[ExI] Circumcision

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2016-06-15 01:33, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
> anders, as a consequentialist, I think you must argue that pain never 
> remembered and never causing any future harm is not per se wrong.  In 
> fact, pain now can mean learning to avoid dangerous things and so is a 
> good thing.
Note that "remembering" can be several things. I can have an episodic 
memory of being in great pain, I can have a semantic memory that I was 
in pain, or I could have an emotional trigger that causes conditioned 
change in behavior/habit due to the pain. The last one can make me avoid 
dangerous things even when I lack the first two.

Pain with no effects whatsoever only has the instantaneous disvalue, 
which might still be a bad thing. Imagine a server farm running emulated 
minds in agony in a loop. The world would be better if it is stopped, 
even if the external output (heat and noise) was the same.

> Now this may be more debatable:  should a person be subjected to 
> capricious pain and humiliation just because it has always been done 
> that way?  I am thinking of fraternity initiations. I experienced it 
> directly.  When the national organization of lambda chi came down with 
> instructions to eliminate hazing, some ot the brothers objected 
> strongly.  They thought that if the new group did not go through what 
> they went through that they were not fully brothers in the frat.  I 
> have seen informal initiations and they were at times vicious.

Cognitive dissonance, I suppose. By adding a threshold and a cost to 
membership people upvalue it, plus presumably they feel a link to 
previous generations.

Sometimes that can be useful for making a desirable institution stable. 
But the value of that stability better far outweigh the disvalue of pain 
and humiliation.

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

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