Zombies Should Have Human Rights

Scottie, Wowbagger and I disagree about about whether or not suffering can be objectively measured. I think it can be measured whereas I gather that Wowbagger thinks it cannot be measured.
Throughout I am using 'suffering' as a synonym for 'pain'.


To add more evidence to the point of view that suffering can be measured, a doctor can and does estimate how much suffering a patient is feeling when the patient is a baby who cannot express his feelings voluntarily.The doctor observes what injury or illness the baby has and observes clinical signs of suffering. When a patient volunteers that his suffering is bad the doctor prescribes pain killers according to the patient's own reports and also according to the doctor's own observations. The patient's own reports are not entirely reliable on their own because the patient may deny that he is suffering much due to macho pride or some such attitude.(NB I am not saying that the doctor should invade the patient's right to choose whether or not to get pain relief).

No value is added to the above scenarios by the claim that suffering is too subjective to be measurable.I wonder about the Kung Fu master, I suspect that his absence of reported suffering is not mental but is because the Kung Fu master can alter the neuronal behaviour in his brain, therefore the master is not feeling the pain that most people would feel, and is objectively, physically, not suffering so that if his brain were scanned it would be observed that little or no suffering could be observed. By the way, I am not entirely sure that bain scans are as transparent and useful as I am assuming, but if not, please let what I claim about brain scans stand as thought experiment.

http://paincenter.stanford.edu/press/pr ... .01.09.pdf

Seems to have been written in 2008. Indicates that not only philosophy regarding mind and qualia but also the law of the land is being influenced by advances in neuroscientific knowledge.

Is "suffering" objective, subjective, or both?

I think your question is important, and I think it tells us something about what is morally right and wrong. There is a sense where a person's suffering or pain can be both subjective and objective. It's subjective because it's relative to you, i.e., your experiencing it. However, if others are observing your suffering, then it's objective for them -they can observe your pain as long as your not purposely trying to conceal it.


What follows is directed at the thread as a whole.

Now if what is morally right and wrong is objective, then there must be some "thing," call it a property or whatever, that we all can observe apart from what a culture, society, person, or persons says or thinks. The question then is - are there moral facts that can be objectified? After all most people believe that for something to be an objective fact as opposed to a subjective or relative fact, then the fact must exist apart from what I think or feel (it's independent of me). For example, the Earth has one moon is an objective fact, and it's a fact apart from what anyone believes about the statement.

So if I make the claim that something is objectively immoral, then there must be something that is observable. What is it? I will answer this by giving an example of what most people would agree is immoral - cutting off someone's arm without good reason, i.e., I cut off their arm because it makes me happy. I will make the claim that it is objectively immoral because of the harm done. What are the objective facts that all can observe? We can see the person's agony, we can see their pain, we can observe their arm severed from the body, and we can see the blood. These are all objective facts of the harm done to the person with the severed arm. I don't see how one could argue otherwise. The facts of this immoral act are no less facts than the fact that the Earth has one moon.

Some immoral acts are difficult to discern because we can't always agree on the harm done. But just because it is difficult to know whether X, Y, and Z are immoral, that doesn't mean that we can't know that A, B, and C are immoral - and objectively so. I don't think it is difficult to see that lying is generally wrong, or that stealing is generally wrong. Most of us can see the harm that is caused by these kinds of actions.

Finally, although I said that all evil causes harm, I don't want to intimate that all harm is evil. For instance, I can cut off someone's arm to save their life.

I think there are at most two simple rules: Minimize suffering, and possibly also maximize pleasure.

Hedonist.

And that follows from the factual observation that suffering is intrinsically bad. (And analogically pleasure being intrinsically good.) There's nothing else we need.

So you observed the fact that suffering is intrinsically bad? How did you do that?

Why am I not sure about pleasure? It's complicated. Very briefly: Imagine a world in which sentience had never developed. Could we say there's something bad about that world? That it's bad when there's nothingness instead of pleasure? That's a though question. I think I've got it figured out, but I'll leave it open for here.

This contributed nothing. Why did you include it?

Thinking ethically means thinking universally. If my suffering is bad, it's not bad because it's mine, it's bad because it's suffering.

Okay, but this is only a comment about 'universality', not suffering.

