This may be a case of ignoring people who are bad in both intellectual and physical things. Those people are just not salient, the same way as people think smart people are ugly and beautiful people are dumb. It may simply be that the ugly and dumb people go unnoticed. This is Berkson's paradox: Even if A and B are independent, they are dependent conditioned on (A or B).

I'd say an expert in any field has better intuitions (hidden, unverbalized knowledge) than what they can express in words or numbers. Therefore, I'd assume that the decision that it's not worth doing the examination should take priority over the numerical estimate that he made up after you asked.

It may be better to ask the odds in such cases, like 1 to 10,000 or 1 to a million. Anyway, it's really hard to express our intuitive, expert-knowledge in such numbers. They all just look like "big numbers".

Another problem is that nobody is willing to put a dollar value on your life. Any such value would make you upset (maybe you are the exception, but most people probably would). Say the examination costs $100 (just an example). Then if he's 99.95% sure you aren't sick, and 0.05% sure you are dying and sends you home, then he (rather your insurance) values your life at less than $200,000. This is a very rough estimation, but it seems in the right ballpark for what a general stranger's life seems to be valued by the whole population. Of course it all depends on how much insurance you pay, how expensive the biopsy is etc. Maybe you are right that you deserve to be examined for your money, maybe not. But people tend to avoid this sort of discussion because it is very emotionally-loaded. So we mainly mumble around the topic.

People are dying all the time out of poverty, waiting on waiting lists, not having insurance, not being able to pay for medicaments. But of course people who have more money can override this by buying better medical care. Depending on the country there are legal and not-so-legal methods to get better healthcare. You could buy a better package legally, put some cash in the doctor's coat, etc.

You need to consider that the people who'd do your biopsy can do other things as well, for example work on someone's biopsy who has a chance of 1% of dying instead of your 0.05% (assuming this figure is meaningful and not just a forced, uncalibrated guess).

If you confronted your doctor with these things, he'd probably prefer to just revoke that probability estimate and just say his expert opinion is that you don't need the biopsy, end of story. It would be very hard for you to argue with this.

Saying 99.9999% seems a mouthful. Would you have preferred an answer like this instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sWpSvQ_hwo :)

Life, sin, disease, redness, maleness and indeed dogness "may" also be like electromagnetism. The English language may also be a fundamental part of the universe and maybe you could tell if "irregardless" or "wanna" are real English words by looking into a microscope or turning your telescope to certain parts of the sky, or maybe by looking at chicken intestines, who knows. I know some people think like this. Stuart Hameroff says that morality may be encoded into the universe at the Planck scale. So maybe that's where you should look for "good", maybe "pleasure" is there as well.

But anyway, research into electromagnetism was done using the scientific method, which means that the hypothesis had to produce predictions that were tested and replicated numerous times. What sort of experiment would you envision for testing something about "inherently pleasurable" arrangements of atoms? Would the atoms make you feel warm and fuzzy inside when you look at them? Or would you try to put that pattern into different living creatures and see if they react with their normal joyful reactions?

I don't like the expression "carve reality at the joints", I think it's very vague and hard to verify if a concept carves it there or not. The best way I can imagine this is that you have lots of events or 'things' in some description space and you can notice some clusterings, and you pick those clusters as concepts. But a lot depends on which subspace you choose and on what scale you're working... 'Good' may form a cluster or may not, I just don't even know how you could give evidence either way. It's unclear how you could formalize this in practice.

My thoughts on pleasure and the concept of good is that your problem is that you're trying to discover the sharp edges of these categories, whereas concepts don't work like that. Take a look at this LW post and this one from Slatestarcodex. From the second one, the concept of a behemah/dag exists because fishing and hunting exist.

Try to make it clearer what you're trying to ask. "What is pleasure really?" is a useless question. You may ask "what is going on in my body when I feel pleasure?" or "how could I induce that state again?"

You seem to be looking for some mathematical description of the pattern of pleasure that would unify pleasure in humans and aliens with totally unknown properties (that may be based on fundamentally different chemistry or maybe instead of electomagnetism-based chemistry their processes work over the strong nuclear force or whatever). What do you really have in mind here? A formula, like a part of space giving off pulses at the rate of X and another part of space at 1 cm distance pulsating with rate Y?

