A p-zombie doesn’t feel pain; it just says it does, and it goes through the motions of being in pain. Does that sound like you? If we chop off your hand, will you not actually be feeling anything?
When people say that it’s conceivable for something to act exactly as if it were in pain without actually feeling pain, they are using the word “feel” in a way that I don’t understand or care about. So, sure: I don’t feel pain in that sense. That’s not going to stop me from complaining about having my hand chopped off!
As far as I know, to feel is to detect, or perceive, and pain is positive punishment, in the jargon of operant conditioning. So to say “I feel pain” is to say that I detect a stimulus, and process the information in such a way that (all else equal) I will try to avoid similar circumstances in the future. Not being a psychologist, I don’t know much more about pain. But (not being a psychologist) I don’t need to know more about pain. And I reject the notion that we can, through introspection, know something more about what it “is like” to be in pain.
I believe it’s unethical to inflict pain on people (or animals, unnecessarily), because to hold something in a state of pain is to frustrate its goals. I don’t think that it is any qualia associated with pain that makes it bad. Indeed, this seems to lead to morally repugnant conclusions. If we could construct a sophisticated intelligence that can learn by operant conditioning, but somehow remove the qualia, does it become OK to subject it to endless punishment?
I don’t think we have to argue whether it is the goal-frustration or the pain-quale that is the bad. They are both bad. I don’t want to have my goals frustrated painlessly, and I don’t want to experience pain even in ways that promote my goals, such as being cattle-proded every time I slip into Akrasia.
And I reject the notion that we can, through introspection, know something more about what it “is like” to be in pain.
It would have been helpful to say why you reject it. If you were in a Mary-style experiment, whre you studied
pain whilst being anaesthetised from birth, would you maintinan that personally experiencing pain for the first
time would teach you nothing?
My pains hurt. My food tastes. Voices and music sound like something.
Um, those are all tautologies, so I’m not sure how to respond. If we define “qualia” as “what it feels like to have a feeling”, then, well—that’s just a feeling, right? And “qualia” is just a redundant and pretentious word, whose only intelligible purpose is to make a mystery of something that is relatively well understood (e.g: the “hard problem of consciousness”). No?
Erm, sorry for the snark, but seriously: has talk of qualia, as distinct from mere perceptions, ever achieved any useful or even interesting results? Consciousness will continue to be a mystery to people as long as they refuse to accept any answers—as long as they say: “Okay, you’ve explained everything worth knowing about how I, as an information processing system, perceive and respond to my environment. And you’ve explained everything worth knowing about how I perceive my own perceptions of my environment, and perceive those perceptions, and so on ad infinitum—but you still haven’t explained why it feels like something to have those perceptions.”
Do you go drink the wine or just read the label? Do you go on holiday or just read the brochure?
Ha! That’s actually not far off. But it’s because I’m a total nerd who tries to eat healthy and avoid unnecessary expenses—not because of how I feel about qualia. I think that happiness should be a consequence of good things happening, not that happiness is a good thing in itself. So I try to avoid doing things (like drugs) that would decouple my feelings from outcomes in the real world. In fact, if I just did whatever I felt like at any given time, I would end up even less outgoing—less adventurous.
My pains hurt. My food tastes. Voices and music sound like something.
Um, those are all tautologies, so I’m not sure how to respond.
a) I thought you were denying “pains hurt”
b) “food tastes” isn’t.
c) The others can be rephrased as “injuries hurt” and “atmospheric compression waves sound like something”.
If we define “qualia” as “what it feels like to have a feeling”, then, well—that’s just a feeling, right? And “qualia” is just a redundant and pretentious word, whose only intelligible purpose is to make a mystery of something that is relatively well understood (e.g: the “hard problem of consciousness”). No?
d) All words are inidivdually redundant
e) If you think you can make the Hard Problem easy by tabooing “qualia”, lets see you try.
but you still haven’t explained why it feels like something to have those perceptions.”
Well, you haven’t. And there is something.
Do you go drink the wine or just read the label? Do you go on holiday or just read the brochure?
