Manfred comments on Inverse p-zombies: the other direction in the Hard Problem of Consciousness - Less Wrong

17 Post author: gwern 18 December 2011 09:32PM

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Comment author: Manfred 19 December 2011 02:13:55PM *  1 point [-]

That's reasonable, and I'd agree there are some good third options (though if the pain is managed to less than getting my teeth drilled into under local anesthesia, I wouldn't really care). We're pretty much faced with my dichotomy now, though. So my statement was the sort of boring one that the current cost/benefit of going into surgery for anything worth even a few weeks of life remains very similar.

Comment author: gwern 19 December 2011 02:56:14PM *  4 points [-]

We're pretty much faced with my dichotomy now, though.

I'm not an anesthesiologist though, so I can't agree with that. Maybe there are alternatives. I can imagine there being workarounds or trade-offs which make more sense in light of these thoughts about i-zombies, such as greater use of local anesthetics (where it's very easy to test whether it works, as opposed to blanket general anesthetics).