Sleepidy-sleep-sleep.

"Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" Chairman Sheng-ji Yang

Is it not unethical to ‘torture’ people or being that don’t know they are being ‘tortured’? The reason I say ‘torture’ instead of torture, is that ‘torture’ comes in many more different forms – withholding the truth about a situation from someone who does not know it is analogous to introducing the concept of pain to someone who has never felt it.

We have some kind of innate desire to teach others, to share information and experiences. For some stupid reason we want robots to experience emotional response, feel compassion, maybe even love. We want to teach them to be human, until someone dears ask ‘is that really a good idea?’, because then we start thinking of the pain that emotions cause. This has cause numerous works of fiction dealing with robots emulating rage or anger and going on robot rampages. Then again, the idea of ‘robots no longer need us’ has done the same…

And it does not stop with robots – we as a society want that every person would be able to feel the same. If there is a very apathic person, we try to change that. If there is someone who can’t feel certain emotions, we stick a label on that person. We want everybody to be like us, to feel and understand as we do. Even when we know for a fact that we are far from perfect.

Sure there are those who don’t want everything to be familiar, some prefer life to be a little more interesting, with beings having different attributes and capabilities. But this is generally caused by the familiarity of difference – if you understand how someone thinks, you really don’t want to give it emotions to screw everything up. That someone would no longer be predictable or, therefore, controllable. And someone who discovers a strange thing that affects that someone can be a mighty dangerous thing. Finding emotions clouds judgement, clouded judgement leads to pain (mistakes), finding pain causes suffering (consequences of mistakes), suffering to hate and so on.

This is why for some situations there cannot be a single solution – every situation is different. You can ask what to do if someone is being used for someone else’s benefits and that someone doesn’t know about it, but without proper analysis of the whole situation, you cannot know the answer. Would it help if that someone knew? Could you stop it? More importantly, should you stop it? Is it even somehow bad that a person is being used for somebody else’s benefit without his or her knowledge? Not really.

 

You might argue that lack of pain and the lack of knowledge are too different to be analogous. But pain, in essence, is a concept of the mind, a result of the interpretation of signals. Without the concept of pain, a person does not have the knowledge of pain. Without the concept of him or her being manipulated by someone they trust, the person does not have the knowledge. Hence, you can manipulate someone who does not know he or she can be manipulated in that way and you can tyrannize those that feel no pain. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. What you think is best for another surprisingly often is not.