From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Tue Feb 11 2003 - 10:30:11 MST
From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky [mailto:sentience@pobox.com]
> Lee Corbin wrote:
> >
> > Isn't the following true? Some patients experiencing
> > unbearable pain
> > are given control of a wire into their pleasure center, with
> > instructions to press it whenever the pain becomes absolutely
> > intolerable, but only then. The patients report that they
> > are restored
> > to a state of normalcy, with the evidently incredible pleasure
> > balancing the incredible pain. For some reason, this
> > subjective result doesn't surprise me---why shouldn't
> > our brains be capable of such subconscious integration?
>
> I've never heard of this result. Got ref?
Lee, I think you may be referring to work done in the 1950s and 60s by
Jose Delgado. Delgado reported that he could relieve extreme pain, as
well as many of the symptoms of schizophrenia, by stimulating the
"septal pleasure centers" electrically. He describes this in his book
_Physical Control of the Mind: Towards a Psychocivilized Society_
However, in that book he never talks about the patients having the
ability to self-stimulate.
Also, Delgado is not exactly the most reputable scientist to have
lived. There are reasons to doubt whether the experiments he
describes ever really happened.
Eliezer, I'm not sure if you were asking Lee about this result in
humans or the result in rats. The result in rats was produced by Olds
and Milner in 1954. Rats will indeed self-stimulate to the exclusion
of food and water, even up to death. (They do the same thing with
cocaine and amphetamines.)
mez
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