Does illusionism kill sentientism?
The argument
Sentientism is the view that moral patienthood is grounded in sentience: typically, the capacity to have positive and negative experiences, like pleasure and pain.
Why does one believe pain is bad? I don’t know about you all, but the reason I think pain is bad is in virtue of it feeling bad. I have a conscious experience of pain which is really negative. I hate being in it; I don’t want to be in it.
What’s the metaphysical nature of pain? I don’t know; there’s lots of disagreement about it. But there’s a notion I’ve seen many illusionists espouse that it doesn’t really matter what the metaphysical nature of pain is; it’s bad because it feels bad, whether that feeling is something phenomenal, functional, representational, or biological. This seems to suggest that the term “pain” does not acquire its reference via a definition which stipulates its metaphysics.
How, then, does pain acquire its reference? How do we know which states to label “pain”?
One intuitively appealing way is by ostension. I get a burn, a cut, a pinch, salt in a wound: those are painful states. There’s some experiential feature that they have in common; that’s what I mean by pain. Whatever that feeling is.
The question now is: what am I ostending? According to the phenomenal realist, I am ostending some phenomenal state. According to the illusionist, however, phenomenal states don’t exist. So either I am ostending something which doesn’t exist, or I am ostending a “pseudo-phenomenal” state: a state which seems to be phenomenal, but isn’t.
But a question remains: what kind of states are pseudo-phenomenal states? Does my ostensive definition refer to a functional state, a representational state, a physical type, a physical token, a biological realization of a physical state?
How would you know the answer to that question? When someone points at a golden chalice full of H₂O and says “that’s water,” we can ask: do you mean that “water” rigidly designates whatever substance is in that cup, or that “water” designates “watery stuff” (transparent, low-viscosity, high-density, non-flammable liquids), or that “water” designates “whatever liquid is in that golden chalice”? Those are all distinct intensions, and you can distinguish which is which by asking “in virtue of what is that stuff you’re pointing at water?”
But if I ask “in virtue of what is that state pain?”, the only answer I can give via introspection is “in virtue of the fact that it feels bad.” It is pain qua negative experience that I am referring to. But the problem is that whenever I am in pain, I am always both in a functional state and in a physical state, and both of those states can be considered causes of my judgment that I am having a negative experience. The functional is entailed by the physical, and possesses no additional causal power. I might try to say things like “pain is the aspect of this mental state in virtue of which I judge it to be bad,” but that description is underdetermined: in every case in which I have been in pain, the physical and functional descriptions are coextensive, and my introspection is totally uninformative as to which I mean. I just have this unhelpful, simplified feeling of badness.
Therefore, it seems that my ostensive definition of pain is indeterminate. If you built a robotic clone of me with the same functional organization and a very different physical substrate, and began to “torture” it, I would have to say there is no fact of the matter as to whether it is in pain, because there is no fact of the matter as to whether my ostensive definition refers to a physical or to a functional state. But this seems to undermine sentientism, which says it’s bad to torture the robot if it feels bad to the robot. There is no fact of the matter here, so therefore there is no fact of the matter about whether it’s bad to torture the robot.
Replies
One might try to make an argument for functionalism by saying that if my neurons were swapped for functionally identical silicon chips, I would still judge myself to be in pain, and therefore I must be ostending a functional state. I think this begs the question. If my whole brain were swapped for a typewriter that just prints “I am in pain, and it’s awful!”, then “I” would still “judge” myself to be in pain. If it’s fair play to substitute neurons for silicon chips, why isn’t it fair play to substitute a brain for a typewriter? If you say “a typewriter doesn’t have the same functional organization, whereas the chips do,” then the argument is circular: you were supposed to convince me why functional organization matters more than physical or biological organization.
Another approach might be to argue that what I am referring to just is the belief that my experience is negative, and beliefs are defined functionally or dispositionally; they don’t exist on a physical level of description. But then this seems circular: I judge myself to be having a negative experience in virtue of the fact that I judge myself to be having a negative experience. The term negative experience is semantically vacuous; it doesn’t cash out in anything, and it doesn’t Or maybe a negative experience is just defined as an experience I don’t want to have. Very well, but why don’t I want to have the experience; in virtue of what? You can’t say “because it’s painful; because it feels bad,” because that would be circular. Either I just have a brute preference to not be in this state and the “feeling of pain” is entirely illusory, or there is something in virtue of which I don’t want to be in this state, and we’re back to determining whether this is something physical or functional.
