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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Your firmware needs hardware to run, and only feels pain while it's running; even if we could make a perfect scan of your brain, it wouldn't actually continue to feel anything unless it could be reinstantiated on some hardware again.

You'd probably need several orders of magnitude less than an octillion cards, whereas our brains still have to get into the octillion-particle range before they're complex enough to start chatting about pain, but on the other hand our brains can register pain in a fraction of a second whereas the cards would probably take hours to weeks depending on the interconnect speed and the players.

What is your definition of pain?

Do people in movies feel pain when the movie is played, or once when it’s created? Do simulated people in thoughts feel pain? Do people in hypothetical movies and scenarios one could think of, and maybe do subconsciously or in forgotten dreams, feel pain? What happens when the substrate becomes more or less realistic (e.g. movie with emotive shapes -> movie with people -> game with simple decision tree -> game with simple LLM -> game with realistic LLM).

And how would we determine that a non-person, non-LLM feels pain?