No responses yet to this question. It seems to me a straightforward
consequence of computationalism that we should be able to write a program
which, when run, will experience pain, and I suspect that this would be a
substantially simpler program than one demonstrating general intelligence. It
would be very easy to program a computer or build a robot that would behave
just like a living organism in pain, but I'm not sure that this is nearly enough to
ensure that it is in fact experiencing pain. Any ideas, or references to sources
that have considered the problem?
> If 3rd person behaviour can be taken as evidence of 1st person experience what does that mean in the case of a machine emulating an organism in pain? The ability to experience pain appears to be phylogenetically very old and dependent on only very minimal cognitive ability. A person in the end stages of dementia may make you wonder whether they are conscious at all, until they start screaming in response to a painful stimulus and it becomes clear that they must retain at least that most basic of conscious experiences. Building a machine to emulate just the responses to pain would be a doddle compared to building one that could walk, talk, be creative etc. Would such a machine thereby actually experience the pain? If so, is it possible that I could run a program on my computer which would experience pain if I move the mouse in a particular way, or that I am inadvertently torturing the computer as I am writing this?
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Wed Dec 13 2006 - 01:50:52 PST