Ethics of Brain Emulation

summerstay

I felt like this draft paper by Anders Sandberg was a well-thought-out essay on the morality of experiments on brain emulations. Is there anything you disagree with here, or think he should handle differently?

http://www.aleph.se/papers/Ethics%20of%20brain%20emulations%20draft.pdf

It's an interesting review of the subject matter, but I have trouble taking seriously a paper discussing suffering of software without ever defining the term suffering and how this definition applies to software.

From the eliminative materialist perspective we should hence be cautious about ascribing or not ascribing suffering to software, since we do not (yet) have a good understanding of what suffering is (or rather, what the actual underlying component that is morally relevant, is).

They acknowledged it.

0hyporational12y

What kind of a definition would satisfy you? IASP defines pain as "An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage." I'm not sure that definition can be understood without having experienced pain, or other unpleasant sensations. So if we can't even have an objective scientific definition of pain, why wouldn't we be satisfied with "everyone who has experienced suffering knows what it is, and that's as good a definition we can get with modern science"?