Armok_GoB comments on A Thought Experiment on Pain as a Moral Disvalue - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Wei_Dai 11 March 2011 07:56AM

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Comment author: Armok_GoB 11 March 2011 01:12:13PM 1 point [-]

I'd say most likely most of those DO imply real pain, and probably vastly greater amounts than merely a human being tortured for 10 min. Now, it is obviously possible to fool a human to think pain is happening when it is not, but I'm not so sure that is not just due to humans being stupid and use sensory inefficiently.

For such a short time it might even be possible to make a perfect illusion like this, depending on bandwidth, but if this experiment was a year instead of 10 min and the observer was a superintelegence, I'd not be surprised to see a mathematical proof such an illusion can not be created without using actual pain on a concious observer. I wouldn't be surprised if it were possible either. I would be very surprised if a human could come up with such a safe method.