So I try to avoid doing things (like drugs) that would decouple my feelings from outcomes in the real world.
Do you send disadvantaged kids to Disneyland, or just send them the brochure? Even if you don’t personally care about
experiencing things for yourself, it is difficult to see how you could ignore its importance in your “good outcomes”.
Not at all. I’m denying that there is anything left over to know about pain (or hurting) after you understand what pain does. As my psych prof. pointed out, you often see weird circular definitions of pain in common usage, like “pain is an unpleasant sensation”. Whereas psychologists use functional definitions, like “a stimulus is painful, iff animals try to avoid it”. I believe that the latter definition of pain is valid (if simplistic), and that the former is not.
If you think you can make the Hard Problem easy by tabooing “qualia”, lets see you try.
I did that here, on another branch of this conversation. Again, this is simplistic, probably missing a few details, maybe slightly wrong. But I find it implausible that there is a huge, important aspect of what it is to be in pain that this completely misses.
Do you send disadvantaged kids to Disneyland, or just send them the brochure?
Depends on the kid. I would have preferred a good book to Disneyland (I don’t like crowds or roller coasters). Again, it’s about preferences, not qualia. And what someone prefers is simply what they would choose, given the option. (And if we want to get into CED, it’s what they would choose, given the option, and unlimited time to think about it, etc...)
Even if you don’t personally care about experiencing things for yourself...
Woah, did I say that? Just because I don’t value feelings in themselves doesn’t mean that I can’t care about anything that involves feelings. There’s no meta-ethical reason, for example, why I can’t prefer to have a perpetual orgasm for the rest of my life. I just don’t. On the other hand, I am a big fan of novelty. And if novel things are going to happen, then something has to do them. That thing may as well be me. And to do something is to experience it. There is no distinction. So I certainly want to experience novel things.
As my psych prof. pointed out, you often see weird circular definitions of pain in common usage, like “pain is an unpleasant sensation”. Whereas psychologists use functional definitions, like “a stimulus is painful, iff animals try to avoid it”. I believe that the latter definition of pain is valid (if simplistic), and that the former is not.
I don’t have to like either definition, and I don’t. The second definition attempts to define pain from outside
behaviour, and therefore misses the central point of a feeling—that it feels like something, subjectively,
to the organism having it. Moreover, it is liable to over-extend the definition of pain. Single celled organisms can show
avoidant behaviour, but it is doubtful that they have feelings.
Putting things on an objective basis is often and rightly seen as a Good Thing in science, but when what you are dealing with is subjective, a problem is brewing..
But I find it implausible that there is a huge, important aspect of what it is to be in pain that this completely misses.
I find it obvious that there is a huge, important aspect of what it is to be in pain that that completely misses. There is nothing there that deals at all, in any way, with any kind of subjective feeling or sensaton whatsoever.
You have decided that pain is a certain kind of behaviour dsiaplyed by entities pother than yourself and seen from the outside, and you have coded that up.
I inspect the code, and find nothing that relates in any way to how I introspect pain or any other feeling.
But I suspect we will continue to go round in circles on this issue until I can persuade you to make the paradigm shift into thinking about
subjective feelings from the POV of your own subjectivity.
Again, it’s about preferences, not qualia.
It’s about both, because you can’t prefer to personally have certain experiences if there is no such thing as subjective experience.
And to do something is to experience it.
Would you want to go on a holiday, or climb a mountain, and then have your memories of the expereince wiped?
You would still have done it.
You’re right, we’re starting to go around in circles. So we should wrap this up. I’ll just address what seems to be the main point.
I find it obvious that there is a huge, important aspect of what it is to be in pain that [your definition] completely misses.
This is the crux of our disagreement, and is unlikely to change. But you still seem to misunderstand me slightly, so maybe we can still make progress.
You have decided that pain is a certain kind of behaviour displayed by entities other than yourself and seen from the outside, and you have coded that up.
