this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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Well, we haven't solved the hard problem of consciousness, so we don't know if size of brain or similarity to human brain are factors for developing consciousness. But perhaps a more important question is, if it did develop consciousness, how much pain would it experience?
Physical pain? Zero.
Now emotional pain? I'm not sure it would even be able to accomplish emotional pain. So much of our emotions are intertwined with chemical balances and releases. If a brain achieved consciousness, but had none of these chemicals at all......I don't know that'd even work.
While we haven't confirmed this experimentally (ominous voice: yet), computationally there's no reason even a simple synthetic brain couldn't experience emotions. Chemical neurotransmitters are just an added layer of structural complexity so Church–Turing will still hold true. Human brains are only powerful because they have an absurdly high parallel network throughput rate (computational bus might be a better term), the actual neuron part is dead simple. Network computation is fascinating, but much like linear algebra the actual mechanisms are so simple they're dead boring - but if you cram 200,000,000 of those mechanisms into a salty water balloon it can produce some really pompus lemmy comments.
~~Emotions are holographic anyways so the question is kinda meaningless. It's like asking if an artificial brain will perceive the color green as the same color we 'see' as green. It sounds deep until you realize it's all fake, man. It's all fake.~~
Wake up, neo...
I'm not sure what color skittles I ate, but im feeling....horny.
Did you think about this before you wrote it?
Didn't have to. Kind of an obvious thing to point out, but OP didn't specify what type of pain he meant, so I figured I would, just in case.
How is it obvious?
Human brains don't actually have any pain receptors (even though headaches would have you seriously believe otherwise), so a brain alone wouldn't be able to feel pain any more than it would be able to smell or see.
Wow. Equally confident, equally confused.
The brain processes the information from the nerves.
Might just be that nerve cells by themselves "experience" something when stimulated, but pain perhaps requires certain structures of neurons or even parts of a brain to be interpreted as "pain". I'm just spitballing though since I'm not a neuroscientist or anything like that.
Physical pain only exists from nerves. Brains don't have any nerves. No nerves. No pain.
lol