There's nothing special about the spatio-temporal location that makes it *my* suffering. So it follows from my first person knowledge of suffering that all suffering is bad. That's a fact about ethics.

No, that's a fact about what it means for Ethics to be 'universal'. It says absolutely nothing about suffering being bad.

People will come with all kinds of objections, i.e. "isn't there value in justice, truth, freedom, beauty etc.", but if one accepts a consequentalist framework, there'd have to be tradeoffs in the utility functions. And that causes huge problems, which I won't go into though.

What if we don't accept a consequentialist framework. Let me rephrase that, what if we don't subscribe to a highly contention theoretical view such as consequentialism? In other words, you don't have a good response to the objection that there's value in justice and truth and freedom. So your only response is to say that if your opponent subscribes to a contentious ethical view like consequentialism, well, then he's got a problem. You're like the world's best philosopher: you merely attribute to your opponent positions which cause him the most problems. Brilliant stuff.

They may also point out cases in which utilitarianism seemingly has counterintuitive conclusions. But think about it, by definition, the utilitarian choice will involve the least amount of suffering.

Yeah, that's right -- and that creates the counter-intuitive conclusions. Your very basis for your Ethics is so deeply flawed that it causes counter-intuitive conclusions. That's not a good way to kick of a campaign, by conceding that your platform sucks.

By rejecting it, one is arguing for extra suffering.

Wrong again. People who reject your Utilitarianism don't promote more suffering, they reject your conception of Ethics. You've made suffering the basis of Ethics. People are free to adopt positions which hold that suffering is bad but which don't make suffering the basis of their Ethics. But I guess you got a monopoly on the idea that suffering is bad. I reject this idea, but certainly Utilitarians didn't corner the market. Plus, your view doesn't just lead to counter-intuitive conclusions -- it leads to embarrassingly bad conclusions. Like killing one innocent man in favor of sparing his ten attackers. That too is brilliant, I'd like to say.

Why would anyone argue for extra suffering?

Nietzsche might, but no one has here, so which strawman exactly are you fighting?

Blah. No arguments here.

Fiveredapples is concerned about whether or not pain is always a bad thing. Certainly pain generally is good.Pain (and suffering generally) are qualities evolved alongside mobility to the effect that mobility is limited to areas and movements that are not correlated with pain. We see this cause and effect in small and simple organisms. Clinically, a person who is unable to feel local pain say in a knee joint will damage the knee joint. The ability to feel pain is one of the uses of consciousness. Similar claims can be made for suffering generally.

Causing harm to beings other than oneself is not the same as causing suffering. Harming others is causing unnecessary suffering or pain. Universality or universalisability is the basis for ethics for the natural reason that we are social animals and if universalisability were absent from our motivations we would kill each other off. This we cannot do as long as we are human beings. The occasions when we break the rule of universalisability are when we rationalise that some other group is less deserving than ourselves, or when we are mad.

I think there are at most two simple rules: Minimize suffering, and possibly also maximize pleasure.

Hedonist.

Yes, Sherlock. Hedonism for all.

So you observed the fact that suffering is intrinsically bad? How did you do that?

No being in pain could ever wish for an increase of pain. Every sentient being avoids suffering, not because it's "tradition" or "learned", but because the nature of suffering is to cause the owner of the experience to avoid it. Of course some people will undergo some suffering intentionally for certain reasons, but only because they thereby expect to prevent even more future suffering, or because they expect some great reward which causes an intense longing -- which, if unfulfilled, is suffering as well.

People will come with all kinds of objections, i.e. "isn't there value in justice, truth, freedom, beauty etc.", but if one accepts a consequentalist framework, there'd have to be tradeoffs in the utility functions. And that causes huge problems, which I won't go into though.

What if we don't accept a consequentialist framework.

Then that leads to extra suffering as well, and also to huge inconsistencies. You might want to check out the paper "The two dogmas of deontology", it deals with some reasons why non-consequentialism is absurd.

They may also point out cases in which utilitarianism seemingly has counterintuitive conclusions. But think about it, by definition, the utilitarian choice will involve the least amount of suffering.

Yeah, that's right -- and that creates the counter-intuitive conclusions. Your very basis for your Ethics is so deeply flawed that it causes counter-intuitive conclusions.

