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In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

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Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#71

Post by wizzwizz4 »

lachlan-sneff wrote: post #66
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many philosophers are confused. Free will is a solved problem (we have free will regardless of the metaphysical premise, unless you're using a weird definition of free will, and even I can prove it for any given metaphysical premise), yet they're still working on it. If somebody links "free will" to "determinism", they're very confused about what free will is. There are a lot of philosophers doing genuinely useful wo…

I must be quite confused then, but how is free will not linked to determinism?

There's a proper proof, which is too long to fit in this margin (i.e. I'm too lazy to find a link), but I can do a much shorter one:

1. Non-determinism is equivalent to determinism plus extra, random input.

2. The addition of random noise does not bestow free will upon something that didn't have it without the random noise.

3. 1 and 2 imply no non-determinstic systems can possess free will if deterministic systems cannot possess free will.

4. 3 implies free will is independent of determinism.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#72

Post by wizzwizz4 »

chr1 wrote: post #62
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Torturing someone in a simulation is not any different than imagining someone being tortured, Isn't it? Our imaginations are predictive, not simulative.

Sure, our imagination does not have enough computational power to be simulative now, but in principle there is nothing preventing existance of a living creature with vastly more powerful brain.

If you're assuming imagination ~= simulation for an argument, you need to state the assumption up-front. That assumption doesn't hold for humans, nor for anything reasonably imaginable for people in our culture.

> Torturing someone in a simulation is not any different than […] performing lots of arithmetic operations.

Near as we can tell, the universe itself just performs lots of arithmetic operations.

I'm going to give an example similar to:

> If you torture someone then use a time machine to restore him to the initial state, did you do anything bad?

to make a point. If you create a person, torture them, then incinerate the person to restore them to the original state, did you do anything bad? If you're privileging "the present state of the universe, excluding historical events, even when evidence of those historical events is apparent in the present state of the universe", you're taking a very niche ethical viewpoint: one where anything can be undone by killing everyone involved.

> So the only logical thing is to admit that torturing/killing/hunting a species to extinction is bad not because of pain, but because of stealing computational resources belonging to someone else/some other sophisticated computational process.

I'd call this the principle of explosion, but I don't actually see how this can even follow from what you said earlier.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#73

Post by rjmo »

As a fellow animal researcher: this article is pretty much devoid of informed or carefully considered thought about the issue.

Many commenters have noted that biological systems are mind-numbingly complex, and we're not even close modeling these systems in a way that's useful for testing novel hypotheses of biology researchers.

The field in which I work, neuroscience, frequently does employ computational modeling, but this modeling is primarily used to provide a mechanistic link between inputs and outputs observed in an in vivo experiment. Present a sensory signal to an animal, observe something about neural dynamics in a brain region, THEN use simplified biologically-inspired elements to provide a plausible mechanism between the two. Even the state-of-the-art in silico model is always child's play compared to the real thing. We definitely don’t know enough about that real thing to build a model that would circumvent its need. This author also works in a neuroscience lab – they should know better.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#74

Post by ars »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #35
ars wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask the reverse question - if the Robot version of a mouse is sufficiently similar to a mouse, maybe the mouse also doesn't actually feel pain, and is really a kind of biological robot. Maybe so are you. Dualism holds that living entities are special, and can never be replicated artificially. So your question can actually be turned into dualism vs monism (which is not a question with a settled answer).

This would run into the "here is a hand", or rather "here is a fist" objection.[1] Pain is the ground reality that is to be explained. If you manage to explain away pain rather than explain it, you haven't actually answered the question at all. If your answer at the end is "pain is not real", this doesn't prove that pain is not real, it proves that your premises were wrong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_is_o…

If a computer prints on the screen "I'm in pain", is it actually in pain?

If you tell me "I'm in pain", are you actually in pain?

If you are sedated with a memory blocker, and are then hurt, but you don't remember it afterward, were you actually in pain? (This isn't an academic question - many medical procedures simply paralyze the patient and add a memory blocker, but don't provide much analgesia. The patient can not express pain, and does not remember it. So does the pain they felt matter?)

You want an explanation of the wrong "ground reality", you are discussing the wrong question, it's not "is pain" real.

It's all about the subjective experience of pain, and can a robot share in that? Can a person in a coma share in that? Can an animal?

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#75

Post by ars »

dTal wrote: post #34
ars wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask the reverse question - if the Robot version of a mouse is sufficiently similar to a mouse, maybe the mouse also doesn't actually feel pain, and is really a kind of biological robot. Maybe so are you. Dualism holds that living entities are special, and can never be replicated artificially. So your question can actually be turned into dualism vs monism (which is not a question with a settled answer).

