I think I remember one of your articles where you said something like (very sorry if I misquote/don't represent your opinion, all mistakes mine) you have a bigger impact by preventing poor babies from eating lead than increasing education spending in places with lots of poor people.
I've been thinking a lot about meditation and jhanas recently, and if teaching everyone how to reach jhanas could solve a lot of problems like the opiod crisis, and this article seems to be the same idea, but at the biological level.
In case it can give you some extra hope, many Far Out team members are interested, or even directly involved in supporting research concerning the deep end of contemplative practices and psychedelic therapies. Insights from these studies have a direct relevance to the suffering abolitionist project, and pair well with the biotech-focused efforts.
As someone who has used both (in a context of the multi agent theory of mind) to greatly reduce suffering, I'm both glad to hear it and skeptical that the benefits can be mainstreamed. But as you'll observe from my other comments I am skeptical in general (likely due to suffering as a child*).
What about the Dark Night? or in general negative side effects of mediation (eprc or Willoughby Britton are doing research there).
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How qualified are those teachers?
Do the students want to do this/what are they taught?
School is trash in basically every area, would we expect it to be good in this area where the qualifications of the teachers are probably even worse.
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If this would just work it would be awesome but I don't think it tells us much about higher level practices. Very cool though to know that this doesn't just work at least in this way.
Over the years, I've heard many wonderful reports about the benefits of jhanas and other meditational disciplines. Sadly, what one rarely hears are stories of anhedonic or melancholic depressives who try meditation and find their mood lifts. Indeed, meditation can make some forms of depression worse. In short, if it works, do it. But alas meditation alone isn't going to fix the problem of suffering.
Until zero-suffering long-termists start talking about population collapse and dysgenics, I'm not going to take them seriously.
I'm also pretty sure I've read about children born without pain receptors who wind up doing crazy things like shoving pencils through their kneecaps because there's no negative feedback. Pain actually does exist for a reason.
EDIT: For the sake of completeness, no, I didn't read the full article before commenting. I'm annoyed by this entire topic so it was something of a hot take. I still think that generalising from weird outlier samples to a program of wholescale biosphere re-engineering is insane, that corrective feedback for people's behaviour in the broader sense is indistinguishable from negative hedonic utility, and that the whole idea is a pipe dream when your civilisation is currently in a state of slow-motion collapse.
No but it does talk about children born without the ability to feel pain and the fact that they often die from failing to avoid dangerous behaviours. Seemed odd to me that you brought them up as if it was some sort of counter to Scott's post when he already specifically raised and discussed that issue.
Alright, fair enough, but I still don't see how you get to zero suffering until the pain receptors are switched off. Even responding to social stigma could be viewed as 'painful.'
Woah, you are commenting without reading the whole article on a *Scott Alexander* essay? Do you also climb without a rope in mountains you visit the first time, eat weird mushrooms you picked without identifying, and cross twelve-lane roads without checking for traffic?
I don't think the article substantially rebuts the point I'm making. Any kind of corrective feedback for a person's behaviour can be regarded as 'painful' under a sufficiently tortured definition of the word. Like... what's the zero-suffering-activist's answer to law-enforcement? Are we going to incarcerate people who commit serious crimes without any reduction in their hedonic utils score?
Perhaps not, but you'd be more persuasive just crying mea culpa in this part of the comments, carefully reading the whole article and then starting a new, more carefully nuance top level comment. The earth over here has been scorched and if you double down you'll end up sounding like a troll or an undergrad.
"Do you also climb without a rope in mountains you visit the first time, eat weird mushrooms you picked without identifying, and cross twelve-lane roads without checking for traffic?"
Were I born without pain receptors or the usual experience of pain and thus as a result never developed anxiety, dread, or apprehension about my actions and activities, why wouldn't I do that?
You might still read about the high risks of these activities and decide that taking some precautions is worthwhile, based on a risk analysis? I'm not convinced that being anxious is necessary for rational action.
