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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

I don't think simulated brains can feel pain any more than a float variable "current_pain_level" set to 100 can "feel pain".

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> I don't think simulated brains can feel pain

I'm not sure why you say that. Does pain have some property that makes it impossible to simulate?

If an organic animal can feel pain and it is possible to create a 100% accurate computational simulation of that animal, then the simulated animal must also experience pain. To me the interesting questions are at what level of simulation fidelity <100% (a) does the simulated pain be said to be "real", and (b) does it make sense for the simulation to be said to give rise to a subjective experience (if at all)? And the follow-on questions for both are "how?" and the "why?".

This whole issue of simulated pain is part of the premise for Roko's Basilisk [0].

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

> If an organic animal can feel pain and it it possible to create a 100% accurate computational simulation of that animal, then the simulated animal must also experience pain.

I believe that from the simulated animal we can only learn that the real animal experiences pain. I believe anything else leads to too many paradoxes and questions like "when you stop the simulation, does it stop existing or continues to experience the pain forever?"

It basically comes down to beliefs and I'm strongly in the "100% simulated organisms don't have real pain / emotion / soul" camp. (And the Chinese Room doesn't know Chinese. :-) )

I agree, these are the relevant questions. In order to assert that a simulated brain cannot feel pain, you'd have to define simulation to mean... somehow something that excludes certain phenomena, like subjective experience, which is at odds with a basically materialist worldview. If subjective experience arises solely from physical systems like a brain, then you'd have to somehow prove that a fully simulated brain differs from a natural brain in some fundamental way, which seems hard.

If things like pain can't be simulated, if subjective experience can't be simulated, you then have to have some alternative explanation for its source in natural animals, which is wandering into metaphysical territory I think most of HN would be uncomfortable with.

I'm on the far end of this spectrum. I intend to say please and thank you to AI sooner or later. :P

>If an organic animal can feel pain and it is possible to create a 100% accurate computational simulation of that animal, then the simulated animal must also experience pain

You can simulate a hurricane with a high degree of accuracy, but it doesn't make the wind blow.

Simulating a thing does not manifest the physical properties of the thing. That's not what a simulation is.

It makes the wind blow _in_the_simulation_.

Pain felt in the simulation would still be a phenomenon worth moral consideration, particularly if you haven't got proof that we aren't all living in a simulation ourselves.

To quote a book I hold in very high regard:

“Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?” ― Greg Egan, Permutation City

Unlike the other processes mentioned thought is computation and it is perfectly possible to run computation on wetware or on an emulator and get the same results.

I also hold that book and it's author in high esteem, but I don't find that quote very useful. Nobody gets wet when you model a hurricane because the model's purpose isn't to make people wet, it's to predict the dynamics of the hurricane at some level of detail. Same goes for fusion plants and biochemical processes.

The purpose of a hurricane isn't to make people wet, it's a by-product. If you wanted a simulation that made people wet then that could be arranged, either by modelling rainfall on simulated people or having a simulation that controlled physical water sprays/sprinklers suspended above physical people. I don't know what that would prove though.

And going back to Permutation City, (spolier) the whole premise of the book was that brain simulations did have real subjective experiences that were qualitatively indistinguishable from those that occur in "real" physical brains.

To quote another book I hold in very high regard (and I love Permutation City too):

"The King leaned over, looked an saw, yes, the Middle Ages simulated to a T, all digital, binary , and nonlinear, and there was the land of Dandelia, The Icicle Forest, the palace with the Helical Tower, the Aviary That Neighed, and the Treasury with a Hundred Eyes as well, and there was Ineffabelle herself, taking a slow, stochastic stroll through the simulated garden, and her circuits glowed red and gold as she picked simulated daisies, and hummed a simulated song."

The key is in the last two words.

Our current understanding of pain is chemical not procedural. We can simulate things in a computer without producing them. Just like SimCity is a simulation of a city not an actual city.

What’s the difference between that and your own pain neurons triggering?

> I don't think simulated brains can feel pain

I don't think we have the kind of understanding of what it means to feel anything for there to be any meaningful, informed opinions on that topic.

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