this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Lots of neat uncomfortable questions arise though. At what point is it conscious? If it never experienced autonomy, life, locomotion, or social human interaction, is it torture or just its natural state of being?
Like how do we know it's natural state isn't just pure pain?
Presumably at that point it could just tell us. Whether or not we would listen is its own set of problems
Would it know? What sort of reference could it possibly have?
We already have a similar problem in medicine where people experience pain differently, so it's hard for people to verbalize and quantify. If you had no frame of reference at all, how would you know that life isn't supposed to be painful?
You can even view it from the opposite way. What if by removing pain you remove any good feeling it has? There can't be light without the dark kind of thing.
Some interesting philosophical questions.
Maybe it would be less happy without the pain!