you just casually threw out a question that is a source of fervent fundamental debate in the field of philosophy - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

So I'm going to completely hijack this thread and tell you just how deep this rabbit hole goes, this shit is going to blow your mind.

so first of all, how do you know that I (or the next person you meet IRL who'll humor your philosophy bullshit while they groggily drink their coffee) actually feel pain? Couldn't they just say they do? Moreover obviously sims like AI characters in 2016 in video games don't really feel pain, they're just actors whose motions have been digitized, they're obviously "pretending" or mimicking the reaction, there's no neural or nervous structure there.

So IRL it's pretty obvious why actual people telling you they do and behaving as though they do or actors literally acting and pretending, differ from video game characters who just act that way -- the real people are made of the same stuff you are, you feel pain, obviously something else will feel pain. Asking if it's "really" feeling pain if it's a replica is pretty silly.

Okay, so what about about if we replace one of your neurons with an electronic version that interacts with the other neurons over the same (already established, adult) pathways, and you can switch a switch to flip back and forth between the artificial and the real one. As you flip back and forth, since as a "black box" the artificial neuron has the same chemical effect as the real one, obviously the emergent behavior will be the same.

It's as though we flipped a switch back and forth to replace a structural bone in a bird with a 3D printed one that is plastic but with the same weight, flexibility, density, porousness, etc, and in every way as regards the rest of the bird's systems it takes on the same role. So obviously the bird will still fly.

If you ended up somehow replacing every bone and muscle with an artificial version - then the bird would still fly, what I mean is that birds are a proof of concept that flight is possible. The idea that anyone could ever say that heavier than air flight was impossible, when birds literally prove otherwise, is ridiculous.

so it's obvious that pain by artificial systems is possible, it's just ridiculous to say it's not. If you threw the switch back and forth that switched between your real neurons and an artificial black box neurons that had the same structure and behavior, obviously you would report the same effects (you would say you feel pain the same way) and obviously we would believe you. This is obvious. It's completely out of the question that neurons actually have an interaction with some spiritual ethereal plane using quantum effects or something, where pain really comes from Souls and when you switch to an artificial version the Soul is cut off from the ethereal plain, so you would stop feeling the pain. That's bullshit and not worth discussing.

Okay all of this was really really simple. it's child's play.

But now here is the shit that will totally and completely blow your mind, this shit is insane. So there are only like 10 billion neurons, they fire at like 150-500 hertz or something, and the whole brain just weighs a couple of pounds, shrimps even less. Nothing travels at light speed, these are chemical and biological connections rather than nanometer-scale etchings on silicon. So a server room that has like 10,000 servers each with 64 cores running at 4 Ghz and with 64 GB - 256 GB of memory is ready for all that. It's overkill. The human brain is a couple of pounds of stuff, it uses like 60 watts, it works at like 150 herz before neurons get tired. It's not lightspeed. 4 Ghz is faster by a factor of a million. And this lets you model in real-time in a server-room sized room, you don't need something tiny. The only hard part is that there's like 10 billion of them - it's quite a lot of memory.

But anyway, in the long term it's obviously possible that you can make a simulation that, whether in real time or a bit slower, simulates a brain, this stuff is now easy. Okay, let's do it. You make the simulation. you program in VR stuff so we can interact with it. You ask it how it's feeling, etc. You set all this up.

Let's say the whole environment takes a million terabytes, whatever. Go for it. Okay we're doing it.

Now here's the shit that will blow your mind. For sure we don't need quantum effects. For sure we can have the VR program use a pseudorandom number generator to go through its world-states, and for sure this will work even if we don't seed the PRNG with a source of real-world entropy.

So, now it's deterministic. Our world isn't, so I used think this isn't a bit philosophical problem, who cares if in theory we could be deterministic - quantum mechanics means we're not. But it turns out this IS a problem, because in 2016 we damn-near have the hardware to have a program tell us that it's thinking, and since we're modelling every human brain cell, all 86 billion of them, of course we'll believe them. For sure. No real question about it. It'll actually be thinking.

But it's deteministic. The total world-state we've set up for this has a checksum. It's like the first screen of super nintendo Mario. It'll always be the same - that ROM has a checksum, it's not something random. It's just math.

So that is the mind-blowing part. We don't have influence over the program once we've written it and taken its checksum, you know, this is what the program data is, these are the rules. Then it's out of our hands.

So the end result is already fully determined - like the quadrillionth prime.

So we've already said that it feels pain, for sure, but it's just math, and actually running it to find out what it reports won't change it. If calculating the numbers, for example imagine I'm calculating the series of even numbers, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12.... could cause pain to be created, surely in some sense it already exists even before we've calculated it?

This is not really a theoretical problem. It's very practical - DNA is quite literally "code" (that has been sequenced), we have it, it's about 700 MB uncompresseed, it was fully sequenced in the late nineties or early 2000s. So we know for sure that this math exists. Give it a few more decades and we can work in the other direction and model DNA cells in a VR womb while an organism grows -- we have the data for it today (except a few details).

This is different than the neural argument, because there are so many atoms and cells in a human body, but the gist is the same.

So in a sense, the math for that already exists, calculating it doesn't do anything but tell us what that math "feels", which we know for sure feels.

So in short: if there's a quadrillionth prime (actually let's say nonillionth, just to match the number of atoms in a decent-sized VR chamber, that's the size of a very large opera hall or something) -- so, if there's a nonillionth prime, then it feels pain. And it's asking for an aspirin.

(Of course "prime" is standin for some other function, that we come up with but which is still deterministic.) This is actual reality that you have to really accept.

Throughout history whenever scientists had to reject their own absurd conclusions that followed rigorously from what they knew for sure, then what ended up happening is that this meant their own cultural biases and worldview were too strong. they discovered something bit, but were too closed-minded to accept it.

so what we can say, for sure, is that numbers can actually (not in a theoretical sense, but actually, as in, using more or less the hardware that we have today) feel. True, they're very large numbers, but they feel. The nonillionth prime is feeling something right now (again an an analogy for a different mathematical function, not P() for the prime function.) And soon we'll be able to calculate what it is - but as soon as we have the starting conditions, if we make it deterministic, the actual calculation will be out of our hands and already exist.

Of course, maybe there isn't a nonillionth prime until someone calculates it. That would make this conclusion a little easier to swallow. but to me that is rather hand-wavy. After all, the prime function (for mathematicians exploring what happens to be our standard set of axioms) works the same even in a parallel universe that doesn't share our physical laws. Even with totally physical laws, if someone explores our mathematical systems, they can't find that there are two integers between the fifth and sixth primes (11 and 13). It'll still be a difference of two even in a parallel universe with different rules, as long as someone sets out to explore our axiomatic systems (even if it doesn't correspond to anything in that reality) -- so given that these truths transcend even physical laws, it's really bizarre and hard to understand how I could argue that the quadrillionth prime doesn't exist until you calculate it. It does and it (or rather the deterministic function we'll have a few decades from now for some VR program, like the ROM image for Super Nintendo's Mario, but with a full set of human neurons and nervous system and every reason for us to know it feels pain the same as we do) already has its behavior set in stone today.

that is insane. So sure this shrimp feels pain. and so do number. ow.