Ah, I see where you’re coming from. You’re saying that the real problem is deciding where to place the intensity categories (Annoying, Hurtful, etc) on the number line of pain, instead of pretending those categories make their own dimension called intensity, and mapping them to another thing called unpleasentness.
The way I was thinking about it:
The way you’re thinking about it:
I think the reason I was drawn to the intensity perspective is because for humans it seems real, and that’s where we have our best understanding (due to the advantages of self-report, more pyschophysics studies, introspecting on our own experiences), and so I was thinking about translating our (still very limited) understanding of that model to the non-human space. But maybe you’re right that it would be better to build a simpler model from scratch around the non-human limitations.
I like the property of the pain scale you mentioned where it scales linearly with time and duration. That would mean the whole ambiguity of the moral-weights/log-pain intersection that this post was about would disappear. And yes, I share your intuition that it would be the same as your gambling property (although would also be interested in any special cases where they come apart).
Thanks for pushing me on this, it helped clarify my own vague thoughts about it!
Sorry for the very delayed reply to this. I meant to reply at the time and then it slipped my mind!
Yes, you’ve summarised my position perfectly, I like those diagrams!
I guess my deeper point was that I wasn’t sure there was any meaningful way to say something like “X is twice as painful as Y” without defining it via choices among gambles or durations. You say for humans it seems real, but does it? I can definitely introspect and discover that X is more painful than Y, but I’m not sure I can introspect and discover that it is N times as painful. Where does that number come from?
Although as I was thinking more about how to justify this, I started thinking about other sensory experiences, like sound. Is it meaningful to say that “X feels twice as loud as Y”, in a sense that doesn’t have to line up with the intensity of the physical sound wave? And then I remembered my physics lessons from way back, and realised the answer might be yes. I was definitely taught that the reason we measure sound volume on a log scale (decibels) is because it lines up better with our sensory perception of it (you have to square the intensity of the sound wave in order to double the perceived intensity). But if this is true then it means there is some sense in which we can introspect and say “X sounds twice as loud as Y”, even though the underlying sound wave might not be twice as intense. And if that is the case then maybe this should also be true for pain.
I’m still very uncertain about this though. If I listened to different sounds and tried to place them on a numerical scale, I’m not really sure what it is that I’d actually be doing.
Ah, I see where you’re coming from. You’re saying that the real problem is deciding where to place the intensity categories (Annoying, Hurtful, etc) on the number line of pain, instead of pretending those categories make their own dimension called intensity, and mapping them to another thing called unpleasentness.
The way I was thinking about it:
The way you’re thinking about it:
I think the reason I was drawn to the intensity perspective is because for humans it seems real, and that’s where we have our best understanding (due to the advantages of self-report, more pyschophysics studies, introspecting on our own experiences), and so I was thinking about translating our (still very limited) understanding of that model to the non-human space. But maybe you’re right that it would be better to build a simpler model from scratch around the non-human limitations.
I like the property of the pain scale you mentioned where it scales linearly with time and duration. That would mean the whole ambiguity of the moral-weights/log-pain intersection that this post was about would disappear. And yes, I share your intuition that it would be the same as your gambling property (although would also be interested in any special cases where they come apart).
Thanks for pushing me on this, it helped clarify my own vague thoughts about it!
Sorry for the very delayed reply to this. I meant to reply at the time and then it slipped my mind!
Yes, you’ve summarised my position perfectly, I like those diagrams!
I guess my deeper point was that I wasn’t sure there was any meaningful way to say something like “X is twice as painful as Y” without defining it via choices among gambles or durations. You say for humans it seems real, but does it? I can definitely introspect and discover that X is more painful than Y, but I’m not sure I can introspect and discover that it is N times as painful. Where does that number come from?
Although as I was thinking more about how to justify this, I started thinking about other sensory experiences, like sound. Is it meaningful to say that “X feels twice as loud as Y”, in a sense that doesn’t have to line up with the intensity of the physical sound wave? And then I remembered my physics lessons from way back, and realised the answer might be yes. I was definitely taught that the reason we measure sound volume on a log scale (decibels) is because it lines up better with our sensory perception of it (you have to square the intensity of the sound wave in order to double the perceived intensity). But if this is true then it means there is some sense in which we can introspect and say “X sounds twice as loud as Y”, even though the underlying sound wave might not be twice as intense. And if that is the case then maybe this should also be true for pain.
I’m still very uncertain about this though. If I listened to different sounds and tried to place them on a numerical scale, I’m not really sure what it is that I’d actually be doing.