Let's talk about the kinds of things that experience pain.

Start with its function: it alerts us to damage, induces us to seek remediation, and to avoid the behavior that caused it. So only objects that can function in this way can have it: complex, living organisms. Maybe they don't all experience pain (do grapevines experience pain?), but this at least narrows it a good bit.

This doesn't get us any closer to understanding how to reproduce the experience in a robot. — Relativist

This boulder has the capacity for experience, but it differs in two important ways from us: 1) it lacks self-reflection on those experiences; 2) it does not experience qualia. — Relativist

I can write a hundred sentences describing the pain, but nothing I say will be equivalent to the raw experience. — Relativist

Not all matter is wet, even in the slightest degree, but liquids usually are. — bongo fury

rocks don't have experiences. What is it like to be an electron? is a nonsensical question — RogueAI

If the claim is that things like rocks have experiences, you're so close to idealism, just go whole hog and ditch the physical. — RogueAI

My point entirely. Bringing genes in the equation does not help much. — Olivier5

From a Darwinian standpoint rape advantages the rapist, but evidently not his victim — Olivier5

in essence the demand is a Conservative one: equality before the law — Benkei

Instantiating the function isn't enough - a zombie could record the frequency of reflected light and proceed to function appropriately. — Relativist

I don't see that you've accounted for qualia. Consider Mary, who is the world's foremost expert on color, but has never experienced redness. She learns to associate her intellectual knowledge with the experience only after she actually has the experience. — Relativist

Against Eliminativism

I am against eliminativism for the simple reason that I am directly aware of my own conscious experience, and whatever the nature of that may be, it seems that any philosophical argument that concludes that I am not actually having any conscious experience must have made some misstep somewhere and at best proven that something else mistakenly called "conscious experience" doesn't exist. But beyond my own personal experience, I find arguments put forth by other philosophers, such as Frank Jackson's "Mary's room" thought experiment, to convincingly defeat eliminativism, though not to defeat physicalism itself as they are intended to do.

In the "Mary's room" thought experiment, we imagine a woman named Mary who has been raised her entire life in a black-and-white room experiencing the world only through a black-and-white TV screen, but who has extensively studied and become an expert on the topic of color. She knows everything there is to know about the frequencies of electromagnetic radiation produced by various physical processes, how those interact with nerves in the eye and create signals that are processed by the brain, even the cultural significances of various colors, but she has never herself actually experienced color. We then imagine Mary leaving her room and seeing the color red for the first time, and in doing so, learning something new, despite supposedly knowing everything there was to know about color already: what the color red looks like.

This thought experiment was originally put forth to argue that there is something non-physical involved in the experience of color that Mary could not have learned about by studying the physical science of color, and I don't think it succeeds at all in establishing that, but I do think that it conclusively establishes that there is a difference between knowing, in a third-person fashion, how physical systems behave in various circumstances, and knowing, in the first person, what it's like to be such a physical system in such circumstances. In essence, I think it succeeds merely in showing that we are not philosophical zombies.

A more visceral analogous thought experiment I like to think of is that no amount of studying the physics, biology, psychology, or sociology of sex will ever suffice to answer the question "what's it like to have sex?" Actually doing it yourself is the only way to have that first-person experience; at best, that third-person knowledge of the way things behave can be instrumentally useful to recreating a first-person experience. But even then, you have to actually subject yourself to the experience to experience it, and that experience that can only be known in the first person is all that's meant by phenomenal consciousness. — Pfhorrest

One way I look it physicalism, is that if true, it should be possible, in principle, to construct a machine that operates identically to human consciousness. — Relativist

How would a machine experience qualia, in a non-zombie way? — Relativist

It is more of a tactic to publicize the political bias of producers and the people involved. — Gus Lamarch

So Qanon isn't far from the truth except that it's Trump and his buddies who are the paedophiles. — Benkei

Source on alleged Hunter Biden email chain verifies message about Chinese investment firm — NOS4A2

From that moment it can react to inputs and produce outputs (lights, for example), whereas previously it was as dormant as a rock. — Malcolm Lett

The whole point is that many 'weak emergences' add up to a 'strong emergence'. — Olivier5

Why would you be surprised at the sudden emergence of something metaphysically interesting? — Isaac

My take is that the distinction between weak and strong emergence is confusing a quantitative difference for a qualitative one. — Olivier5

If I kick a rock..Will it experience anything? Will it think to itself "I have been kicked!" ?

Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing. — Mark A. Bedau via Wikipedia

I never said it was magic, but it's an emerging phenomenon in the sense that it cannot happen outside of life. It has no meaning at the atomic level. No precursor, nothing that compares. It only means something at the cellular level. Below that level, it makes no sense at all. — Olivier5

Atoms don't reproduce, and molecules don't reproduce. They don't have any 'elementary reproduction' — Olivier5

I don't see any reason to assume they have any 'elementary consciousness' as a way to explain our consciousness... Both are just behaviors that emerged through life. — Olivier5

Try and understand what I am saying about the Heraclitus river. What is a river? It is not actually defined by the specific molecules of water flowing through it. Otherwise you wouldn't see the same river twice. Likewise your body is not defined by the atoms flowing through it. — Olivier5

Have you ever heard of sexual reproduction? It is a universal property of living systems, and you can't find it anywhere in non living stuff. Stones and stars don't copulate. QED here is a strongly emerging phenomenon. — Olivier5

human beings are not produced by chemical synthesis. They are made by sexual reproduction — Olivier5

You and I are made of information, essentially. — Olivier5

By describing it as panpsychism (everything is conscious), you are doing that. Yes, you are demoting consciousness in this context to any physical response function, but that itself is a result of poor choice of terminology. — Kenosha Kid

You sound like a panpsychist idealist. That's a contradiction — RogueAI

You're back to the Hard Problem: how does "active consciousness" emerge from "non-active consciousness" stuff? — RogueAI

What's your objection to strong emergence? — Olivier5

it must draw some arbitrary line somewhere, the line between things that are held to be entirely without anything at all like phenomenal consciousness and things that suddenly have it in full, and thus violates my previously established position against fideism. — Pfhorrest

It just seems like a category error to call physics 'psychology'. — Kenosha Kid

What is a 'purely functional' thing, then? — Kenosha Kid

I guess my salient point is: are you assuming some non-conscious stuff exists? If so, do you believe consciousness comes from this stuff? — RogueAI

legistlate that no more than 1 new justice can be appointed per 4-year presidential term regardless of how many vacancies occur during that term — 180 Proof

So one has to admit that D. Trump played so well his given role (better than his precedents and the greatest actors at Hollywood did) to the point almost all people (right, left.. etc..), if not all, were fully convinced that he is a real top decision-maker and not just another official speaker (just a great talented actor behind whom there are... sorry I don't like talking politics). — KerimF