"With the pit of despair, he placed monkeys between three
months and three years old in the chamber alone, after
they had bonded with their mothers, for up to ten weeks"
"after they had bonded with their mothers"? That's pretty cruel and totally an apples to oranges comparison. That researcher relied on the curse of knowledge and self aware to deprive the monkeys of a pleasurable stimulus.
Where do you get the idea that the monkeys would be even better if they never got to see their mothers at all? You are saying that suffering is ok as long as you aren't aware that not-suffering is even possible.
To investigate the debate, Dr. Harlow created inanimate surrogate mothers for the
rhesus infants from wire and wood.[10] Each infant became attached to its particular
mother, recognizing its unique face and preferring it above all others. Harlow next
chose to investigate if the infants had a preference for bare wire mothers or cloth
covered mothers. For this experiment he presented the infants with a clothed mother
and a wired mother under two conditions. In one situation, the wire mother held a
bottle with food and the cloth mother held no food. In the other situation, the
cloth mother held the bottle and the wire mother had nothing.[10]
Overwhelmingly, the infant macaques preferred spending their time clinging to the
cloth mother.[10] Even when only the wire mother could provide nourishment, the
monkeys visited her only to feed. Harlow concluded that there was much more to the
mother/infant relationship than milk and that this "contact comfort" was essential
to the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children. It was
this research that gave strong, empirical support to Bowlby's assertions on the
importance of love and mother/child interaction.
Another experiment by Harry Harlow. The interesting things to observe here is that the money felt attachment to something that provided it with contact comfort. The brain in question wouldn't even know what "contact" is because it lacks a sense of touch. With that in mind (no pun intended), what we're left to speculate is where that complex mass of neurons will venture. Will it "hallucinate and invent" something that provides the equivalent of a mother figure?
Alternatively, (and I think this is more probably), it's possible that the brains we invent for a long time are merely equivalent to evolutionary stages of brain development from millions of years in the past. That begs the question, would the precursors of the modern human brain be considered to be an inhumane condition to the brain we have today? It clearly had a lesser capacity in all sorts of ways. The ancient human brain cannot comprehend, yet alone fathom what the modern human brain is capable of. By the time we grow these brains to the neuronal mass capable of human levels of thought, we will probably lack the ability and knowledge still on how to make it think like us because the technology for growing it bigger is going to far outstrip our capacity to coax it to grow a certain way (assuming we even know what that way we should grow it to achieve the consciousness of the modern human).
That was the whole point that was being made, that you don't know what you're missing if you never had it. The study doesn't counter that assertion, since these monkeys obviously do know what they're missing.
It's not suffering if you don't have any pain and don't know/desire for anything different. A brain by itself cannot even know there is a such thing as 'better'.