> Cameron seems to be somewhere between pain insensitivity and asymbolia; she’s had some very mild stove-related accidents, but always seems to figure out the situation in time. She hasn’t lost the ability to sweat. She hasn’t lost the ability to smell. The only Special Bonus Side Effect the London team was able to find is that apparently her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars.
That does not seem to affect Cameron in particular, though I don't know if everyone could "figure out the situation in time".
If your ultimate goal is zero suffering, you're going to have to knock out pain receptors eventually. Also, suffering evolved in a more general sense as part of homeostatic feedback mechanisms intended to keep you alive.
All the roads that lead to that outcome are going to involve raising birthrates and preserving human talent. (Unless the plan here is to abolish the ageing process, which would eventually create its own problems.)
A goal of *less* suffering in the broader sense might be achievable, but this isn't what David Pierce is arguing for. He wants *zero* suffering of any description.
I think you are hung up on semantics here. Pierce may not mean zero suffering quite as literally or extremely. To be clear - I don't claim to know what his actual position is, but there seem to be more reasonable interpretations to what you are suggesting.
Before creating a no-pain biosphere, it makes sense genetically to aim for a low-pain biosphere for human and nonhuman animals (https://www.gene-drives.com) alike. Compare high-functioning genetic outliers (not quite as unusual as Jo Cameron) who, if asked, say things like "oh, pain, it's just a useful signalling mechanism".
Your premise is false. You don't have to knock out pain receptors. You have to recalibrate them, so they send information without also sending suffering, e.g. "Take your hand off the hot stove," instead of "AAIIEEEE!!"
Don't pain receptors work by providing sufficient motivation? I currently have an agonising shoulder condition, so I don't move my shoulder. If it was just information relaying that I had a shoulder problem, I'd likely ignore it or forget it and move my shoulder, injuring myself anew.
Evolution has done a pretty uneven and sometimes bad job in calibrating our pain system, no doubt, but I'd be surprised, at least, if lots of these circuits aren't doing useful work.
Is it a rotator cuff tear? I think I've got one of those right now -- have had one before and I recognize the feeling. Yesterday tossed a small practically weightless toy for the cat to chase, and it sort of clicked and slid inside and hurt so bad I felt sick for about a minute.
Ah, hope it gets better soon. No, mine is calcific tendonitis, which is basically small deposits of bone forming inside the supraspinatus. It is like I've been stabbed by a calcium dagger and the blade broke off inside the shoulder head.
Maybe a very self-controlled person could unfailingly keep a limb the right degree of still, without requiring pain, based on their long term goal of having healthy limbs, but even then we'd need some additional feedback system to replace pain so we knew there was a problem in the first place. I'm all for someone devising such a system.
In my case, if the pain was a quarter its current level, I think I would move my shoulder a little bit more, but then again that'd probably be good for my recovery. The pain does seem to be way over the top. But I'd be wary of the unforeseen possibilities of just quartering all pain. I think we'd want to be more strategic about which pains to reduce and when.
It would be nice to be able to "turn the knob" on suffering. Turn 8/10 pain into 4/10 pain, 4/10 pain into 2/10 pain, etc. Then the signaling would always be there, but would never be strong enough to cause more than brief suffering.
This is why it makes sense to study the outliers that seem to have the best "reduction in total suffering" to "adaptive functioning" ratio, and the case of Jo Cameron is certainly among them.
I hope that the diversity of sociopolitical views of the team members, coupled with approximating what's generally considered a high cause neutrality (think: anaesthesia, crisis relief) is at least somewhat reassuring. We do not interfere with the personal views of the low-suffering genome owners, and do not encode any specific views on UK politics. :)
That is not what Scott wrote. What he actually said was " lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement, but in fact she has strong political opinions (she doesn’t like Boris Johnson)." His point was not that she was radical and vehement, it was that she was able to feel angry disapproval of a government figure. How radical or correct or original her politics are is completely irrelevant to the question he's addressing, which is whether she is sort of emotionally numb and can't feel indignation about things she sees as bad government.
