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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1890 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Can’t give a full response now, but mostly agree.

I don't think you need to be a spiritualist (although I am) to think that ML systems cannot experience pain.

I believe we’ve spoken about this before; I agree if you are defining pain as the sensation of physical pain, since you likely can’t capture most of its dimensions without a body or a sense of ownership over that body as belonging to you. Affective and emotional pain, on the other hand, is a broader category; it’s not prima facie implausible for an artificial system to have some kind of weird hall-of-mirrors distorted analogue of that which represents “negatively valenced response to stimulus”.

But qualia is very subtle - for instance, things as similar as men and women can experience distinctly different qualia.

It gets way weirder and more fucky than that: I’m aware of a study where researchers blinded rats and fitted them with a prosthesis which fed their visual cortexes info from a geomagnetic sensor. Their brains quickly adapted to the new sensory modality, to the extent that they were navigating mazes almost as well as sighted rats. Mole rats use magnetonavigation, and become incredibly stressed out and fearful when placed in experimental conditions that prevent them from sensing that. I have no clue how it would feel to be that rat, to be able to experience the Earth’s magnetic field firsthand. I literally have no conception of what that looks or feels like.

Thus I think that if we ever were able to make self-aware machines, their qualia could and would likely be vastly different from ours, possibly incomprehensibly so.

This is my take too. There’s no reason to expect their subjective perceptions would be similar at all; just because qualia may arise does not mean that qualia needs to be anthropomorphic. It’s the main problem I have with a lot of sentient-AI fiction; they’re just humans in metal skins meant to induce empathy and understanding. But in all likelihood the inner workings of a human mind and any kind of hypothetical future ML model won’t be the same.

I won’t speak on the topic of whether radically dissimilar alien qualia deserve moral consideration, except that I expect the topic to be divisive if it ever becomes a salient point of conversation. Though as per the blinded rat study it’s possible that humans themselves in the future will be able to use prostheses to experience many dimensions of unnatural qualia inaccessible to us, it’s likely they’ll assign moral value to them, and as such they may be far more sympathetic to the idea of the welfare of cognitive aliens.

I have no clue how it would feel to be that rat, to be able to experience the Earth’s magnetic field firsthand. I literally have no conception of what that looks or feels like.

And thanks to meddlesome medical ethics rules you never will!

just because qualia may arise does not mean that qualia needs to be anthropomorphic. It’s the main problem I have with a lot of sentient-AI fiction; they’re just humans in metal skins meant to induce empathy and understanding. But in all likelihood the inner workings of a human mind and any kind of hypothetical future ML model won’t be the same.

Yes, exactly.

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