The case of Dax Cowart

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“I was burned so severely and in so much pain that I did not want to live even in the early moments following the explosion. A man who heard my shouts for help came running down the road, I asked him for a gun. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Can’t you see I am a dead man? I am going to die anyway. I need to put myself out of this misery.’ In a very kind and compassionate caring way, he said, ‘I can’t do that.'”

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“We might give more weight to the judgments of those who have already been tortured, since their evaluations of the experiences are presumably more accurate. Unfortunately, here too people may forget the severity of their past suffering. This empathy gap often happens to me when I think back on my own past experiences of intense suffering, unable to conjure up feelings of how awful I felt at the time.” (Brian Tomasik)

“Sometimes people who suffer enormously do look back and judge that their suffering wasn’t worth it. Consider the case of Dax Cowart, who suffered so badly that he wished he had been killed, even in retrospect.”

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How to address the problem of sentience?

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In the field of philosophical ideas we can not (easily) make predictions, but we can prove and demand that philosophical hypotheses should have:

  • Regarding the proposed subject:
    • Clarity
    • Internal coherence
    • Compatibility with the evidence (observations, experiences)
    • Explanatory capacity
    • Parsimony, in the sense of leaving out accessory or arbitrary elements
  • Regarding the author, the creation process, and its context:
    • Honesty
    • Impartiality
    • Skepticism
    • Recognize the intention
    • Recognize the motivation

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Asymmetries and compensations between pleasure and pain

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There are two very related questions: “Is there a symmetry between suffering and enjoyment?” and “Can suffering be compensated with enjoyment?”

Investigating the way in which we respond to these questions is very relevant, since we may have biases or blindness that are encouraging to make bad decisions, such as the survivorship bias. By better understanding and evaluating suffering and enjoyment we can more easily minimize suffering and maximize enjoyment, as well as compensate for bad experiences, if such a thing were possible.

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Why Does Very Hot Water Sometimes Feel Cold?

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Cold receptors primarily react to temperatures ranging from 68 to 86˚F, while warm receptors are activated between 86˚F and 104˚F. At extreme temperatures—below 60˚F and beyond 113˚F—the temperature signal is accompanied by a sensation of pain. Weirdly, researchers have discovered that at temperatures greater than 113˚F, some cold receptors can also fire.

The majority of scientists support the theory that paradoxical cold is a malfunction of the thermoreceptor system. Evidence suggests that pain receptors that respond to potentially harmful heat levels coexist on the same sensory fibers as cold thermoreceptors, says Lynette Jones, a senior research scientist at MIT. So when the nerve fiber sends a signal to the brain, it can sometimes be misinterpreted as a sensation of extreme cold. Paradoxical cold is the “strange operation of a system under unusual stimulation conditions,” she says… Read more

How to demonstrate sentience?

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In this short piece, Manu Herrán sumarizes two sets of proposals to address the problem of sentience, three mechanisms to show if an individual feels (the resemblance, the best possible explanation and Phenomenal Puzzles) and two ways to check if a theory of sentience is correct or not.

“It is common to ask: how can sentience (the ability to feel) be demonstrated? The question has several interpretations and nuances. On the one hand, whoever asks this question may be pointing out the difficulty of making predictions and obtaining evidence; In short, the difficulty of using the scientific method in the matter of sentience. But, as this article explains, there are many things we can do to address the issue of sentience in the most scientific way possible.

The question can also refer to a specific individual: how to know if an individual feels or not ?; Or it can refer to theories about sentience: what is the correct theory? How can we prove it?”

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