I'm sure you're not too dumb to remember what Scott said, so you're just lying here to try to make him look bad. Listen, there's no way you can make him look anywhere near as bad as you look so far here. You don't read the article, you run your mouth anyhow, when people ask you to read it you ask them instead to summarize it, and now you're putting up things Scott didn't say, and didn't even mean inside of *quotation marks* and them jeering at them. You're being a major asshole.
Agreed. My knee-jerk reaction is that Jo Cameron is a counterexample to the idea that the hedonic treadmill is universal and inescapable, and that a consistent set of experiences for a period of time always settled down to "meh" for everyone, with only _changes_ making us happier or unhappier. And counterexamples are _very_ important!
The negative feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill can operate even in paradise. Jo Cameron experiences hedonic adaption like the rest of us; but Jo's unusually high hedonic set-point means she's always enjoyed a much higher default quality of life. What's tantalizing is the possibility that just a handful of genetic tweaks might do the same for future life.
Many Thanks! Excellent point. I was thinking of the default model being that more or less the same set-point was linked to the hedonic treadmill for everyone. Yes, Jo Cameron proves that "same set-point" is false, but as you pointed out, this is indeed separable from _dynamics_, from
>The negative feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill can operate even in paradise.
Thanks. Twenty years ago I wrote https://www.gradients.com/ ("An information-theoretic perspective on Heaven") about a world where the ancient pleasure-pain axis has been superseded by a pleasure-superpleasure axis. It's still my tentative prediction for the future of sentience.
Re: the first point, as an intentional initiative with a narrowed focus, we heavily prioritize the neutral robustness while conducting the exploratory research - we want to ensure that the outcomes, including potential interventions, will be net positive under numerous reasonable ethical assumptions and game-theoretic arrangements. This should not interfere with adaptive functioning or giving a consideration to challenges in other domains.
Re: the second point, it has been addressed both in the article and in the FAQ section on our website. Happy to answer any further questions you may have!
"This should not interfere with adaptive functioning or giving a consideration to challenges in other domains."
This seems to be an elaborate way of saying that "preventing civilisational collapse is someone else's job." I just... I don't get how people with supposedly long-term goals and priorities don't treat these topics more seriously. It's like your house is burning down and you're talking about the most comfortable way to arrange the furnishings.
I think he's saying "we're intentionally targeting treatments that don't interfere with adaptive functioning". "This should" in the sense of "we are working to", not "we expect to".
I'm already sufficiently annoyed with effective altruists in general, especially after the SBF debacle, so extending that principle out to the biosphere in general looks like the textbook definition of telescopic philanthropy.
I'm not sure how much the SBF fiasco was intrinsic to effective altruism, but this points at an interesting question.
A lot of the problem, as I understand it, isn't so much that effective altruism was a scammy environment as that it was a gullible environment. A focus on rationalism didn't lead to enough willingness to be skeptical in face of attractive claims. People may well be working on getting better at being less vulnerable. I wouldn't necessarily have heard about it.
To tie it back to the topic, does feeling pain have anything to do with not falling for scammers? Jo Cameron seems to have enough good sense to not be looted, but has she run into capable scammers?
The problem with Jo Cameron isn't Jo Cameron. It's the accelerationist progressive left doing what they always do and fishing out cherry-picked counterexamples to normative standards which they will then use to dismantle traditional constraints on human action- or, in this case, the constraints imposed by millions of years of biology- before any comprehensive and rigorous long-term study of the wider social side-effects could possibly be mounted. And when the bill comes due, it will always be someone else's fault.
Based on the existing datapoints (e.g. activism of Jo Cameron, engagement of deeply realized meditators in social issues), it seems that removing a large portion of involuntary suffering while maintaining adaptive behavior should a) increase people's capacity to support other important causes, b) increase people's confidence in the net positivity of existence, or at least further support pro-existence stances.
