You can’'t deny suffering then claim that you have rights. On your own logic we can impose anything we want want on you.
The philosophical point being that the social contract grants rights and imposes obligations.
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You “should” think nothing. The universe has no “shoulds” I can say “I don’t want you to think that” I can’t say “The universe decrees you can’t think that”
In that very same sense, the government wants you to not impose violance, which is just a lot of people agreeing that they don’t want you to impose violance, and they will punish you if you do. No need to appeal to universal evidence.
Fun fact: you are free to believe or not believe whatever you want.
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If the justification for punishing those who cause suffering rests solely on social conventions, then one society has no basis for condemning another society that permits violence. They would simply embody different cultural norms, each deserving equal respect. In a sense, this is already how we regard animals: we do not morally condemn lions for killing, because they belong to a different form of life with its own behavioral framework.
From this perspective, even acts of violence could be interpreted as expressions of a different worldview rather than as objectively wrong. One might even argue that such a worldview is, in some cases, too far ahead of its time to be understood or accepted by the society in which it appears, just as certain artists have been rejected by their contemporaries because their ideas were considered too innovative to be appreciated.
Painkillers decrease the level of stress hormones in suffering animals like in humans. There is no good reason to ignore the suffering of animals.
That’s still all about mechanisms, like blocking in a computer mechanisms that imitate the behaviour of a suffering being. Being able to block them is not evidence that the computer was suffering.
But the animal is not a mechanism, recall, despite its mechanical parts. You’re stuck in a fallacy of composition.
What is not a mechanism in an animal?
No,
People generally disprefer violent lawless societies and that’s not an arbitrary preference. It originates in deep evolutionary time.
The whole animal. I already clarified this, it’s open to view.
Nothing is objectively wrong. It’s called subjective morality and it’s been thought of before many times. There was even a book called “Beyond good and evil”, imagine that.
A society can condemn another one, it just can’t base that condemnation on objective truths.
This way you are saying that pain does not exist.
I suppose so, I am. It exists to any human that defines it, but is there an objective thing called “pain” out there in the universe? Not really. To a bacteria sensation is just sensation, not good or bad. Same with humans, but we just judge it, clothe it in our ideas and write it into our story. Give it meaning in the only way it can have, within our life and experience, nothing more.
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Philosophically, no. Sensationally, yes.
Though this explanation requires expert mind.
This means that, if I cause pain and suffering to somebody, the only thing I need to care of is about breaking historical social conventions and my possible subjective concepts and ideas. Other than that, there is no reason to care about the pain that the other person feels.
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Yes. If you want to cause someone pain, there is no universal or logical arguement out there that proves you shouldn’t.
But I don’t want you to. Most people don’t want you to. That’s about it.
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Hey together,
interesting and and very current thread. I think there is no philosophy faculty where this question has not been posed and discussed in class or paper due to recent surge in the development of LLM´s.
I have tried to read through all replies in order to avoid repetition, but it was a lot so forgive me if I repeat something already put forward.
Looking at your reasoning, it appears that you are questioning the existence of pain. But instead, I believe the question is rather who possesses the ability to feel pain ?.
Is it
a) Only Humans?
b) Only Computers?
c) Humans and Computers?
d) Neither Humans nor Computers?
Regarding b):
I think we can for now discard this possibility, because it is the least interesting. We knew about pain long before we could even imagine anything like a computer, hence the motivation for inquiry lies rather in examining whether these new type of agent “AI/Computer/Robot” also knows what we know as pain.
Regarding a):
This is probably the position most people feel comfortable with and that aligns most with our intuitions. Pain seems to be something only Agents who possess personhood (in a vague untechnical sense of the word) can possess. (I would like to refrain from discussions on personhood 
) And it is when defending this position that we are met with a, at least prima facie, contradiction.
Which would look as follows:
P1: Humans can feel pain.
P2: Computers cannot feel pain.
P3: Computers are merely mechanisms.
P4: If x is merely a mechanism, x cannot feel pain.
P5: Humans are merely mechanisms.
From P4 & P5 follows:
P6: Humans cannot feel pain.
P1↯P6 → P1 and P6 contradict.
To escape this contradiction we need to refute either
P4 which would leas to option c) as a conclusion
or
P1 which would lead to option d) as a conclusion.
My take on this two horned dilemma:
I dont see any grounds to uphold P4, but I neither think we must accept that both humans and computers can feel what we refer to as pain.
I disagree with this statement insofar as that I would exchange “emulate” with “simulate”.
Emulating refers to an imitation (striving to equal) while simulating refers to giving or assuming the appearance or effect of something, and that is all a computer does. It does not emulate but simulate human behaviour. A computer is mechanism that simulates another (human) mechanism and by emulating the mechanism it may emulate what we call pain, but we can chose to reserve the term pain solely for the product of the human mechanism and therefore claim that only humans feel “pain”. Yes it would become a tautology. But it would be a tautology as much as “Pain is a bad feeling.” is a tautology.
If so, it seems to me that philosophy is an extremely bad, cruel and inhuman activity, that has a constitutional tendency to make humans more and more inhuman, pitiless, indifferent, cold like calculators. What is the point of doing philosophy if it guides us to ignore the pain that other people feel when we do violence to them?
Philosophy doesn’t guide you to do anything. It just tells you what is. The universe is indifferent. No amount of philosophy or non-philosophy will change that. If you want morality, look at religion. They’ee way more certain and kind.
Regarding crying because of pain, I’m reading that crying triggers the release of natural painkillers. Crying literally helps ease there pain.
Why is the super advanced computer crying? Even if, for the sake of argument, we say it subjectively experiences pain, how did it come about that it cries tears?