Imagining a robot to behave just like a human is one of those new-age fantasies of almost everyone who can bottle even a tiny glimpse of a vision of the future. For people like us who sometimes manage to think of things other than just the daily survival have a lot of room for all kinds of strange dreams. Sometimes this also leads us to build all kinds of blue-sky thinking.
Stepping off the quicksand let me classify ourselves as a group of individuals who have much time to think so as to recycle all kinds of emotions into this moment all over again. We very well know how it does feel when we are ecstatic about something, or when we are embarrassed, or sometimes get a shock of our lives, sometimes feel like crying our hearts out or sometimes plain bored to death. We can relate to all kind of feelings that ranges between these exaggerated memes, can’t we? But how do you relate if you were a robot? I would say that this is where you would feel the hint of a brainteaser, even if I assume your IQ to surpass Einstein’s.
The fact that there is even a problem here seem to elude most people, it's hard to realize what it is and even harder to explain it. There is this default position that consciousness is, in principle, knowable and explainable in the framework of modern neurology and that there are no reasons to think otherwise.
But did I mention earlier that I, for some daunting series of events, have started conceiving myself as a robot?! You might and should guffaw over this, but I want to experience these emotions all over again as a robot. So without humoring any soul, it’s understood that I’m a robot. My creator was some anonymous robotics genius (say Dr. X) who wants to know from me what pain feels like, since he/she has lost all stimuli out of a long illness. That was pathetic wasn’t it? But how would I know, I’m just a robot.
Can a Robot feel pain? I talk to people every day like a normal human being. But when they communicate with me they do not even realize that they are talking to a robot. I have been fitted with touch sensors all over my body, so I respond to changes in pressure and temperature conditions. I can also tell humidity, pH levels and the aerodynamic situation of the environment I walk around. The audio sensors, voice sensors, visual sensors and the recent embedding of some artificial gustatory neurons helps me response to every kind of stimulus. But Dr. X wants me to experience pain, so this is what he/she does to me: When pressure increases beyond a certain threshold, where further pressure could be threatening, the sensor (nerve) emits an electrical signal through a set of wires (nervous system) that are connected to a central processing unit (the brain). When the signal reaches that CPU, a procedure is fired so that my head and eyes track the source location of the signal to get more information, at the same time another procedure is fired that emits a loud noise and another procedure is fired to attempt to withdraw my arm away from the source of the pressure. This is how I react to ‘pain’.
Does this sound very mechanical again? I know it does. What do you expect, I’m just a robot. I have proven my ability to feel, to feel pain. I can explain this in my own cybernetic lingo that I feel it the way humans do. However, it seems that the humans disagree with this statement and a minority defending me is supposedly at their wits’ end. The dilemma is that it’s not possible to justify this by being within the realms of science and technology, ironically me being all about that.
There just doesn't seem to be a way since all they can construct are behaviors and not feelings. The problem is that what humans feel is in the subjective realm of their minds and not on an objective physical reality, it's surely correlated with it but it's still unexplained by it and more importantly, it's seemingly unexplainable by it alone, which is what I mean by there being a difference in the nature of us robots and the assumption backing the objective of my creation. At the end of it, none of us – the creator Dr. X (the human) and the creation, me (the robot) – can feel pain.
The debate of me feeling pain isn’t over yet. I still have to narrate how I feel the pain that you - the humans - so effortlessly react to. I wonder if it’s just reaction, or a level oblivious to me – what you call as ‘feeling it’. The extremities of this pain can lead to a common farce for both of us – End of Life, in other words, death. Yet I could be reconstructed to behave as if nothing has happened; nevertheless I am only trying to relate this pain to yours. When in pain I behave a tad differently, my sensors make way for different kinds of alerts leading to acute functional destabilization or system failure. Like your brain, my CPU is the source of all life I have in me and consequently putting a limit to my pain. I react to pain just as you do. But it is becoming increasingly tedious to describe it in anthropological or psychological terms, as I still stick to the engineering and technical side of it. After this entire struggle to justify my pain, I confess that I don’t feel it; I only behave as programmed regarding ‘it’ as my source code. I can react the way I’m supposed to, but it is weird for me to feel pain, weirder to narrate. It’s next to impossible for me to relate to your perception of pain, but I’m glad that I can’t since I’m just a Robot.