No, I have decided that pain is any stimulus—that is, a feeling—that causes a certain kind of behavior. This is not splitting hairs. It is relevant, because you keep telling me that my view doesn’t account for feelings, when it is all about feelings! What you really mean is that my view doesn’t account for qualia, which really just means I’m being consistent, because I don’t believe in qualia.
you can’t prefer to personally have certain experiences if there is no such thing as subjective experience.
Here for example, you seem to be equivocating between “experience” and “subjective experience”. If “subjective experience” means the same thing as “experience”, then I don’t think there is no such thing as subjective experience. But if “subjective experience” means something different, like “qualia”, then this statement doesn’t follow at all.
P.S. This may be off-point, but I just have to say, this:
I inspect the code, and find nothing that relates in any way to how I introspect pain or any other feeling.
...is because the code has no capacity for introspection—not because it has no capacity for pain.
Edit: maybe this last point presents room for common ground, like: “Qualia is awareness of ones own feelings, and therefore is possessed by anything that can accurately report on how it is responding to stimuli.”?
No, I have decided that pain is any stimulus—that is, a feeling
I don’t accept that all stimuli are feelings. A thermostat is stimulated by changes in temperature, but I don’t think
it feels the cold.
that causes a certain kind of behavior. This is not splitting hairs. It is relevant, because you keep telling me that my view doesn’t account for feelings, when it is all about feelings!
It is about “feelings” as you define the word, which is not general usage.
What you really mean is that my view doesn’t account for qualia, which really just means I’m being consistent, because I don’t believe in qualia.
Which is itslef consistent with the fact that your “explanations” of feelign invariabel skirt the central
issues.
However, I am never goign to be able to provide you with objective proof of subjective feelings. It is for
you to get out of the loop of denying subjectivity because it is not objective enough.
If “subjective experience” means the same thing as “experience”, then I don’t think there is no such thing as subjective experience. But if “subjective experience” means something different, like “qualia”, then this statement doesn’t follow at all.
“subjective experience” means “exprerience” and both mean the same thing as “qualia”.
Which is to say, it is incoherent to me that you could deny qualia and accept experience.
...is because the code has no capacity for introspection—not because it has no capacity for pain.
I don’t think introspection is sufficient for feeling, since I can introspect thought as well.
I also think that I am conscious, but you keep telling me I have the wrong definitions of words like this, so I don’t know if we agree. I would say being conscious means that some part of my brain is collating data about my mental states, such that I could report accurately on my mental states in a coherent manner.
If someone offered me a pill that would merely reduce my qualia experience of pain I would take it, even if it still triggered in me a process of information that would cause me to try to avoid similar circumstances in the future, and even if it were impossible to tell observationally that I had taken it, except by asking about my qualia of experiencing pain and other such philosophical topics. That is, if I am going to writhe in agony, I would prefer to have my mind do it for me without me having to experience the agony. If I’m going to never touch a hot stove because of one time when I burned me, I’d prefer to do that without having the memory of the burn. This idea is not malformed, given what we know about the human brain’s lack of introspection on it’s actions.
I believe it’s unethical to inflict pain on people (or animals, unnecessarily), because to hold something in a state of pain is to frustrate its goals. I don’t think that it is any qualia associated with pain that makes it bad.
In practice it seems that the only reason that it frustrates a person’s goals to receive pain is because they have a goal, “I don’t want to be in pain.” There are certainly reasons that the pain is adaptive, but it certainly seems from the inside like the most objectionable part is the qualia. If the sophisticated intelligence HAS qualia but doesn’t have as a goal avoidance of pain, that suggests your ethical system would be OK to subject it to endless punishment (a sentiment with which I may agree).
If someone offered me a pill that would merely reduce my qualia experience of pain I would take it
Morphine is said to have this effect. Some people who have been prescribed it for pain say that they still feel the pain but it doesn’t hurt. But it’s illegal in most places except for bona fide medical purposes.
