Natural Rationality | decision-making in the economy of nature

1/14/08

On The Folk Concept of Robotic Pain

Bryce Huebner report, on the X-Phi Blog, the results of an experiment where he asked volunteers about someone---Dave0--who was either a (normal) human, a human with a CPU in the head a normal robot, or a robot with a brain instead of a CPU. Can Dave feel pain, can Dave be happy, etc. Interestingly, he founds, among other that

(....) volunteers thought that it was pretty unlikely that something with a hard metallic body could count as a locus of pain. But, they were not particularly bothered by the ascription of pain to a human with a CPU instead of a brain.
(...) there was a significant difference in volunteers' ascriptions of belief and happiness when Dave had a human body and a CPU instead of a brain;


read his post or his description of the experiments or the paper he wrote about that



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