I just want to add that, based on personal experience with changed happiness set points in my life (mine used to be extremely high!), this statement seems trivially true to me. I've maintained a lot of my high-happiness-setpoint stances even after it crashed (partially due to biological issues, partially because my mother died and it made my brain start obsessively pattern-matching absences, which it hadn't done before), since they all still make perfect sense, but it takes remarkable work to maintain them emotionally, and I don't think I would have started with them if I had not had the high-happiness-setpoint around the times I was establishing my attitudes toward life and people.
Which is to say, I would definitely take something that could give me my old happiness set point back, and I have reason to believe it would make me a better person.
Or, "Long-range prediction of non-linear phenomena is... untenable." AGI - possibly LLMs - might be our post-biological descendants. Mass drivers on equatorial mountains throwing us into orbit might let us colonize the Earth-Mars asteroid belt, giving us several orders of magnitude more lebensraum and consequently provoking population increase. Open borders might raise reproductive rates significantly... There are a lot of current approaches to preventing civilizational collapse; closing your eyes and covering your ears and shouting at the top of your voice that no one is doing anything is, among other things, untrue.
People seem to shift it to "but I can't afford a kid" so I doubt it. Even if one of you doesn't have to be pregnant for nine months, you might well decide "two is as much as we want because any more is too expensive".
This makes me deliriously happy (no joke intended). Finally some material progress on The Hedonist Imperative! May all the fans-of-suffering, the too-invested-in-sour-grapes, and every one holding the transparently evil position that suffering is good, meritorious, something to protect and strive for... Well. May they all update and adopt the Obviously Correct position that Superhappiness is Optimal.
Thank you. When our project attracted substantial attention, we obtained some constructive and greatly appreciated feedback that we quickly incorporated into our roadmap. Simultaneously, the most frequent talking points of the critics seemed to be grounded in the inability/unwillingness to imagine adaptive functioning devoid of negative valence, and/or in assigning value to the suffering even if it was both maladaptive and involuntary. We, obviously, challenge this position, and are glad that this discussion if finally taking place on a larger scale.
I suspect that for many of us skeptics it's not inability or unwillingness per se, just bayes unfortunately filtered through SDB. Most are too squeamish to say out loud that e.g. reducing child mortality likely does make a society less fit in other ways we value. Where we need to be convinced is that the next intervention will be the one that finally reduces suffering without corresponding cost.
I'm happy to admit the possibility of being trapped in a local optima, here, but the philosophical point isn't 'is suffering good?' but 'will this next attempt at alleviating it be overly blithe again as usual?'.
We mostly think suffering useful given the rest of how a human is organized. It's at least 'lindy'. This question more concerns one's priors on interventionism than one's sour grapes.
it's not that suffering is good. It's that suffering exists, so how can we mitigate it, and make use of it, given that we are very likely to suffer at some time in some way?
See Christina's story above. Painkillers did nothing for her, so she coped with the pain by pacing around the room. Finding ways to use suffering is like that: pacing, rather than lie crying curled up in a ball, because either way we're going to feel the pain.
Oh, definitely. But if you're in a situation where there's no way of removing it and you have to undergo it anyway, then finding coping strategies work better for you.
Imagine Jo *had* to go to work the day after her husband killed himself because the job wouldn't give her time off, she needed the money, etc. Then "well better pull myself together and get on with it, anyway he's better off now" is an attitude that enables survival. Being so upset you're non-functional, even for a short while, is harmful. We all think that her attitude is unusual because we generally have the social support that says "okay, you are grieving and this is natural so you can have some time for that", hence we find her lack of grief unusual or even unsettling.
But if it was literally "work or die", then we'd understand Stoicism in that situation. Same way with "okay, suffering happens, how do we make use of it?" in theology and so forth.
Switch it to be about power rather than pain? Being able to compel someone to do something humiliating (but not physically painful) is still exerting power over them, and you get the bonus of forcing them to do something they don't want to do, because it emotionally/mentally distresses them?
"You WILL file your taxes on time before the deadline, heh-heh-heh1"
"NOOOOO, Master, anything but that! And you've even withheld my dose of Adderall so I can't focus!"