I think that split-brain study shows the opposite of what you think it shows. If you observed yourself to be writhing around in agony, then you would conclude that you were experiencing the qualia of pain. Try to imagine what this would actually be like, and think carefully about what “trying to avoid similar circumstances in the future” actually means. You can’t sit still, can’t think about anything else. You plead with anyone around to help you—put a stop to whatever is causing this—insisting that they should sympathize with you. The more intense the pain gets, the more desperate you become. If not, then you aren’t actually in pain (as I define it) because you aren’t trying very hard to avoid the stimulus. I’d sympathize with you. Are you saying you wouldn’t sympathize with yourself?
BTW, how do you think I’d respond, if subjected to pain and asked about my “qualia”? By this reasoning, is my pain irrelevant?
In practice it seems that the only reason that it frustrates a person’s goals to receive pain is because they have a goal, “I don’t want to be in pain.”
I think you have the causation backwards. Pain causes a person to acquire the goal of avoiding whatever the source of the pain is, even if they didn’t have that goal before. (Think about someone confidently volunteering to be water-boarded to prove a point, only to immediately change his mind when the torture starts.) That’s how I just defined pain above. That’s all pain is, as far as I know. Of course, in animals, the pain response happens to be associated with a bunch of biological quirks, but we could recognize pain without those minutiae.
If the sophisticated intelligence HAS qualia but doesn’t have as a goal avoidance of pain, that suggests your ethical system would be OK to subject it to endless punishment (a sentiment with which I may agree).
Well, you just described an intelligence that doesn’t feel pain. So it doesn’t make sense to ask whether it would be OK to inflict pain on it. Could you clarify what it would mean to punish something that has no desire to avoid the punishment?
When people say that it’s conceivable for something to act exactly as if it were in pain without actually feeling pain, they are using the word “feel” in a way that I don’t understand or care about.
Taken literally, this suggests that you believe all actors really believe they are the character (at least, if they are acting exactly like the character). Since that seems unlikely, I’m not sure what you mean.
If an actor stays in character his entire life, making friends and holding down a job, in character—and if, whenever he seemed to zone out, you could interrupt him at any time to ask what he was thinking about, and he could give a detailed description of the day dream he was having, in character...
Well then I’d say the character is a lot less fictional than the actor. But even if there is an actor—an entirely different person putting on a show—the character is still a real person. This is no different from saying that a person is still a person, even if they’re a brain emulation running on a computer. In this case, the actor is the substrate on which the character is running.
Would you say a thermostat feels pain when it can’t adjust the temperature towards its preferred setting? Otherwise you might have some strange ideas about the complexity of video game characters. There’s a very long way to go in internal complexity from a video game character to, say, a bacterium.
This program aimlessly wanders over a space of locations, but eventually tends to avoid locations where X has returned True at past times. It seems obvious to me that X is pain, and that this program experiences pain. You might say that the program experiences less pain than we do, because the pain response is so simple. Or you might argue that it experiences pain more intensely, because all it does is implement the pain response. Either position seems valid, but again it’s all academic to me, because I don’t believe pain or pleasure are good or bad things in themselves.
To answer your question, a thermostat that is blocked from changing the temperature is frustrated, not necessarily in pain. Although, changing the setting on a working thermostat may be pain, because it is a stimulus that causes a change in the persistent behavior a system, directing it to extricate itself from its current situation.
Well, I agree with Dennett, and I’m pretty sure I’m a p-zombie.
I mean, that’s the whole point, right? That p-zombies aren’t actually any different from real people?
Ding-ding!
A p-zombie doesn’t feel pain; it just says it does, and it goes through the motions of being in pain. Does that sound like you? If we chop off your hand, will you not actually be feeling anything?
When people say that it’s conceivable for something to act exactly as if it were in pain without actually feeling pain, they are using the word “feel” in a way that I don’t understand or care about. So, sure: I don’t feel pain in that sense. That’s not going to stop me from complaining about having my hand chopped off!
OK. But you’re using “feel” in a sense I don’t understand.
As far as I know, to feel is to detect, or perceive, and pain is positive punishment, in the jargon of operant conditioning. So to say “I feel pain” is to say that I detect a stimulus, and process the information in such a way that (all else equal) I will try to avoid similar circumstances in the future. Not being a psychologist, I don’t know much more about pain. But (not being a psychologist) I don’t need to know more about pain. And I reject the notion that we can, through introspection, know something more about what it “is like” to be in pain.
