ABSTRACT
Some humans may seek to purchase pain-feeling robots for the purpose of torturing them – a sad fact about some humans. This chapter explores the Chinese room argument against robot pain. The role of the Chinese room thought experiment is to establish the truth of the claim that it is indeed possible for something or someone to run any arbitrarily selected program without thereby understanding Chinese. One way to construct a robotic copy of a human is by gradually transforming a human into a robot by a sequence of prosthetic replacements of the human’s naturally occurring parts, especially parts of the nervous system, with artificial analogs. Like all physiological systems in the human body, the nervous system is composed of causally interacting cells. The chapter emphasizes the ways in which the thought experiments in the respective arguments attempt to marshal hypothetical first-person accessible evidence concerning how one’s own mental life appears to oneself.