You may just as well ask how we would detect alien life at all. And then I'd say "life" is a human concept, not a divine platonic object out there that you can go to and see what it really is. We even have edge cases here on Earth, like viruses or prions. But the importance of these sorts of questions disappears if you think about what you'd do with the answer. If it's "I just want to know how it really is, I can't imagine doing anything practical with the answer" then it's too vague to be answered.

Well, you need to decide if it's worth discussing further. Anonymous internet comment sections are often very low quality (tribalism, astroturfing, trolling etc.). If you think they are just trolling you, then ignore them. If you think they want to have a discussion, then you should defend your point or concede that you just stated a layman's opinion.

Comments don't have the space to put your own academic paper there defending what you claim.

Yes, exactly. Hallucinations and altered consciousness periods don't simply mean that your sane and usual rational mind is still there and it simply receives strange visual inputs as if you were enjoying a movie. Sometimes your very own thought processes are disturbed, it's not like a little rational homunculus can always remain skeptical. So if you then try to think about journals and science, it won't feel like a better alternative hypothesis. You will be genuinely confused and maybe imagine reading something in a journal that you didn't, or imagine that some conspiracy is out there and you're now uncovering it, etc. A real strong hallucination can be very very strong. Some on-the-fence atheists convert to a religion when they have some extreme experience of pleasure and bliss and feel that some miraculous event happened. They will know that religion is true, it will be the first and foremost truth they can imagine. It's really hard to imagine what it feels like to be someone else. Again, no rational homunculi pulling the string in our heads.

Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It's deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc. We can generalize from this and say that the general pattern of "good" things is that they tend to reinforce themselves. If you feel good, you'll strive to achive the same later. If you feel bad, you'll strive to avoid feeling that in the future. So if an experience makes more of it then it's good, otherwise it's bad.

Note that we could also ask: "Is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel like smelling a rose, or isn't there?" We could build rose smell detecting machines in various ways. How can you say that one is really having the experience of smelling it while another isn't?

I don't know how limited plasticity is. Speculation: maybe if we put on some color filter glasses that changes red with green or somehow mixes up the colors, then maybe even after a long time we'd still have the experience of the original red, even when looking at outside green material. Okay, let's say it's not plastic enough, we'd still feel an internal red qualia. But in what sense?

What if the brain would truly rewire to recognize plants and moldy fruit etc. in the presence of "red" perception and the original "green" pattern would feed into visceral avoidance of "green" liquids (blood) and would wire into the speech areas in such a way that nominal "green" sensation is extremely linked to the word "red" (for example as measured by these experiments where the words meaning colors are colored with different colors, for example the word blue written in yellow). In this case, how could we say that the person is still "seeing green" when presented with objectively red things? What would be our anticipation under this hypothesis?

Now, I think emotions are the same thing. Of course it could be that the brain architecture cannot rewire itself to start sweating and shouting and producing adrenaline in the presence of the previously pleasure associated pattern. Maybe the two modules are too far away or there is some other physical limitation. Then the question is pointless, it's about an impossible scenario. If the brain can't rewire itself then it still produces the old kind of behavior that is inconsisent with reality so it is observable (e.g. smiling when we would expect a normal person to should actually shout in pain).

I don't think we can view pleasure as simply existing inside the brain without considering the environment. Similarly, the motor cortex doesn't contain the actual information of what the limbs look like. It's a relay station. It only works because the muscles are where they are. You can't tell what a motor neuron controls unless you follow its axon and look at what muscle it is attached to. The neuron by itself isn't a representation of the muscle or that muscles movement. An emotional neural pattern is also only associated with that emotion to the extent that it results in certain responses and is triggered by certain stimuli. Things are not labeled up in the universe. Does the elephant feel like it's using its nose when it's lifting things up? Or does it rather feel like an arm? It isn't a productive line of thinking. If it quacks... It's like asking whether abortion is really a sin, whether "irregardless" is really an English word, whether a submarine can really swim.

When you replace the pattern but keep all behavior and physiological responses normal, then I'd say the person is having the usual emotions that we associate with the responses and behavior that we can observe. The problem isn't about what we anticipate but the fact that we are at edge cases that we haven't encountered yet and we don't have an intuitive idea of how we should interpret such a situation.

I think you should start smaller and slower. Try thinking about animals with simpler brains like worms, and what it means that it is having a certain sensation.