Valuing Sentience: Can They Suffer?

Can we taboo "Suffer"? Because at this point I'm not even sure what that means. Is it "a biological signal that identifies damage"? That seems too simple, because most sophisticated machines can detect damage and signal it, and we don't particularly worry ourselves about that.

Catch-22 re God & pain:

Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of his celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that.

Listening to RadioLab they described a wasp who's midsection had been accidentally crushed. As it was dying it began to eat it's own viscera. Likely because it detected a rich food source and began executing the standard action when in the presence of a rich food source. It was at this point that I finally intuitively understood that insects are simply biological replicating machines. I cannot think of them as feeling anything akin to suffering any more, merely damage-avoidance subroutines.

It seems we're concerned about the capacity of a mind to experience something it wants to avoid. Doesn't that imply that the complexity of the mind is a factor?

Let me offer a similar scenario that has the advantage of reality: we can implement it right now without waiting for future research.

We know where the pleasure centers of rats are. We can implant electrodes into these centers and stimulate them leading to rats being in, more or less, perpetual state of ecstasy.

We can right now create Happy Rat Farms where rats' brains are electrically stimulated to experience lots and lots of great pleasure.

Is it valuable to create Happy Rat Farms?

If Omega explained it was about to take out its super-scalpel and give me an incredibly precise lobotomy, which would take away some abilities of my mind, but not all, and there was nothing I could do to escape it, and afterwards Omega would poke the remnant of me with hot irons for a few days before killing me, but I could pay in advance to escape the hot irons, and the same offer was given to everyone, regardless of what Omega had predicted that they would choose...

If the lobotomy would take away my ability to appreciate complex forms of beauty, humor, and camaraderie, or my ability to form or comprehend English sentences, my ability to contribute to society, my ability to organize my experiences into narratives, my ability write and be persuaded by arguments like this one, my sense of a morality and inclination to act upon it, or my ability to design tools, I would still pay not to be poked with hot irons.

But if I was told that the lobotomy would take away my ability to suffer (And Omega said that by "suffer," it meant whatever familiar yet unidentified processes in my brain I previously attached that word to), I wouldn't care about the hot irons.

Is "can they feel pain" or "can they feel pleasure" really the right question, though? Let's say we research the biological correlates of pleasure until we understand how to make a compact and efficient network of neurons that constantly experiences maximum pleasure. Because we've thrown out nearly everything else a brain does, this has the potential for orders of magnitude more sentience per gram of neurons than anything currently existing. A group of altruists intend to create a "happy neuron farm" of these: are they awesome and inspiring or misguided and creating nothing of value?

I think this is a false dilemma. I don't find that scenario "awesome", but I do believe it would be creating something of value. The reason I believe this is that, when I experience intense pleasure, I can apprehend that these experiences ought to exist in the universe, by virtue of how they feel like. Filling the universe (or a portion of it) with these experiences is therefore a great thing, regardless of how "awesome" or "inspiring" I happen to find it.

Only tangentially related, this reminds me of a flash-fiction about vast farms of neuron-less meat, and the conundrum a humane society faces when some of those slabs of meat develop neurons. Great story, only 1000 words. Neither Face Nor Feeling.

Suffering is an emotional state triggered by desire. Desire is the attachment of value to imagined experiences.

So there's a minimal level of consciousness required to experience suffering, and a neuron farm probably doesn't meet it, that's why it's not morally significant. What sorts of organisms do meet it is another matter.

Can you suffer? Can you prove it?

Do I enjoy its taste and texture? Pig, yes; octopus, no.