I guess I'll just be brief myself then.
Mind projection fallacy
Typical mind fallacy.
I'm not sure why you think i confused sociopathy (lack of guilt, sympathetic pain) with sadism (pleasure via pain of others).
I was more concerned about the nonempathy-psychopathy confusion. I'm not offended, but other people will be.
most humans compute altruism via interactions between the amygdala and the vmPFC
You don't know that, but more importantly naming brain regions doesn't explain anything. It's not necessary to bring real brains to the discussion.
referring to mere mirroring the affective states
Perhaps not mere, but that's how people use the word.
Qualia only applies to you, not to others.
Only if you're a solipsist. When people claim to have qualia, this is evidence they have qualia, because I have qualia, and they have brains similar to mine.
If we can make a high resolution record of what happens in their brain when they report qualia, we can look at what kind of computation those qualia are, and therefore determine if other agents have them too.
If we can make a high resolution record of what happens in their brain when they report qualia, we can look at what kind of computation those qualia are, and therefore determine if other agents have them too.
I'm confused...you seem to be suggesting that we use behavioral output to determine which parts of the brain are responsible for qualia, which you say should define morality... didn't you just tell me that I shouldn't use behavioral output to define my morality?
If we did it the way you said, and looked at the brain to see what happened when people...
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