I believe it’s unethical to inflict pain on people (or animals, unnecessarily), because to hold something in a state of pain is to frustrate its goals. I don’t think that it is any qualia associated with pain that makes it bad. Indeed, this seems to lead to morally repugnant conclusions. If we could construct a sophisticated intelligence that can learn by operant conditioning, but somehow remove the qualia, does it become OK to subject it to endless punishment?
I don’t think we have to argue whether it is the goal-frustration or the pain-quale that is the bad. They are both bad. I don’t want to have my goals frustrated painlessly, and I don’t want to experience pain even in ways that promote my goals, such as being cattle-proded every time I slip into Akrasia.
It would have been helpful to say why you reject it. If you were in a Mary-style experiment, whre you studied pain whilst being anaesthetised from birth, would you maintinan that personally experiencing pain for the first time would teach you nothing?
Don’t you mean that avoiding pain is one of your goals?
It just seems like the default position. Can you give me a reason to take the idea of qualia seriously in the first place?
Yes.
Yes. Because pain hurts.
Yes. My pains hurt. My food tastes. Voices and music sound like something.
Do you go drink the wine or just read the label? Do you go on holiday or just read the brochure?
Um, those are all tautologies, so I’m not sure how to respond. If we define “qualia” as “what it feels like to have a feeling”, then, well—that’s just a feeling, right? And “qualia” is just a redundant and pretentious word, whose only intelligible purpose is to make a mystery of something that is relatively well understood (e.g: the “hard problem of consciousness”). No?
Erm, sorry for the snark, but seriously: has talk of qualia, as distinct from mere perceptions, ever achieved any useful or even interesting results? Consciousness will continue to be a mystery to people as long as they refuse to accept any answers—as long as they say: “Okay, you’ve explained everything worth knowing about how I, as an information processing system, perceive and respond to my environment. And you’ve explained everything worth knowing about how I perceive my own perceptions of my environment, and perceive those perceptions, and so on ad infinitum—but you still haven’t explained why it feels like something to have those perceptions.”
Ha! That’s actually not far off. But it’s because I’m a total nerd who tries to eat healthy and avoid unnecessary expenses—not because of how I feel about qualia. I think that happiness should be a consequence of good things happening, not that happiness is a good thing in itself. So I try to avoid doing things (like drugs) that would decouple my feelings from outcomes in the real world. In fact, if I just did whatever I felt like at any given time, I would end up even less outgoing—less adventurous.
a) I thought you were denying “pains hurt” b) “food tastes” isn’t. c) The others can be rephrased as “injuries hurt” and “atmospheric compression waves sound like something”.
d) All words are inidivdually redundant e) If you think you can make the Hard Problem easy by tabooing “qualia”, lets see you try.
Well, you haven’t. And there is something.
Do you send disadvantaged kids to Disneyland, or just send them the brochure? Even if you don’t personally care about experiencing things for yourself, it is difficult to see how you could ignore its importance in your “good outcomes”.
Not at all. I’m denying that there is anything left over to know about pain (or hurting) after you understand what pain does. As my psych prof. pointed out, you often see weird circular definitions of pain in common usage, like “pain is an unpleasant sensation”. Whereas psychologists use functional definitions, like “a stimulus is painful, iff animals try to avoid it”. I believe that the latter definition of pain is valid (if simplistic), and that the former is not.
I did that here, on another branch of this conversation. Again, this is simplistic, probably missing a few details, maybe slightly wrong. But I find it implausible that there is a huge, important aspect of what it is to be in pain that this completely misses.
Depends on the kid. I would have preferred a good book to Disneyland (I don’t like crowds or roller coasters). Again, it’s about preferences, not qualia. And what someone prefers is simply what they would choose, given the option. (And if we want to get into CED, it’s what they would choose, given the option, and unlimited time to think about it, etc...)
