To explore whether high-intensity Pain can be experienced by primitive sentient organisms, we reframe the question as one of information resolution within a scale of Pain intensities. Briefly, two evolutionary possibilities are considered for how nervous systems evolved to represent varying Pain intensities, enabling appropriate responses to competing behavioural demands: (1) increasing resolution within a fixed range of intensities (i.e., introducing finer gradations between the minimum and maximum perceived intensity, e.g., 0 to 10) or (2) expanding the range itself of perceived intensities (e.g., extending the maximum perceived intensity value beyond 10, to values like 100, or 1000)
Were you aware of the following? (From Shriver 2024, §3.2.6.)
it’s not immediately obvious that simply having a more discerning ability to evaluate will also entail having the capacity for more intense experiences. Henry Shevlin, in an unpublished draft, proposed two possible accounts of what happens when we add evaluative richness. On the “compression account,” the ends of the spectrum stay as far apart as they were previously, but we add precision in how small the units are that exist between the two poles. However, on the “expansion account,” adding more evaluative states pushes the ends of the spectrum outward. As such, on the expansion account, adding richness would seem to actually increase the range of evaluative states and hence would give us one account of how adding richness could increase a welfare range. To be clear, there was no particular reason to assume that the expansion rather than the compression account is correct, but this does offer one story of how increased neuron counts in affective parts of the brain may increase welfare capacity.
In the above quotes, Shevlin and you are basically saying the same things with different terms, right? Or am I missing something?
Were you aware of the following? (From Shriver 2024, §3.2.6.)
In the above quotes, Shevlin and you are basically saying the same things with different terms, right? Or am I missing something?
(Great post. Thanks for sharing!)