On Saturday, January 10, 2015 at 8:07:39 AM UTC-6, Tharindra Galahena wrote:

In humans and animals pain act as a motivation to withdraw from damaging situations in order to protect the body from harm.

The real question is do humans or animals or anything that walks this Earth (other than myself, of course) feel pain? To the degree I give you the benefit of the doubt, I'm obliged to do so for anything else that -- after all -- has only the appearance
of complicated-moving otherwise-inanimate matter to me.

Machines feel pain inasfar as they register conditions of distress and respond to those conditions. That's the only workable definition of "feel" I can see. What you're REALLY asking is whether there is a sentience on the other end anywhere -- which is
the same question I'm already asking of you.

Those who come from a Judeo-Christian (and more generally an Abrahamic) background or culture (even when they affiliate as agnostic or atheist!) tend to exhibit the bias that thing alike humans are somehow special or different from other matter and that
this difference is a difference of kind rather than of degree. As one of many consequences (and demonstrations) of this bias, Westerners tend to get creeped out by robotic motions or behaviors that become just a bit TOO realistic -- like they're
witnessing the reanimation of dead corpses or zombies. It is, notably, a bias and perception that is completely absent in East Asian (and perhaps also South Asian) settings.

So this (which I made) may creep out a Westerner because it looks "too spooky" but pass over an Asian like it's nothing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnATwZgmI2I

Those with Vedantic biases, where the central premise is that consciousness is actually an attribute engrained in the core of the universe that is only expressed neurologically in biological beings (but is not actually an attribute OF those beings per se)
do not have a problem with seemingly inanimate matter behaving or conducting themselves in "human-like" fashion. The difference between people, animals and inanimate objects is a matter of degree, not of kind.

As a result, people in Japan have no problem with their human-like robots scampering about. The lifelike behavior is not creepy, because cultures imbued with Vedantic philosophies, beliefs or religions already attribute consciousness to matter and to
everything in the universe; not as an all-there or all-not on-off thing, but as a matter of degree.

So when you hear people posing this general issue, what you're actually hearing is people implicitly betraying their Judeo-Christian bias and -- if the person is presumably agnostic or atheist or otherwise non-spiritual -- it's a case of when they got "
BUSTED!" Caught in the act of betraying by deed the very thing they claim to be distanced from!

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