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Joined 8 months ago
Cake day: February 2nd, 2026
  • Think about it this way; general anesthesia does not shut off the brain or put you to ‘sleep’, it disrupts the signals that the brain uses to let the various parts of the brain communicate with one another.

    When the doctor is cutting you open, brain scans have shown that the part of the brain that receives pain lights up like a Christmas tree. You ‘feel’ every slice of the knife, but since that signal cannot make it over to the part that says ‘ouch’ or the part that says ‘I said ouch and I feel pain and there is a knife I will remember this as a life changing trauma’ it simply stays in that spot being bright and alive until surgery is over.

    The AI has a the part that can say ‘ouch’ but that’s it, so even if you connect a pain signal generator up to a part that can say ‘ouch’ it doesn’t turn into trauma until you have that third piece which rationalizes the pain together with an understanding of the pain and a recording of the pain as a memory with context.

    Consciousness as we understand and value it involves a lot of parts working together, but those parts can also exist in complete isolation from one another as well. It’s better to think of current AI as a fancy book; you cannot hurt a book by reading it, even if the book is about terrible things. The pain only exists within your empathy.