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Yvain comments on A Thought Experiment on Pain as a Moral Disvalue - Less Wrong
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That position implies we should be indifferent between torturing a person for six hours in a way that leaves no permanent damage, or just making them sit in a room unable to engage in their normal activities for six hours (or if you try to escape by saying all pain causes permanent psychological damage, then we should still be indifferent between killing a person quickly, or torturing em for six hours and then killing em).
I think this is a controversial enough position that even if you're willing to bite that bullet, before you state it you should at least say you understand the implication, are willing to bite the bullet, and maybe provide a brief explanation of why.
First I want to note that "the sensation of pain, considered in and of itself" is, after "the redness of red", the second most standard example of "qualia". So if, like good Dennettians, we're going to deny that qualia exist then we'd better deny that "the sensation of pain in and of itself" has moral disvalue!
Instead we should be considering: "the sensation of pain in and of how-it-relates-to-other-stuff". So how does pain relate to other stuff? It comes down to the fact that pain is the body's "damage alarm system", whose immediate purpose is to limit the extent of injury by preventing a person from continuing with whatever action was beginning to cause damage.
So if you want to deny qualia while still holding that pain is morally awful (albeit not "in and of itself") then I think you're forced at least some of the way towards my position. 'Pain' is an arrow pointing towards 'damage' but not always succeeding - a bit like how 'sweetness' points towards 'sugar'. This is an oversimplification, but one could almost say that I get the rest of the way by looking at where the arrow is pointing rather than at the arrow itself. (Similarly, what's "bad" is not when the smoke alarm sounds but when the house burns down.)
Well, it's manifestly not true that all pain causes permanent psychological damage (e.g. the pain from exercising hard, from the kind of 'play-fighting' that young boys do, or from spicy food) but it seems plausible that 'torture' does.
I admit this gave me pause.
There's a horrible true story on the internet about a woman who was lobotomised by an evil psychologist, in such a way that she was left as a 'zombie' afterwards (no, not the philosophers' kind of zombie). I've rot13ed a phrase that will help you google it, if you really want, but please don't feel obliged to: wbhearl vagb znqarff.
Let it be granted that this woman felt no pain during her 'operation' and that she wasn't told or was too confused to figure out what exactly was happening, or why the doctor kept asking her simple things - e.g. her name, or to hum her favourite tune. (The real reason, as best I can tell, was "to see how well a person with that amount of brain damage could still do so and so")
What I want to say is that even with these elaborations, the story is just as repulsive - it offends our moral sense just as much - as any story of torture. This would still be true even if the victim had died shortly after the lobotomy. More to the point, this story is massively more repulsive than, say, a story where Paul Atreides has his hand thrust into a 'pain box' for half an hour before being executed (presumably by a gom jabbar). (And that in turn feels somewhat more repulsive than a story where Paul Atreides is tricked into voluntarily holding his hand in the pain box and then executed, despite the fact that the pain is just as bad.)
Torture isn't just a synonym for "excruciating pain" - it's more complicated than that.
Here's a more appetising bullet: We should be indifferent between "Paul Atreides executed at time 0" and "Paul Atreides tricked into voluntarily holding his hand in the pain box for half an hour and then executed". (I'd be lying if I said I was 100% happy about biting it, but neither am I 100% sure that my position is inconsistent otherwise.)
I know Dennett's usually right about this sort of thing and so there must be something to that argument, but I've never been able to understand it no matter how hard I try. It looks too much like wishful thinking - "these qualia things are really confusing, so screw that." Certainly it's not the sort of Reduction with a capital "R" I've heard that's left me genuinely satisfied about the nonexistence of things like Free Will or Good or Essence-Of-Chair-Ness.
I would be hesitant to say the sensation of pain in and of itself has moral disvalue; I would say that people have preferences against pain and that the violation of those preferences causes moral disvalue in the same sense as the violation of any other preference. I would have no trouble with inflicting pain on a masochist, a person with pain asymbolia, or a person voluntarily undergoing some kind of conditioning.
Damage can also be something people have a preference against, but it's not necessarily more important than pain. There are amounts of torture such that I would prefer permanently losing a finger to undergoing that torture, and I suspect it's the same for most other people.
You seem to be arguing from "Things other than pain are bad" to "Pain is not bad", which is not valid.
I admit your Paul Atreides example doesn't disgust me so much, but I think that's because number one I have no mental imagery associated with gom jabbars, and number two I feel like he's a legendary Messiah figure so he should be able to take it.
If we start talking about non-Kwisatz Haderach people, like say your little sister, and we start talking about them being whipped to death instead of an invisible and inscrutable gom jabbar, I find my intuition shifts pretty far the other direction.
So I'm reading about your moral system in your other post, and I don't want to get into debating it fully here. But surely you can recognize that just as some things and systems are beautiful and fascinating and complex, there are other systems that are especially and uniquely horrible, and that it is a moral credit to remove them from the world. Sometimes I read about the more horrible atrocities perpetrated in the Nazi camps and North Korea, and I feel physically sick that there is no way I can't just kill everyone involved, the torturers and victims both, and relieve them of their suffering, and that this is the strongest moral imperative imaginable, much more important than the part where we make sure there are lots of rainforests and interesting buildings and such. Have you never felt this emotion? And if so, have you ever read a really good fictional dystopian work?
Not all pain, but certainly that's a factor.
I don't see how that follows. Killing someone quickly leaves them no time to contemplate the fact that all their plans and desires have come to a dead end; what is awful about torture is the knowledge of one's plans and desires being thwarted - even more awful than not allowing that person to carry out their plans and fulfill their desires. (Also, in many cases other people have plans and desires for us: they prefer us to be alive and well, to enjoy pleasure and avoid pain, and so on. Torture thwarts those desires as well, over and above killing.)
I don't think that this is as awful as the degree to which torture hurts.
Note that you're saying that not only is the thwarting of someone's plans a disvalue, having them contemplate the thwarting is an additional disvalue.
Also, since being tortured makes contemplation harder, you should prefer torturing someone for six hours and them killing them to letting them contemplate their imminent death in comfort for six hours and then killing them.
When you're being tortured you have no choice but to attend to the pain: you are not cognitively free to contemplate anything other than your own destruction. In comfort you could at least aim for a more pleasant state of mind - you can make your own plans for those six hours instead of following the torturer's, and if you have the strength, refuse to contemplate your own death.
But why do other people prefer for you to avoid pain, if pain is not a moral disvalue? And what exactly do they mean by "pain" (which is what the post asked in the first place)?
I liked this comment on Alicorn's post: "(pain) makes you want to pull away; it's a flinch, abstracted". What seems to matter about pain, when I think about scenarios such as the one you proposed, is its permanent aversive effect, something not present in simulated pain.
Trying to frame this in terms of anticipated experiences, the question I would want to ask about the posited ECP is, "if I meet this ECP again will they hold it against me that I failed to press the button, because of negative reinforcement in our first encounter". The way you've framed the thought experiment suggests that they won't have a memory of the encounter, in fact that I'm not even likely to think of them as an entity I might "meet".