patrick.net

When Sarah Palin shoots them from her Alaskan Helicopter Hunting Safari ... the little animals ... they experience the pain.
When Putin strips off his shirt, and wrestles them to the ground ... they feel the pain.
;)

I don't know. I'll ask my brother-in-law.

The real hard question is: can you program a computer to feel pain? What would that even mean?

Consider this:
Pain is not a behavior or a data processing: if you look at an organism feeling pain from the outside you will see a signal going to the brain, and triggering more signals there. At that's it. But a signal is not pain: it's just a signal. Receiving a signal is not the same as feeling pain. A program could be programmed to receive a signal and trigger further signals. I still couldn't say that program feels pain.
So if pain is not a behavior or a data processing, it is by definition outside the space of what is programmable.

Of course if you program some kind of conscious program, there is a chance that it actually has experiences based on what it is exposed to. These experiences maybe different than what they look like from the outside, looking at the processing happening. But since it can only be programmed from the outside, then we go back to the hard question: we can't program pain because pain cannot be defined as a behavior or a data processing, and therefore we wouldn't know what to program.

Pain is dependent on having the idea of self.

Pain is less self, threat to self, etc. One of my very first posts:

https://patrick.net/19/self

Heraclitusstudent says

can you program a computer to feel pain?

Obviously yes. Anything you can do with a neural network, you can do with a Turing machine and vice versa. They are functionally equivalent. This is easy to prove as you can run a virtual Turing machine in a neural network and a virtual neural network in a Turing machine. Thus each can do what the other can. It's only a question of which is more efficient and easier to program for a given task.