This comment doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the existence of a robot copy imply a lack of pain? How can you argue that whether humans feel pain is an unsolved question? Shall we experiment on you instead?

See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23727782

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#76

Post by chr1 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #72
chr1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, our imagination does not have enough computational power to be simulative now, but in principle there is nothing preventing existance of a living creature with vastly more powerful brain.

If you're assuming imagination ~= simulation for an argument, you need to state the assumption up-front. That assumption doesn't hold for humans, nor for anything reasonably imaginable for people in our culture. > Torturing someone in a simulation is not any different than […] performing lots of arithmetic operations. Near as we can tell, the universe itself just performs lots of arithmetic operations. I'm going to g…

The example with creating a person and then destroying it is different, because after creation it can continue to live independently from yourself. But if you create a person in your computer, that person can exist only as long as you provide the computational power for it to exist. In a way it is similar to abortion, where destroying a fetus is ok because it cannot exist on it's own, and the mother cannot be forced to provide her resources to it.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#77

Post by nunja »

Digit-Al wrote: post #70
cellis wrote: post #20

Who here has watched as much Black Mirror/Westworld as I have and know how this ends? My question is, if a robot is engineered well enough to replicate the "real" thing, then when you test on it, aren't you just shifting the torture from "living" to another thing yet to be granted the rights of the living? If you answer "no", then you have to admit that the model is incomplete and it does not in fact feel pain and is…

I think you are missing something obvious here. Pain does not exist in any objective sense, it is a construct created by the brain in response to certain stimuli as a survival mechanism. If you were creating a simulation of a human body to use in medical experiments then surely you would not give it a brain that functioned in any meaningful sense. I would not say that a body incapable of feeling pain is an "inadequat…

Maybe pain is a part of the treatment as any body/antibody response. It is a push notification mechanism designed in a million of years of evolution for a reason. But I agree that it might be deprecated soon.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#78

Post by tsimionescu »

foobar_ wrote: post #47
hobofan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, those techniques are what we are moving towards and we are slowly getting there, but for the time being they can't be universally applied.

You do understand you are just defending big pharma and cosmetics. I really doubt any new ground breaking discovery has come from animal testing.

Can you name 1 important medical discovery that has NOT come from animal testing?

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#79

Post by FeepingCreature »

ars wrote: post #74
FeepingCreature wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would run into the "here is a hand", or rather "here is a fist" objection.[1] Pain is the ground reality that is to be explained. If you manage to explain away pain rather than explain it, you haven't actually answered the question at all. If your answer at the end is "pain is not real", this doesn't prove that pain is not real, it proves that your premises were wrong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_is_o…

If a computer prints on the screen "I'm in pain", is it actually in pain? If you tell me "I'm in pain", are you actually in pain? If you are sedated with a memory blocker, and are then hurt, but you don't remember it afterward, were you actually in pain? (This isn't an academic question - many medical procedures simply paralyze the patient and add a memory blocker, but don't provide much analgesia. The patient can no…

> If you tell me "I'm in pain", are you actually in pain?

> If a computer prints on the screen "I'm in pain", is it actually in pain?

Maybe. If you SMS me that you are in pain, are you in pain? "I'm in pain" is evidence of someone being in pain. But being in pain, the referent, is just being in pain. There's no additional indirection.

> If you are sedated with a memory blocker, and are then hurt, but you don't remember it afterward, were you actually in pain?

Yes.

> You want an explanation of the wrong "ground reality", you are discussing the wrong question, it's not "is pain" real.

No, this is an issue that was actually brought up.

> > maybe [...] you [...] [don't] actually feel pain

All reason is grounded in experience. If I know anything, it's the things that I experience directly. Pain is probably the most direct experience there is.

edit:

> It's all about the subjective experience of pain, and can a robot share in that? Can a person in a coma share in that? Can an animal?

Yes. No. Yes.

These are not difficult questions to answer... You're phrasing it like there's some kind of philosophical difficulty here, but I don't think there is. If you define pain as an aversive sensory experience, ie. a sensory experience that makes you wish it would stop (this definition covers disgust and discomfort as well, and I think that's valid), then it seems clear that anything that can form goals (and yes, a memory blocked sedated person can form goals, they just can't act on them) can experience pain. I think the objection to computers is just that we rely too much on our empathy to determine when something "is in pain". I think an NPC in a game that moves away from a fire is experiencing pain, even though its mind is extremely simple, just like an amoeba would when it avoids a harmful chemical. It doesn't have such a thing as a qualia of pain, maybe (I'm not convinced!) - but that's hardly necessary.

I feel we must overcome our distrust of functional descriptions. Pain is a functional pattern, and not a very complex one.

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