Comment by wittyreference | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wittyreference | Hacker News Reader

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They went on to describe the forearm experiment which showed a much higher rate of awareness. I don’t see why you’ve chosen to omit that. You seem to casually discard the idea that awareness without memory is irrelevant, but when I’ve informed patients of amnestics they’ve been horrified - maybe needlessly so, but I’m not so arrogant as to think “silly patient, your horror is wrong and therefore irrelevant.”

Many people don’t regard “you’ll be in pain and then forget” as the same as “no pain.”

And the idea that HR and BP are perfect indicators of pain is ridiculous. Anesthetics reduce the responsiveness of both; cardiac parameters don’t respond perfectly, and you don’t need perfect anesthesia to impair them.

In my hospital, at least, we don’t take for granted that we achieve perfect coverage. It’s normal to give patients a bolus of amnestic at the tail end of a procedure to cover any gap in pain/distress while we were bringing them back to consciousness.

> Many people don’t regard “you’ll be in pain and then forget” as the same as “no pain.”

I find this incredibly fascinating. If people were to be offered a sum of money in exchange for feeling immense pain for an hour but then having that memory wiped, I wonder how many would shrug and say "I won't remember anything? Sure, sign me up." I wonder at the ethical and morality of such things. If the person's reality is based solely on their memories, is it even unethical? Like I said, fascinating.

Thank you for the intriguing thought experiment for today.

Statistics on women who choose a "no painkiller" second childbirth after doing so the first time might exist.

That might be an aversion to using painkillers again after experiencing awful side-effects in the first delivery.

Ah, I meant those that go without painkillers a second time.

The lingering physical effects of a body experiencing trauma for that amount of time might be too damaging for some to be willing to accept amnesia as a panacea.

There might also be a difference between a) You will be in pain for an hour, remembering the whole thing, and at the end of that hour, your memory will be wiped; and b) You will be in pain for an hour, but you will not form any memory of any part of that hour in the first place. It's the difference between saving data to a huge file and then deleting it, versus piping the data to /dev/null as it comes in. AFAIK amnestic drugs are intended to be closer to the second method.

You might be interested in the radio programme "Brian Gulliver's Travels".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Gulliver%27s_Travels

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01m29vt

They included an episode (Kognitia) where people are able to forget traumatic experiences. Here's a tiny clip: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00yj97w

They're available on Archive.org here: https://archive.org/details/briangulliverstravels1-2

I think there are ethical questions for the beneficiaries. Isn't like subjecting someone else to intense pain for an hour in order to receive money?

A few years back, I had a procedure that involved twilight sedation. That means you're aware of the experience while it's happening, but have no memory of it afterwards.

I thought about this exact thought experiment constantly leading up to the day of the procedure.

It's a fascinating philosophical question. Did I experience the pain of the procedure? A past me before the procedure agreed to commit some future me to pain. During the procedure, that me then certainly experienced pain. But the hypnotic drug washed that memory away leaving a third me that had the benefits of the procedure but no memory of the pain.

So what is the moral calculus to perform when signing your future self up to pain that your future future self will forget?

> Many people don’t regard “you’ll be in pain and then forget” as the same as “no pain.”

This makes perfect sense to me. Forgetting the pain is nice for future-me, but doesn't do anything for current-me. There will be a period where I am in pain and am aware of it. Forgetting it later is good for your mental health presumably, but forgetting something doesn't erase it from existence.

Okay, so how is this person in massive amounts of pain without having the physiological response of a raised heart rate and raised blood pressure?

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