Woah, did I say that? Just because I don’t value feelings in themselves doesn’t mean that I can’t care about anything that involves feelings. There’s no meta-ethical reason, for example, why I can’t prefer to have a perpetual orgasm for the rest of my life. I just don’t. On the other hand, I am a big fan of novelty. And if novel things are going to happen, then something has to do them. That thing may as well be me. And to do something is to experience it. There is no distinction. So I certainly want to experience novel things.
I don’t have to like either definition, and I don’t. The second definition attempts to define pain from outside behaviour, and therefore misses the central point of a feeling—that it feels like something, subjectively, to the organism having it. Moreover, it is liable to over-extend the definition of pain. Single celled organisms can show avoidant behaviour, but it is doubtful that they have feelings.
Putting things on an objective basis is often and rightly seen as a Good Thing in science, but when what you are dealing with is subjective, a problem is brewing..
I find it obvious that there is a huge, important aspect of what it is to be in pain that that completely misses. There is nothing there that deals at all, in any way, with any kind of subjective feeling or sensaton whatsoever. You have decided that pain is a certain kind of behaviour dsiaplyed by entities pother than yourself and seen from the outside, and you have coded that up.
I inspect the code, and find nothing that relates in any way to how I introspect pain or any other feeling.
But I suspect we will continue to go round in circles on this issue until I can persuade you to make the paradigm shift into thinking about subjective feelings from the POV of your own subjectivity.
It’s about both, because you can’t prefer to personally have certain experiences if there is no such thing as subjective experience.
Would you want to go on a holiday, or climb a mountain, and then have your memories of the expereince wiped? You would still have done it.
You’re right, we’re starting to go around in circles. So we should wrap this up. I’ll just address what seems to be the main point.
This is the crux of our disagreement, and is unlikely to change. But you still seem to misunderstand me slightly, so maybe we can still make progress.
No, I have decided that pain is any stimulus—that is, a feeling—that causes a certain kind of behavior. This is not splitting hairs. It is relevant, because you keep telling me that my view doesn’t account for feelings, when it is all about feelings! What you really mean is that my view doesn’t account for qualia, which really just means I’m being consistent, because I don’t believe in qualia.
Here for example, you seem to be equivocating between “experience” and “subjective experience”. If “subjective experience” means the same thing as “experience”, then I don’t think there is no such thing as subjective experience. But if “subjective experience” means something different, like “qualia”, then this statement doesn’t follow at all.
P.S. This may be off-point, but I just have to say, this:
...is because the code has no capacity for introspection—not because it has no capacity for pain.
Edit: maybe this last point presents room for common ground, like: “Qualia is awareness of ones own feelings, and therefore is possessed by anything that can accurately report on how it is responding to stimuli.”?
I don’t accept that all stimuli are feelings. A thermostat is stimulated by changes in temperature, but I don’t think it feels the cold.
It is about “feelings” as you define the word, which is not general usage.
Which is itslef consistent with the fact that your “explanations” of feelign invariabel skirt the central issues.
However, I am never goign to be able to provide you with objective proof of subjective feelings. It is for you to get out of the loop of denying subjectivity because it is not objective enough.
“subjective experience” means “exprerience” and both mean the same thing as “qualia”. Which is to say, it is incoherent to me that you could deny qualia and accept experience.
I don’t think introspection is sufficient for feeling, since I can introspect thought as well.
Okay, I’ve tabooed my words. Now it’s your turn. What do you mean by “feeling”?
The conscious subjective experience of a sensation or emotion.
How do I know whether I am having a conscious subjective experience of a sensation or emotion?
You’re conscious. Being conscious of things kind of goes with the territory.
I also think that I am conscious, but you keep telling me I have the wrong definitions of words like this, so I don’t know if we agree. I would say being conscious means that some part of my brain is collating data about my mental states, such that I could report accurately on my mental states in a coherent manner.
If someone offered me a pill that would merely reduce my qualia experience of pain I would take it, even if it still triggered in me a process of information that would cause me to try to avoid similar circumstances in the future, and even if it were impossible to tell observationally that I had taken it, except by asking about my qualia of experiencing pain and other such philosophical topics. That is, if I am going to writhe in agony, I would prefer to have my mind do it for me without me having to experience the agony. If I’m going to never touch a hot stove because of one time when I burned me, I’d prefer to do that without having the memory of the burn. This idea is not malformed, given what we know about the human brain’s lack of introspection on it’s actions.
