Nature itself plans trajectories to minimize action, the integral of a Lagrangian: it's literally just a number, but it decides the motion of molecules and galaxies. What's wrong with a moral system based around minimizing a pain integral, subject to constraints? Still just a number. But one that can easily take an important position in our decision-making, and find a deep-seated place in our minds as well.
Of course, we probably ended up with morals in the first place as a distillation of game-theoretic heuristics, which helped us trust and cooperate with each other, which would have been an evolutionary benefit. But as with anything else, we're accountable to the drives that evolution left us with, not evolution's reasons for putting them there. The morals are in our minds, not in nature, but either way it's numbers all the way down.
Maybe we're deeply wrong about our intuitions, and actually no conscious experience is happening in the brain at all, despite the brain having an incorrect model about itself which predicts this (and causes it to make utterances claiming that it has experiences). That's the school of thought known as eliminitivism. Under this view, all suffering is a myth, in the same way that luckiness and angels are.
If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.
Edit: or if you dont like that explanation, why should a consensus of a calculation have any more merit than an individual calculation?
Consensus matters because if people around you disagree with you they will kill you or put you in prison. At rock bottom this is how all laws and ethical norms are created.
It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.
so it's not "just a calculation"? I am NOT trying to make a joke/reference to Clinton, but I think in these philosophical conversations, we have to step back even further and question what our definition of "is" is.
Again, I'm a CS grad who has never taken philosophy, so I'm sure this has been explored to death by people who own this field. But there's absolutely a point in philosophy where you can't even rely on "what is true": slamming my fingers in the doorway IS painful (to me), but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe. Just as Einstein proved, two observers can experience different realities, fundamentally, two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door).
What do you mean by "just a calculation" here, and how does everyone else's experience of pain apply?
You seem to be implying that for everyone who is not the 1st person subjective experiencer of pain, the only possible representation of that pain is some form of "calculation". You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right?
Sure, you could choose to use some process of calculation as one way to measure pain, but this isn't the only way to conceptualize it, nor is it the only way that people experience it.
e.g. mirror neurons are interesting to consider. We have in our brains these neurons dedicated to experiencing what we observe others experiencing. We cringe when we see someone suddenly become involved in a painful accident. We recoil when we see something horrific. The nature of what the observer experiences is almost certainly very different than what the person in pain is experiencing, but there's a shared experience for those in proximity.
Whatever pain is or isn't, the fact that its effects can be localized to a single person and the fact that it may be calculable in some way seem unrelated to each other.
> two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door)
You hurting your finger in the door and me not feeling the exact thing you experienced are independent facts about the state of the world when the door slamming occurred. Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.
That is an assumption, and a dangerous one at that. What you speak of is a kind of 'empathy', a feeling of emotions by Proxy... not everyone actually has that... some people don't cringe at other's pain, for some: their pupils dilate.
That's a tangent to the current discussion, but yeah... some 'calculate your pain', other's 'calculate the pleasure your pain cause in them'...
But to add to the discussion, pain isn't localizable to one person, not always, at least... so is emotion/feeling mappable a calculation of the neurons? (maybe/probably)
Not exactly. I'm showing the abusrdity of people who think that the brain is just a computer and that its results: "just a number" fly in the face of their reality of experiencing pain. If it's just a number, why don't they slam their hand in the door and show us?
> You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right?
By their own definition, "the nature of pain itself" is just a number, just a result of a huge calculation of trillions of neurons with substantially higher numbers of networks. The terrifying sound, the facial expressions, the visceral "gut-feeling", thats all just pattern recognition (on your behalf), there's nothing more to it than a calculation, right?
> Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.
technically correct but only because we could, in theory, both inflict pain on ourselves simultaneously using the doorway.