Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting.

I'm fairly puzzled by sensation/qualia. The idea that there's some chemical reaction in my brain which produces sensation as a side effect is very weird. In principle it seems like you ought to be able to pare things down in order to produce a "minimal chemical reaction" for suffering, and do "suffering chemistry" in a beaker (if you were feeling unethical). That's really trippy.

People often talk about suffering in conjunction with consciousness, but in my mind information processing and suffering are just different phenomena:

* Children aren't as good at information processing, but they are even more capable of suffering.

* I wouldn't liked to be kicked if I was sleeping, or blackout drunk, even if I was incapable of information processing at the time, and had no memory of the event.

So intuitively it seems like more neurons = more "suffering chemistry" = greater moral weight. However, I imagine that perhaps the amount of "suffering chemistry" required to motivate an organism is actually fairly constant regardless of its size. Same way a gigantic cargo ship and a small children's toy could in principle be controlled by the same tiny microchip. That could explain the moral weight result.

Interested to hear any thoughts.

While in animals with complex nervous systems like humans and also many mammals and birds there may be psychological reasons for suffering, like the absence or death of someone beloved, suffering from physical pain is present in most, if not all animals.

The sensation of pain is provided by dedicated sensory neurons, like other sensory neurons are specialized for sensing light, sound, smell, taste, temperature, tactile pressure, gravity, force in the muscles/tendons, electric currents, magnetic fields, radiant heat a.k.a. infrared light and so on (some of these sensors exist only in some non-human animals).

The pain-sensing neurons, a.k.a. nociceptors, can be identified anatomically in some of the better studied animals, including humans, but it is likely that they also exist in most other animals, with the possible exception of some parasitic or sedentary animals, where all the sense organs are strongly reduced.

So all animals with such sensory neurons that cause pain are certain to suffer.

The nociceptors are activated by various stimuli, e.g. either by otherwise normal stimuli that exceed some pain threshold, e.g. too intense light or noise, or by substances generated by damaged cells from their neighborhood.

Interesting. So how about counting nociceptors for moral weight?

What specifically makes it so the pain neurons cause pain and the pleasure neurons cause pleasure? Supposing I invented a sort of hybrid neuron, with some features of a pain neuron and some features of a pleasure neuron -- is there any way a neuroscientist could look at its structure+chemistry and predict whether it will produce pleasures vs pain?

Even if this is not well understood, it is likely that any differences between the pain neurons and any other sensory neurons are not essential.

It is likely that it only matters where they are connected in the sensory paths that carry the information about sensations towards the central nervous system. Probably any signal coming into the central nervous system on those paths dedicated for pain is interpreted as pain, like a signal coming through the optical nerves would be interpreted as light, even when it would be caused by an impact on the head.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociception

> Children aren't as good at information processing, but they are even more capable of suffering.

That is too strong a statement to just toss out there like that. And I don’t even think it’s true.

I think children probably feel pain more intensely than adults. But there are many more dimensions to suffering than pain. And many of those dimensions are beyond the ken of children.

Children will not know the suffering that comes from realizing that you have ruined a relationship that you value, and it was entirely your fault.

They will not know the kind of suffering that’s behind Imposter Syndrome after getting into MIT.

Or the suffering that comes from realizing that your heroin addiction will never be as good as the first time you shot up. Or that same heroin addict knowing that they are betraying their family, stealing their mother’s jewelry to pawn, and doing it anyway.

Or the suffering of a once-great athlete coming to terms with the fact that they are washed up and that life is over now.

Or the suffering behind their favorite band splitting up.

Or the suffering behind winning Silver at the Olympics.

Or the agony of childbirth.

Perhaps most importantly, one of the greatest sorrows of all: losing your own child.

Et cetera

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