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.)
That position implies we should be indifferent between torturing ... (or if you try to escape by saying all pain causes permanent psychological damage
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.
then we should still be indifferent between killing a person quickly, or torturing em for six hours and then killing em).
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.)
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!
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 thi...
Related To: Eliezer's Zombies Sequence, Alicorn's Pain
Today you volunteered for what was billed as an experiment in moral psychology. You enter into a small room with a video monitor, a red light, and a button. Before you entered, you were told that you'll be paid $100 for participating in the experiment, but for every time you hit that button, $10 will be deducted. On the monitor, you see a person sitting in another room, and you appear to have a two-way audio connection with him. That person is tied down to his chair, with what appears to be electrical leads attached to him. He now explains to you that your red light will soon turn on, which means he will be feeling excruciating pain. But if you press the button in front of you, his pain will stop for a minute, after which the red light will turn on again. The experiment will end in ten minutes.
You're not sure whether to believe him, but pretty soon the red light does turn on, and the person in the monitor cries out in pain, and starts struggling against his restraints. You hesitate for a second, but it looks and sounds very convincing to you, so you quickly hit the button. The person in the monitor breaths a big sigh of relief and thanks you profusely. You make some small talk with him, and soon the red light turns on again. You repeat this ten times and then are released from the room. As you're about to leave, the experimenter tells you that there was no actual person behind the video monitor. Instead, the audio/video stream you experienced was generated by one of the following ECPs (exotic computational processes).
Then she asks, would you like to repeat this experiment for another chance at earning $100?
Presumably, you answer "yes", because you think that despite appearances, none of these ECPs actually do feel pain when the red light turns on. (To some of these ECPs, your button presses would constitute positive reinforcement or lack of negative reinforcement, but mere negative reinforcement, when happening to others, doesn't seem to be a strong moral disvalue.) Intuitively this seems to be the obvious correct answer, but how to describe the difference between actual pain and the appearance of pain or mere negative reinforcement, at the level of bits or atoms, if we were specifying the utility function of a potentially super-intelligent AI? (If we cannot even clearly define what seems to be one of the simplest values, then the approach of trying to manually specify such a utility function would appear completely hopeless.)
One idea to try to understand the nature of pain is to sample the space of possible minds, look for those that seem to be feeling pain, and check if the underlying computations have anything in common. But as in the above thought experiment, there are minds that can convincingly simulate the appearance of pain without really feeling it.
Another idea is that perhaps what is bad about pain is that it is a strong negative reinforcement as experienced by a conscious mind. This would be compatible with the thought experiment above, since (intuitively) ECPs 1, 2, and 4 are not conscious, and 3 does not experience strong negative reinforcements. Unfortunately it also implies that fully defining pain as a moral disvalue is at least as hard as the problem of consciousness, so this line of investigation seems to be at an immediate impasse, at least for the moment. (But does anyone see an argument that this is clearly not the right approach?)
What other approaches might work, hopefully without running into one or more problems already known to be hard?