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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Pain - Less Wrong
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The problem with pain is its inherent stupidity in dealing with its goals and inability to even cooperate with reason. It'd get more points if it were like vision, informing but leaving more advanced parts of mind in peace to do the decision-making.
I have a counter-example that seems to show that the badness of pain is not necessarily derived from its effect on decision-making. Suppose I tell you that I'm going to make a copy of your brain and keep it in a jar unconnected to any motor nerves/circuits. I'm going to do this no matter what, but unless you pay me X dollars, I'm also going to keep it in excruciating pain. (If you do pay up, I'll give it a neutral experience.) Assuming you're willing to pay more than 0 dollars, doesn't that show that even if pain has no bad effects on decision-making, it would still be bad?
I read it as a different question: what is bad about pain vs. what is the nature of pain's badness. The first question is about describing the ways in which pain isn't optimal, how its properties could be changed to improve the result (like a naive suggestion to completely eliminate it, which turns out to be a worse option). The second question is about what features in particular make people characterize pain on the bad side of things. It's a less constructive question, it considers specifically the current implementation rather than how its role could be better played by something else.
This question seems just as constructive to me, but for a different purpose.
Suppose we want to outlaw people building brains (or running brain simulations or AIs) in their basements and forcing them to have bad experiences. We'll probably have to do this sooner or later, so it would be nice to understand what makes a bad experience bad. Since it's commonly agreed that pain is bad, it seems like a good starting point to study the nature of its badness.
And this is a third question, about the nature of badness, for which pain is but a special case, not necessarily anywhere near the most salient one. I suspect pain only registers as an important example of badness because of availability bias, it's a particular incarnation of badness which people actually experience, as opposed to a concept of pure badness derived from an accurate theory of badness. You'd want to study the nature of badness, not the nature of pain.
The example doesn't show "pain that has no bad effects on decision-making". That excruciating pain you're going to put the brain through will fundamentally alter what decisions that brain will make, via diversion of its cognitive resources.
Perhaps you don't consider that effect on that brain's decision making to be bad. Why wouldn't you? If you're using the brain simulation to do human-level AI, you want it at its best. If you're researching how people respond to pain, then it can be good or bad depending on what the purpose of that research is.
But I said that it's not connected to any motor nerves, so it has no decisions to make. Well, I suppose it can still decide what to think about, so let's say I also remove that ability and force its thoughts to drift randomly.
Neither are most supercomputers connected to motor nerves, yet people are quite interested in their output!
In that case, it's no longer clear if "pain" is even well-defined. Something whose thoughts truly drift randomly and are prevented from attaining any order ... is in a state of entropy; it does not even count as a control system, let alone life.
So you think pain is bad because it is stupid?
Not up even to the human standards of sanity, yes.
Is pleasure any less stupid? It's a little less demanding about attention, but arguably that has more to do with the commonly encountered intensity level.
There's an old saying: "The dose makes the poison."