Your theory implies that it's okay to torture infants in some cases, even when this in no way increases a "greater good"! That's more counter-intuitive than anything utilitarianism ever advocated.

Fiveredapples is concerned about whether or not pain is always a bad thing. Certainly pain generally is good. Pain (and suffering generally) are qualities evolved alongside mobility to the effect that mobility is limited to areas and movements that are not correlated with pain.

You need to distinguish functional reasons from intrinsic reasons. Pain evolved for a reason, and often it's useful because it prevents us from getting injured, or it lets us realize that we are injured and then causes us to not get even more injured. But that doesn't make the intrinsic nature of pain good! Those are just indirect reasons. If you could have all the above functions of pain through some other mechnism, you certainly wouldn't want actual pain in addition, just for the hell of it.

Wowbagger wrote:

You need to distinguish functional reasons from intrinsic reasons. Pain evolved for a reason, and often it's useful because it prevents us from getting injured, or it lets us realize that we are injured and then causes us to not get even more injured. But that doesn't make the intrinsic nature of pain good! Those are just indirect reasons. If you could have all the above functions of pain through some other mechnism, you certainly wouldn't want actual pain in addition, just for the hell of it.

Certainly.However can one imagine what sort of mechanism could substitute for stimulus and response? Let's be practical and admit that life has to include suffering.The good ethics are aimed at alleviating suffering which is inevitable.

Being a bit of a platonic guy with a dualistic view on some aspects of the world... I disagree with you.
I believe conscience has a special quality not defined by a mathematical formula or a deterministic way.
I also believe that most likely, conscience has basic grounds on quantum mechanics making it random or in other words indeterministic.
For zombies to have human rights they have to be indeterministic by behaviour and by nature (hardware).
I believe in free will and only a free will zombie can have human rights. Consequentially in that case he stops being a zombie to be a full human.
For the case of free will I use Erwin Schrödinger "incontrovertible direct experience" that we have free will. He also states that the human body is wholly or at least partially determined, leading him to conclude that "...'I' -am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature."

Now, IF there is no free will AND the whole of human behaviour can theoretically be discribed mathematically THEN I agree that zombies should have human rights... because we'd be zombies as well... though deluded ones.

Teralek wrote:

Now, IF there is no free will AND the whole of human behaviour can theoretically be discribed mathematically THEN I agree that zombies should have human rights... because we'd be zombies as well... though deluded ones.

Philosophical zombies aras as you surmise, artefacts. In view of the fact that it is at least theoretically possible for humans to be artificially cloned, i.e. constructed from a few basic cells as Dolly the Sheep was so constructed, it matters that artifically constructed humans are conceded human rights.

If one reads up a little on modern neuroscience one learns that all human choices are determined by physical events in brain and body proper. Therefore there is no Free Will despite our wishing and intuiting that Free Will exist.

True, we are each and all deluded to some extent or other.The justification for doing philosophy is to try to be a little less deluded. It is the glory of human beings that we can try to rise above the necessity of our heritage.We may be zombies but we are not dinosaurs.

Philosophical zombies aras as you surmise, artefacts. In view of the fact that it is at least theoretically possible for humans to be artificially cloned, i.e. constructed from a few basic cells as Dolly the Sheep was so constructed, it matters that artifically constructed humans are conceded human rights.

If one reads up a little on modern neuroscience one learns that all human choices are determined by physical events in brain and body proper. Therefore there is no Free Will despite our wishing and intuiting that Free Will exist.

True, we are each and all deluded to some extent or other.The justification for doing philosophy is to try to be a little less deluded. It is the glory of human beings that we can try to rise above the necessity of our heritage.We may be zombies but we are not dinosaurs.

Hello Belinda.
True twins are actually perfect clones! We don't need to wait until we can do it in a lab, they exist already.
There is another way also to look a the p-zombie problem which is the chinese room or the turing test. Quite nice thought experiences about AI too.
This all points to the problem of subjective conscient experience. This is a pressing problem that we are going to have to decide sooner or later given the advances on AI technology. We could have a computer that can pass the turing test very soon.

I don't question that physical events determine our choices, that is obvious. The way I see it is for determinism to be true there can be no exceptions to this, AND as of consequence the whole of a human life can be predicted by a mathematical formula. In this case a world like the one pictured on the movie Minority Report is ethically sound.
I think you can't have p-zombies because sooner or later you would discover something "odd" about their behaviour, being sort of deterministic. So they would be different from us.

