Let me try to rephrase it in terms of something that can be done in a lab and see if I get your point correctly. We should conduct experiments with humans, identifying what causes sufferings with which intensity, and what happens in the brain during it. Then, if the animal has the same brain regions, it is capable to suffer, otherwise, it is not. But it won’t be the functional approach, we can’t extrapolate it blindly to the AI.
If we want the functional approach, we can only look at the behavior. What we do when we suffer, after it, etc. Then being suffers if it demonstrates the same behavior. Here the problem will be how to generalize human behavior to animals and AI.
I think the experiments you describe on humans is a reasonable start, but that you would then need to ask: “Why did suffering evolve as a distinct sensation from pain?” I don’t think you can determine the function of suffering without being able to answer that. Then you could look at other systems and see if something with the same functionality exists. I think that’s how you could generalize to both other animals and AI.
Let me try to rephrase it in terms of something that can be done in a lab and see if I get your point correctly. We should conduct experiments with humans, identifying what causes sufferings with which intensity, and what happens in the brain during it. Then, if the animal has the same brain regions, it is capable to suffer, otherwise, it is not. But it won’t be the functional approach, we can’t extrapolate it blindly to the AI.
If we want the functional approach, we can only look at the behavior. What we do when we suffer, after it, etc. Then being suffers if it demonstrates the same behavior. Here the problem will be how to generalize human behavior to animals and AI.
I think the experiments you describe on humans is a reasonable start, but that you would then need to ask: “Why did suffering evolve as a distinct sensation from pain?” I don’t think you can determine the function of suffering without being able to answer that. Then you could look at other systems and see if something with the same functionality exists. I think that’s how you could generalize to both other animals and AI.