This is part of the Hard Problem of Consciousness: why is there any such thing and how does it work? It is Hard because we cannot even see what a solution would be. Even if we discovered patterns of neural activity or anything else that reliably and in great detail matched up with the experience, it seems that that still wouldn’t tell us why there is such a thing as that experience, and would not suggest any test we could apply to a synthetic imitation of the patterns.
(7) If we met an alien life-form, how could we tell if it was suffering?
The world is already full of alien life-forms—that is, life-forms radically different from yourself. How do you decide, and how should you decide, which of the following suffers? A human being with toothache; a dog that has been hit by a car; a mouse bred to grow cancers; a wasp infected by a fungus that is eating up its whole body and sprouting from its surface; a caterpillar paralysed and being eaten alive by the larvae of that wasp; a jellyfish stranded on the beach that a playful child has thrust its spade into; a fish dying from the sting of a jellyfish; a tree with the sort of burr that wood carvers prize for its ornamental patterns; parched grass in a drought. And, for that matter, a cliff face that has collapsed in a great storm; tectonic plates grinding together; a meteor burning up in the atmosphere.
First, I think getting a rigorous answer to this ‘mystery of pain and pleasure’ is contingent upon having a good theory of consciousness. It’s really hard to say anything about which patterns in conscious systems lead to pleasure without a clear definition of what our basic ontology is.
Second, I’ve been calling this “The Important Problem of Consciousness”, a riff off Chalmers’ distinction between the Easy and Hard problems. I.e., if someone switched my red and green qualia in some fundamental sense it wouldn’t matter; if someone switched pain and pleasure, it would.
Third, it seems to me that patternist accounts of consciousness can answer some of your questions, to some degree, just by ruling out consciousness (things can only experience suffering insofar as they’re conscious). How to rank each of your examples in severity, however, is… very difficult.
This is part of the Hard Problem of Consciousness: why is there any such thing and how does it work? It is Hard because we cannot even see what a solution would be. Even if we discovered patterns of neural activity or anything else that reliably and in great detail matched up with the experience, it seems that that still wouldn’t tell us why there is such a thing as that experience, and would not suggest any test we could apply to a synthetic imitation of the patterns.
The world is already full of alien life-forms—that is, life-forms radically different from yourself. How do you decide, and how should you decide, which of the following suffers? A human being with toothache; a dog that has been hit by a car; a mouse bred to grow cancers; a wasp infected by a fungus that is eating up its whole body and sprouting from its surface; a caterpillar paralysed and being eaten alive by the larvae of that wasp; a jellyfish stranded on the beach that a playful child has thrust its spade into; a fish dying from the sting of a jellyfish; a tree with the sort of burr that wood carvers prize for its ornamental patterns; parched grass in a drought. And, for that matter, a cliff face that has collapsed in a great storm; tectonic plates grinding together; a meteor burning up in the atmosphere.
Right- good questions.
First, I think getting a rigorous answer to this ‘mystery of pain and pleasure’ is contingent upon having a good theory of consciousness. It’s really hard to say anything about which patterns in conscious systems lead to pleasure without a clear definition of what our basic ontology is.
Second, I’ve been calling this “The Important Problem of Consciousness”, a riff off Chalmers’ distinction between the Easy and Hard problems. I.e., if someone switched my red and green qualia in some fundamental sense it wouldn’t matter; if someone switched pain and pleasure, it would.
Third, it seems to me that patternist accounts of consciousness can answer some of your questions, to some degree, just by ruling out consciousness (things can only experience suffering insofar as they’re conscious). How to rank each of your examples in severity, however, is… very difficult.