Good grief! I've been in so, so many debates - in pubs, in professional or academic settings, even on military operations - where I've argued for _exactly_ this (honestly, uncannily so!) to entirely universal derision ‒ and until this post I genuinely supposed I was the only person in the world who had such beliefs. Very, very glad to read this ‒ thanks most awfully, Scott!
(But still a tiiiny bit disappointed to get through the whole post without seeing the phrase "Immanetise the Eschaton"...)
Same, although I was lucky enough to find this stuff many years ago when I was around 18 or so; I was pretty elated to find that I was not, in fact, the only one to see that suffering is bad (so to speak, heh).
See the big new thing is Biblical Transhumanism. We know that the Bible is the literal word of God and infallible in every way, right? And we know that early Genesis people could live to over 900 years old. So that gives us a divinely-revealed research direction - long lifespans are clearly possible, we just need to undo whatever went wrong genetically after Noah, probably some kind of inbreeding problem caused by the population bottleneck there. And pain is probably preventable or at least highly mitigatable too! When god curses Adam and Eve he tells Eve "I will terribly sharpen your birth pangs, in pain shall you bear children." We're not sure yet whether this means childbirth specifically can be made less painful or if all pain can and - hey wait, where are you going? I was just about to invite you to my new Church of Transhumanism, we take up offerings for medical research every sunday!
Biblical literacy as part of the cultural background is declining, and you can't expect kids to pick up on it in school because that would be The Government Privileging One Religion Over Another and Establishing Christianity.
But mostly because they're reading 'modern, relevant' texts that no longer use such imagery. If the family doesn't go to church (or even if it does), they're not hearing such texts read and they don't know where these references come from, then, when they encounter them.
Even more so for those from a non-Christian (culturally or not) background who reasonably can't be expected to recognise such themes.
EDIT: Or non-Jewish background, because Judaism would also be familiar with the Old Testament (duh).
I hear you. It's a bit sad to see how thoroughly misunderstood the Establishment Clause has become over the past couple centuries. Far too many people these days don't understand that by definition, you cannot "establish Christianity" for the simple reason that there is no such thing as "The Church of Christianity," various individual religions laying claim to that honor notwithstanding.
The original Congress that adopted the First Amendment, containing several of the people who helped debate on and draft the Bill of Rights, might open Monday's session with a prayer by a Methodist chaplain, then Tuesday's with a Presbyterian chaplain, Wednesday's with a Lutheran chaplain, and so on. That's a far cry from the mess we find ourselves in today, where we have a de facto Established Church of Atheism.
Anyone know of a good Christian/Biblical mythology book I can read to my kids? There's plenty of them for Greek/Norse/Roman/etc., but I haven't seen a good Biblical one written from an outsider perspective but serious enough that my kids would recognize references such as the lion laying with the lamb.
Scarless wound healing seems to me to be something much more interesting and beneficial to explore than "can we all become pain-free, carefree, super-happies?"
May I push back at such a description? Other things being equal, the more one loves life, the more zealously one wants to protect and preserve it. Consider the transhumanist polymath Anders Sandberg, for example ("I do have a ridiculously high hedonic set-point"). It's no coincidence that all people I know involved in x-risks studies and prevention are themselves blessed with unusually high hedonic set-points. Sure, their lives aren't blighted by anxiety, but they _do_ care - probably more so than folk whose feelings about Life are at best ambivalent.
Agreed. I'm in the position of probably having a somewhat lower hedonic set-point than most people (though, objectively, luckier than most people). As a somewhat grouchy 65 year old, I tend to look at x-risks rather fatalistically.
Indeed. I have a friend in the AI safety community who half-seriously likes to suggest I know ASI will probably kill us but hide this recognition because of my negative utilitarianism. Not so (I think digital zombies are cognitively crippled https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/full-spectrum-superintelligence.pdf). Yet anyone who understands the nature of the severe mental and physical pain endemic to Darwinian life can be forgiven for wondering if an insentient world tiled with paperclips (etc) would really be worse.
In practice, I think fixing the problem of suffering is up to us.
