I just had a naive illumination. Say that sentience first appeared in two different simple creatures, independently, at the same time:
Dolores: She’s just like her non-sentient siblings, except that she feels unnecessarily severe pain if she’s about to die of starvation, although not severe in a way that would impair her ability to do what is necessary not to starve (otherwise, she would die, and it’s her non-sentient siblings who would spread their genes.)
Mildred: Same, except that her starving pain is milder, and that’s enough to motivate her to lexically prioritize solving this problem, just like Dolores.
Judging by what you’ve written in the post and comments, you could give two different arguments for why Dolores would have lower fitness than Mildred:
1. Dolores’s pain would override everything else (e.g., she might be so focused on not starving that she forgets about drinking).
But this applies just as much to Mildred, no? No matter how mild her pain is, it will also override everything if that’s the only thing she feels. If she feels some pain when starving and nothing while thirsty, she might forget about drinking just the same. In pure isolation, how bad the pain is changes absolutely nothing in terms of fitness, here, no?
2. Dolores needs a more demanding biology than Mildred in order to feel something worse.
But how would we know this? Why would subjectivelyworse mean more demanding energy-wise? Why couldn’t it just as well be the more subtle less bad affects that are more demanding?
Thanks, Jim! I think Dolores/Mildred is actually a very helpful toy example.
If both Dolores and Mildred already cross the threshold needed to lexically prioritize starvation, then Dolores’s stronger feeling may indeed add no extra functional value. That’s very close to the point we tried to make in the revised Figure 1 of Do primitive sentient organisms feel extreme pain?: two systems can differ in range while still being equally effective for prioritization, provided the relevant discriminative structure is the same.
So yes: in your setup, the extra intensity could be selectively neutral if it also carries no extra costs or constraints. That’s where the framework still bites. Our point isn’t that higher intensity must always be selected against, but that it shouldn’t automatically be treated as either necessary or neutral.
On your second point, I also agree that we should be careful: I would not want to claim, as a general rule, that “more intense” always means “more expensive.” The more modest claim is that some ways of implementing very high intensity may require broader integration, stronger modulation, or greater whole-system involvement, and if they do not, then your neutrality story remains a live possibility (even if it is not the default expectation in the framework).
This is also part of why we’ve been trying to make these distinctions more explicit in the more recent Interspecific Affect GPT post: not because it settles cases like this, but because it forces us to state more explicitly where the ceiling question depends on extra commitments, where neutrality remains a serious live possibility, and how this kind of reasoning can be pushed toward real taxa—something that matters directly for interspecific comparisons of the capacity to feel pain.
I just had a naive illumination. Say that sentience first appeared in two different simple creatures, independently, at the same time:
Dolores: She’s just like her non-sentient siblings, except that she feels unnecessarily severe pain if she’s about to die of starvation, although not severe in a way that would impair her ability to do what is necessary not to starve (otherwise, she would die, and it’s her non-sentient siblings who would spread their genes.)
Mildred: Same, except that her starving pain is milder, and that’s enough to motivate her to lexically prioritize solving this problem, just like Dolores.
Judging by what you’ve written in the post and comments, you could give two different arguments for why Dolores would have lower fitness than Mildred:
1. Dolores’s pain would override everything else (e.g., she might be so focused on not starving that she forgets about drinking).
But this applies just as much to Mildred, no? No matter how mild her pain is, it will also override everything if that’s the only thing she feels. If she feels some pain when starving and nothing while thirsty, she might forget about drinking just the same. In pure isolation, how bad the pain is changes absolutely nothing in terms of fitness, here, no?
2. Dolores needs a more demanding biology than Mildred in order to feel something worse.
But how would we know this? Why would subjectively worse mean more demanding energy-wise? Why couldn’t it just as well be the more subtle less bad affects that are more demanding?
What am I misunderstanding/missing?
Thanks, Jim! I think Dolores/Mildred is actually a very helpful toy example.
If both Dolores and Mildred already cross the threshold needed to lexically prioritize starvation, then Dolores’s stronger feeling may indeed add no extra functional value. That’s very close to the point we tried to make in the revised Figure 1 of Do primitive sentient organisms feel extreme pain?: two systems can differ in range while still being equally effective for prioritization, provided the relevant discriminative structure is the same.
So yes: in your setup, the extra intensity could be selectively neutral if it also carries no extra costs or constraints. That’s where the framework still bites. Our point isn’t that higher intensity must always be selected against, but that it shouldn’t automatically be treated as either necessary or neutral.
On your second point, I also agree that we should be careful: I would not want to claim, as a general rule, that “more intense” always means “more expensive.” The more modest claim is that some ways of implementing very high intensity may require broader integration, stronger modulation, or greater whole-system involvement, and if they do not, then your neutrality story remains a live possibility (even if it is not the default expectation in the framework).
This is also part of why we’ve been trying to make these distinctions more explicit in the more recent Interspecific Affect GPT post: not because it settles cases like this, but because it forces us to state more explicitly where the ceiling question depends on extra commitments, where neutrality remains a serious live possibility, and how this kind of reasoning can be pushed toward real taxa—something that matters directly for interspecific comparisons of the capacity to feel pain.