A further approach would be to say that I am introspectively aware of functional properties of pain, but not of their physical properties, and therefore I can’t be rigidly designating a physical state. I don’t know whether my periaqueductal grey is active, but I do know I have a disposition to avoid this state; how could the periaqueductal grey qua physical state make a difference? But that doesn’t seem to make a difference in other reference cases. If I point at a cup of liquid H₂O, and I ostensively label that stuff water, I am referring to H₂O despite not knowing water = H₂O. But if you ask me whether the stuff I’m pointing at is a covalent or ionic compound, I have no idea. If you ask me to describe it, I’d say it’s transparent, makes me feel cold when I touch it, pretty low viscosity, high density, etc. Those sound like properties of “watery stuff,” not H₂O; those properties could in principle be “realized” by a different substrate. But that doesn’t mean that what I am ostending is “watery stuff”; I could still be referring to H₂O.
The best arguments, I think, are going to have to show that when I judge a mental state to be “painful,” it must be in virtue of its functional properties and not its physical properties. Unfortunately, I don’t see a great way to do this. Functional properties are entailed by physical properties, both are equally good causal explanations of my introspective judgment, and introspection does not pick out one over the other. Therefore, it seems to me that one of the following must be true:
Sentientism is false.
Illusionism is false.
Pain cannot be defined by ostension.
I would like to be persuaded out of this trilemma. All thoughts are welcome.
Doesn’t your argument that you don’t know the physical substance is necessary. Prove too much. You can use pretty much the same argument to argue that the exact atoms in your brain are necessary for consciousness and there is no fact of the matter whether other people experience pain, which is obviously nonsense. To me, the reason why the functional properties matter is because if somebody is running a simulation of my brain, the process causing that simulation to talk about its painful experiences is the same process. Whereas in the case of the typewriter, the process is completely different, so there’s no reason to assume that it’s caused by the same experience. I also think it’s just obvious that the properties of experiences are an actual thing out there. It’s not just a matter of perspective as to whether your experience of vision is three-dimensional or not that is simply a matter about the experiences you have access to. That doesn’t mean you can’t define things such that digital minds don’t experience pain, but that’s because you’re using a definition that doesn’t correspond to what people normally mean as it doesn’t actually track the feeling. Certainly, whether an experience has negative valence intuitively appears obviously unrelated to substance. It’s about things like whether you intrinsically want to avoid the experience. Also, any good account of pain has to be closaly related to motives. Otherwise, we end up with the old psychophysical problem that it looks like it’s a massive coincidence that what things motivate us or so often the things that make us happy while the things we try to avoid are generally things which make us painful after all if positive and negative valence has nothing to do with motivations it would be equally likely for us to actually be motivated to increase pain and decrease happiness.
In law, the need to apply old laws to new technologies often results in ridiculous-seeming analogies. On Monday in Supreme Court oral argument, one of the lawyers used the made-up phrase “virtual private papers” to refer to Google Location History records, in the context of the Fourth Amendment guarantee against “unreasonable searches and seizures” of “papers”. Later this year the Supreme Court will consider how the phrase “goods or services from a video tape service provider” applies to websites. Copyright law treats software as a type of “literary work”. I could go on.
These analogies are messy and subjective, but we need to make them anyway. The law is the law and we have to figure out how to apply it, even in situations the law’s authors never considered. The only alternative would be to just not apply the law to new technology, and that would be bad.
I believe that morality is similar. The “law” we follow is our moral intuition, derived from biological and social evolution. The idea that there should be an objective standard of consciousness is a philosophical “technology” that postdates almost all of that evolution. AI will be a literal technology that postdates it. Our moral law simply doesn’t address those technologies, but we’re forced to apply it to them anyway. We have to make an analogy: is a digital brain more like a human brain, or more like a digital not-brain? There is no objectively correct answer. It’s just a question of which option feels the most reasonable, the least icky.
For me that’s the functional approach. But I think that your trilemma is real, and that the true statement is number 3, “Pain cannot be defined by ostension.” If one asks “in virtue of what is that state pain?”, you could say you mean the functional state or the physical state; but if you haven’t decided, then no amount of pointing will help.