Do Computers Feel Pleasure or Pain like the Human Mind?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Human Mind! Computer Mind?
A dolt called Priddy, who had some academic post somewhere, writes that the mind, unlike a computer, can distinguish physical pleasure from pain, and can distinguish positive and negative values, also unlike a computer. He wants us to realise that moral discrimination is a function of the human mind. Who would be willing to doubt him—at present? But Priddy wants humans to be forever different from computers because we are not just organic machines, but have a soul! Or at least so we presume, because who can confidently say that computers will never be able to feel pleasure or pain.
What we call these things are our way of registering what is good for us and what is bad for us. But there seems to be nothing absolute about it. In Brave New World, people are conditioned to hate flowers like roses. In real life, there are plenty of people who cannot recognize that other humans feel pain, like themselves, or they enjoy inflicting it, if they do realize it. There are even some people who get pleasure from pain. It all shows that, if we are to presume that these things are functions of the souls God gave us, then they are peculiarly malleable things. The truth is that people like this philosopher are besotted with their own importance. Yet they have none!
This same man goes on to tell us that the mind evaluates using “deep-seated values” which depend on “moral intellect”. He is incapable of seeing that whatever these things are he is trying to mystify, they are the products of the human machine and its experience. He tries to tell us that consciousness directs the mind and not the reverse—again part of an argument that the mind is directed by a soul or something equivalent to it.
Yet what he really means is that human actions are sometimes unconscious. His “consciousness” that directs the mind is unconsciousness. So, tennis players react to the flight of the ball before it has time to register consciously. It is therefore an unconscious reaction. It is however an unconscious reaction that has taken countless hours of dedicated conscious practice to develop.
It turns out that motivation is the main difference between the human mind and computers. Human beings are self-motivating but computers are not. The reason is that human beings have desires. These air-heads just have not the intelligence or imagination to appreciate what they are saying. How can this blusterer say that a dedicated computer that turns the central heating on and off does not feel the cold and the heat? The plain fact is that it does, otherwise it would not work! The computer that does this is more intelligent than this author who thinks it cannot do it!
The computer is no more aware of the details of its sensors than human beings are of their senses, so if this computer had been given some sort of neural network that registered the results of the sensors and had been trained to respond to them, just as a human being is in life, how would it express the sensations from its thermometric input? If we had trained it to say that the sensation that it gets that causes it to switch the heat on is cold and the reverse is heat, then the computer can respond that it is switching the heat on because it feels cold! Idiots who have indoctrinated themselves with the idea of a soul cannot see that a computer must have one too, once it gets to this level of sophistication.
Doubtless, we will hear that the compuer does not really “feel” the heat like we do, but we can expect that from these pathetic things. The computer can justifiably complain that we do not feel like it does!
