Across cultures and centuries, humans have sought to explain suffering, be it as moral failure, biological necessity, or existential condition. Today, as artificial intelligence begins to mimic aspects of thought and emotion, the question resurfaces: can a machine suffer? In this paper, we revisit suffering not as a sentimental analogy but as a comparative lens between human and algorithmic...
In the real world, our bodies influence how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. Our body can also affect estimations of object sizes and distances. But how does our body affect our haptic experience? Here, we examined the modulation of a visuo-haptic illusion of touch on a virtual stick in virtual reality, when participants were embodied in an avatar and when they were not. During...