In practice it seems that the only reason that it frustrates a person’s goals to receive pain is because they have a goal, “I don’t want to be in pain.” There are certainly reasons that the pain is adaptive, but it certainly seems from the inside like the most objectionable part is the qualia. If the sophisticated intelligence HAS qualia but doesn’t have as a goal avoidance of pain, that suggests your ethical system would be OK to subject it to endless punishment (a sentiment with which I may agree).
Morphine is said to have this effect. Some people who have been prescribed it for pain say that they still feel the pain but it doesn’t hurt. But it’s illegal in most places except for bona fide medical purposes.
I think that split-brain study shows the opposite of what you think it shows. If you observed yourself to be writhing around in agony, then you would conclude that you were experiencing the qualia of pain. Try to imagine what this would actually be like, and think carefully about what “trying to avoid similar circumstances in the future” actually means. You can’t sit still, can’t think about anything else. You plead with anyone around to help you—put a stop to whatever is causing this—insisting that they should sympathize with you. The more intense the pain gets, the more desperate you become. If not, then you aren’t actually in pain (as I define it) because you aren’t trying very hard to avoid the stimulus. I’d sympathize with you. Are you saying you wouldn’t sympathize with yourself?
BTW, how do you think I’d respond, if subjected to pain and asked about my “qualia”? By this reasoning, is my pain irrelevant?
I think you have the causation backwards. Pain causes a person to acquire the goal of avoiding whatever the source of the pain is, even if they didn’t have that goal before. (Think about someone confidently volunteering to be water-boarded to prove a point, only to immediately change his mind when the torture starts.) That’s how I just defined pain above. That’s all pain is, as far as I know. Of course, in animals, the pain response happens to be associated with a bunch of biological quirks, but we could recognize pain without those minutiae.
Well, you just described an intelligence that doesn’t feel pain. So it doesn’t make sense to ask whether it would be OK to inflict pain on it. Could you clarify what it would mean to punish something that has no desire to avoid the punishment?
Taken literally, this suggests that you believe all actors really believe they are the character (at least, if they are acting exactly like the character). Since that seems unlikely, I’m not sure what you mean.
If an actor stays in character his entire life, making friends and holding down a job, in character—and if, whenever he seemed to zone out, you could interrupt him at any time to ask what he was thinking about, and he could give a detailed description of the day dream he was having, in character...
Well then I’d say the character is a lot less fictional than the actor. But even if there is an actor—an entirely different person putting on a show—the character is still a real person. This is no different from saying that a person is still a person, even if they’re a brain emulation running on a computer. In this case, the actor is the substrate on which the character is running.
So would you say video game characters “feel” pain?
Probably some of them do (I don’t play video games). But they aren’t even close to being people, so I don’t really care.
Would you say a thermostat feels pain when it can’t adjust the temperature towards its preferred setting? Otherwise you might have some strange ideas about the complexity of video game characters. There’s a very long way to go in internal complexity from a video game character to, say, a bacterium.
I don’t think a program has to be very sophisticated to feel pain. But it does have to exhibit some kind of learning. For example:
This program aimlessly wanders over a space of locations, but eventually tends to avoid locations where X has returned True at past times. It seems obvious to me that X is pain, and that this program experiences pain. You might say that the program experiences less pain than we do, because the pain response is so simple. Or you might argue that it experiences pain more intensely, because all it does is implement the pain response. Either position seems valid, but again it’s all academic to me, because I don’t believe pain or pleasure are good or bad things in themselves.
To answer your question, a thermostat that is blocked from changing the temperature is frustrated, not necessarily in pain. Although, changing the setting on a working thermostat may be pain, because it is a stimulus that causes a change in the persistent behavior a system, directing it to extricate itself from its current situation.
(edit: had trouble with indentation.)