Written by Madeline G. Reinecke (@mgreinecke) You might recall a story from a few years ago, concerning former Google software engineer Blake Lemoine. Part of Lemoine’s job was to chat with LaMDA, a large language model (LLM) in development at the time, to detect discriminatory speech. But the more Lemoine chatted with LaMDA, the more… Read More »Humanizing Chatbots Is Hard To Resist — But Why?
This is my first post in a series highlighting current pain science that is relevant to philosophers writing about well-being and ethics. My work on this topic has been supported by the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics, the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, as well as a generous grant from Effective Altruism Grants.
There have been numerous published cases in the scientific literature of patients who, for various reasons, report feeling pain but not finding the pain unpleasant. As Daniel Dennett noted in his seminal paper “Why You Can’t Make A Computer That Feels Pain,” these reports seem to be at odds with some of our most basic intuitions about pain, in particular the conjunction of our intuitions that ‘‘a pain is something we mind’’ and ‘‘we know when we are having a pain.’’ Dennett was discussing the effects of morphine, but similar dissociations have been reported in patients who undergo cingulotomies to treat terminal cancer pain and in extremely rare cases called “pain asymbolia” involving damage to the insula cortex.Read More »Pain for Ethicists: What is the Affective Dimension of Pain?
