, and what it means that it is having a certain sensation.
I don’t know how limited plasticity is. Speculation: maybe if we put on some color filter glasses that changes red with green or somehow mixes up the colors, then maybe even after a long time we’d still have the experience of the original red, even when looking at outside green material. Okay, let’s say it’s not plastic enough, we’d still feel an internal red qualia. But in what sense?
That would be an interesting experiment to do. We already know that people can adapt to wearing lenses that invert the picture or shift it laterally. Changing the colours while maintaining differences would be a little more complicated but quite feasible. You would need something similar to a VR headset, with a front-facing camera in front of each eye. The camera sensors would be connected, via some electronics to process the colours in any desired way, to the screen that each eye would see. This would be doable by a hobbyist with the necessary technical know-how. It might be as simple as cannibalising a couple of pocket cameras and switching some of the connections to the screen on the back.
This all seems to be about the “qualia” problem. Take another example. How would you know if an alien was having the experience of seeing the color red? Well, you could show it red and see what changes. You could infer it from its behavior (for example if you trained it that red means food—if indeed the alien eats food).
Similarly you could tell that it’s suffering when it does something to avoid an ongoing situation, and if later on it would very much prefer not to go under the same conditions ever again.
I don’t think there is anything special about the actual mechanism and neural pattern that expresses pain or suffering in our brains. It’s that pattern’s relation to memories, sensory inputs and motor outputs that’s important.
Probably you could even retrain the brain to consider a certain fixed brain stimulus to be pleasure even though it was previously associated with pain. It’s like putting on those corrective glasses that turn the visual input by 180° and the brain can adapt to that situation and the person is feeling normal after some time.
I see the argument, but I’ll note that your comments seem to run contrary to the literature on this: see, e.g., Berridge on “Dissecting components of reward: ‘liking’, ‘wanting’, and learning”, as summed up by Luke in The Neuroscience of Pleasure. In short, behavior, memory, and enjoyment (‘seeking’, ‘learning’, and ‘liking’ in the literature) all seem to be fairly distinct systems in the brain. If we consider a being with a substantially different cognitive architecture, whether through divergent evolution or design, it seems problematic to view behavior as the gold standard of whether it’s experiencing pleasure or suffering. At this point it may be the most practical approach, but it’s inherently imperfect.
My strong belief is that although there is substantial plasticity in how we interpret experiences as positive or negative, this plasticity isn’t limitless. Some things will always feel painful; others will always feel pleasurable, given a not-too-highly-modified human brain. But really, I think this line of thinking is a red herring: it’s not about the stimulus, it’s about what’s happening inside the brain, and any crisp/rigorous/universal principles will be found there.
Is valence a ‘natural kind’? Does it ‘carve reality at the joints’? Intuitions on this differ (here’s a neat article about the lack of consensus about emotions). I don’t think anger, or excitement, or grief carve reality at the joints- I think they’re pretty idiosyncratic to the human emotional-cognitive architecture. But if anything about our emotions is fundamental/universal, I think it’d have to be their valence.
Yes, this is the qualia problem, and, no it isn’t easy to imagine pain and pleasure being inverted. Spectrum inversion isn’t a necessary criterion for something being a quale. You seen to have landed on the easy end of the hard problem.
I don’t know how limited plasticity is. Speculation: maybe if we put on some color filter glasses that changes red with green or somehow mixes up the colors, then maybe even after a long time we’d still have the experience of the original red, even when looking at outside green material. Okay, let’s say it’s not plastic enough, we’d still feel an internal red qualia. But in what sense?
What if the brain would truly rewire to recognize plants and moldy fruit etc. in the presence of “red” perception and the original “green” pattern would feed into visceral avoidance of “green” liquids (blood) and would wire into the speech areas in such a way that nominal “green” sensation is extremely linked to the word “red” (for example as measured by these experiments where the words meaning colors are colored with different colors, for example the word blue written in yellow). In this case, how could we say that the person is still “seeing green” when presented with objectively red things? What would be our anticipation under this hypothesis?
Now, I think emotions are the same thing. Of course it could be that the brain architecture cannot rewire itself to start sweating and shouting and producing adrenaline in the presence of the previously pleasure associated pattern. Maybe the two modules are too far away or there is some other physical limitation. Then the question is pointless, it’s about an impossible scenario. If the brain can’t rewire itself then it still produces the old kind of behavior that is inconsisent with reality so it is observable (e.g. smiling when we would expect a normal person to should actually shout in pain).
I don’t think we can view pleasure as simply existing inside the brain without considering the environment. Similarly, the motor cortex doesn’t contain the actual information of what the limbs look like. It’s a relay station. It only works because the muscles are where they are. You can’t tell what a motor neuron controls unless you follow its axon and look at what muscle it is attached to. The neuron by itself isn’t a representation of the muscle or that muscles movement. An emotional neural pattern is also only associated with that emotion to the extent that it results in certain responses and is triggered by certain stimuli. Things are not labeled up in the universe. Does the elephant feel like it’s using its nose when it’s lifting things up? Or does it rather feel like an arm? It isn’t a productive line of thinking. If it quacks… It’s like asking whether abortion is really a sin, whether “irregardless” is really an English word, whether a submarine can really swim.
When you replace the pattern but keep all behavior and physiological responses normal, then I’d say the person is having the usual emotions that we associate with the responses and behavior that we can observe. The problem isn’t about what we anticipate but the fact that we are at edge cases that we haven’t encountered yet and we don’t have an intuitive idea of how we should interpret such a situation.
I think you should start smaller and slower. Try thinking about animals with simpler brains like worms, and what it means that it is having a certain sensation.
That would be an interesting experiment to do. We already know that people can adapt to wearing lenses that invert the picture or shift it laterally. Changing the colours while maintaining differences would be a little more complicated but quite feasible. You would need something similar to a VR headset, with a front-facing camera in front of each eye. The camera sensors would be connected, via some electronics to process the colours in any desired way, to the screen that each eye would see. This would be doable by a hobbyist with the necessary technical know-how. It might be as simple as cannibalising a couple of pocket cameras and switching some of the connections to the screen on the back.