Until someone can show me undeniable proof that the whole of the human behaviour can be predicted I will keep having my justified belief that we have free will. The way I see it, if we lived in a universe that would be completely predictable I would accept determinism, since this is not the case, I keep supporting indeterminism.

But determinism does not imply predictability.

Well... I think it does in theory... it may not be feasible because of extreme complexity. I can't think of anything remarkably deterministic which is not at the same time predictable.

Yes, it does within certain theories, I think, such as mathematics or rigorous scientific experiments .But such theories as mathematics and rigorous scientific experiments are not real life which is infinitely complex, but are more or less useful models for real life.

Regarding real life rather than closed sytems such as maths, determinism belief, like Free Will belief is a choice based upon faith and not upon sufficient evidence.

My choice of determinism is based upon my rejection of the Abrahamic religions' doctrines of Free Will belief in order that individuals may be blamed and punished either on Earth or in a life hereafter. Neither is there any neuroscientific basis for Free Will and I trust modern science.

Well, point taken.
I had an experience as a little boy that could have put me on the path of religion. I had a Roman Christian education.
At the beginning anyway, I saw many inconsistencies in the Christian faith. I started searching the explanation outside the Christian faith. I still didn't get the answer that I wanted.
I also had a natural curiosity for science and today I have a degree in biotechnology.
So I put my brain to work. My conclusion is that neither science or religion had a complete grasp of reality. Because I had this inconsistence in my head between my personal experience and the lack of answers in science.
And I started to see in much of the scientific thought rejecting perfectly "possible" ideas just because they completely abject "Abrahamic religions' doctrines". To do correct science we must forget they exist. Don't expect results, don't assume anything, just go with the flow.

I took my own path and when I defend indeterminism I'm not forcefully defending a "God", I'm not even thinking of ANY religion, though many think I am...
Also in my mind for indeterminism to be false there cannot be ANY pattern of human behaviour that is unpredictable.
Belinda if you do a google search you see that there is some research that supports free will. The problem is some critics and advocates of free will always take it to the religious spectrum... this is what really annoys me.

You can't predict quantum uncertainty, but that doesn't mean that the future isn't "predetermined". There can be determinism without complete predictability. Physics states that time is just a dimension, so past and future exist in some sense everywhere.

Also, what value is there in indeterminism? I never got that point, I don't see how this is supposed to give anyone "free will". If I choose something rationally, my choice will have reasons. And reasons determine my choice. If reasons would give me random output, they wouldn't be reasons. If your decision-making rests on quantum randomness, how exactly is that a "will"? If your brain just throws dice, this neither seems particularly "free", nor does it seem like a "will" to me. I think the whole notion of "free will" is incoherent. And it doesn't make sense evolutionarily.

In defense of a compatibilistic view I recommend the following paper: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/fre ... rfinal.pdf
It makes much more sense to me to define free will in this way. When people talk about free will, I don't think they want to be more random. They want moral responsibility!

Teralek, you say that if humans have free will, you wouldn't give artificial humans that don't have it human rights. But if it turned out that humans don't have free will, you would give the artificial ones human rights as well.

1. Wouldn't you want to operate with the benefit of the doubt in the first case? Since you don't even know whether humans have free will, wouldn't you want to include the artificial ones, at least until the question is settled with some more certainty?

2. If it turns out humans don't have free will, why not reject human rights altogether? Wouldn't that be the consistent thing to do according to your first statement? If artificial humans without free will don't deserve human rights, why should it be different for "natural" humans?

3. Do you think beings without free will deserve ethical consideration at all? For instance, human infants or people born mentally handicapped certainly don't have free will, do they count too? How about non human animals?

Teralek, there is a reason behind Free Will explanations gravitating towards religion. Philosophic Free Will implies that there is an originator of the will so that the will is independent of previous or concurrent causes of it, such as inherited propensities, or scientific laws. The one and only possible originator(if originator there be) is God,however, and Free Will is a special dispensation from God to humans so that they can freely choose whether or not to obey God's revealed law.

This myth is the only possible explanation for philosophic Free Will qua absolutely uncaused originator.