And what if the essentially qualia of suffering is just what a loss function feels like, and each time we spin up a deep convolution generative adversarial neural network to make pictures of cats that don't exist yet, we're bringing into existence a spark of consciousness and then rapid-fire torturing it with an unspeakable agony far excruciating than anything our meatsack bodies could even conceive of.

edit: oh god, this actually blew up, I had intended it to be nothing more than a shitpost

  • KurdKobein [any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    There's a popular intuition that an organism's ability to suffer is proportional to it's complexity. If C. elegans with its 302 neurons is experiencing as much suffering when you accidentally step on it while jogging in a park as a human being crushed to death, that would fuck up a lot of people's conceptions of morality.

      • ABigguhPizzahPieh [none/use name,any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I would say likely not. Let's look at a plant - what would be the purpose of pain to an organism that can't move away from the source of pain? If I touch a knifes edge, my hand recoils back from the pain. If you cut a plant, it doesn't recoil. "Pain" would serve it no purpose because it can't move. If C. elegans touches a knifes edge and it also recoils back, but does it experience pain the way we do if it doesn't have a mind or is it simply responding to stimulus? I think it's simply responding to stimulus