There's a theory that the human visual cortex has special processing to pick out ripe fruit, naked humans, and snakes. The snake processing is clearly a later addition, after the Fall. Tracing that back might lead to the fear and suffering areas, although possibly also to free will.
After receiving a pointing out instruction from Loch Kelly a year ago my life hasn't been the same. I used to say I was an 8/10 happy, but now I'm like a 10/10. The problem is that i wouldn't trade 1 day of my current life for 5 days of my previous (i.e. 1 day now is worth more than 5 days then). This leads me to think that experiencing nonduality doesnt interact with traditional wellbeing. Anyway, I basically can't believe how well I am. Its very strange talking about it (I rarely do, online)
It's an instruction intended to give insight at a lower level than traditional knowledge (like koans). Instead of learning a fact, you might change your schemas. I've heard this phase only in the context of non-duality, in which case it would be intended to erode the perception of being a self.
A common pointing out instruction that leaps to mind would be something along the lines of "look for the looker".
Or recursive questions; for example: What do you want? gets you pretty basic answers along the lines of fame, success, wealth, happiness et cetera. What do you want to want? gets you abruptly much closer to your best self. What do you want to want to want? is hard to parse; you could rephrase it as What would your best self want to want? and you start get more interesting answers. This approach can be applied to a range of questions.
Hi Marcel :) Good question! A few things actually. Firstly, my true nature (the context in which all conscious content appears), then, the nondual nature between context and content (i.e. they're actually made of the same thing anyway), and then the ground of being from which all this arises (love).
Sorry I was unclear. It is great that I’ve had this perceived improvement in wellbeing. But the problem is either the 10 point scale isn’t sensitive enough or I’m lying to myself about something to do with my experience.
I'm extremely unsure. But it seems from my experience there is at least a 5x difference between 8/10 and 10/10. Some things I feel now for hours a day, that may not be captured by 10 point scales: deeply well, completely safe, boundless, timeless (in one sense, impermanent in another), interconnected, loving.
It is not. Different EAs believe different things, and there is nothing like a unified push towards any given world model or cause area. But I do think that EAs are vastly more likely than genpop to believe in the utility/attainability of enlightenment.
Yes, fair. EA is a broad umbrella. But, like you said, there are trends. And whether "Enlightenment" exists at all is a theological claim on par with "the resurrection of Jesus actually happened". Even whether things like Jhanas *exist* is tricky to answer (and I've had meditative experiences that seem to fit the "Jhana" description - doesn't mean I was actually in a "Jhana" state or that such a state exists.)
If there was an ostensibly secular group where nonetheless over half of the members think the Resurrection probably happened, I'd be comfortable calling that "quasi-christian".
This seems much closer to "did Jesus exist as a historical figure" than "did Jesus rise three days later". We have actual modern day accounts of enlightenment as well as people who have apparently reproduced it in conditions we can independently verify. Surely, this counts as being more likely than something that violates the second law of thermodynamics?
"If there was an ostensibly secular group where nonetheless over half of the members think the Resurrection probably happened, I'd be comfortable calling that "quasi-christian"."
May I refer you to the cryonics movement, which thinks it can deliver the resurrection of the body, no religion required? 😀
Though if you read through comments on this site, I think the emphasis is now shifting to brain preservation so it can be digitally 'sliced' and imaged and an upload created (someone on here did have a recent comment about that).
Secular re-creation of religious promises, via technology!
One other thing about Pearce: he describes himself as a "negative utilitarian" and has said things to the effect that, if all life on Earth were about to be instaneously and painlessly destroyed, he'd be "overjoyed" about the impending end of all suffering. (I also think he claims that he advocates "paradise engineering" as the solution to suffering instead of ecocide on strictly practical rather than ethical grounds - destroying the world would be harder to accomplish for the simple reason that just about everyone would be trying to stop you from doing it.)
Far Out team members are united by the shared priority of minimizing the maladaptive and involuntary suffering, but have diverse views and perspectives on religious, cultural, and philosophical manners, including the axiological asymmetry of pain and pleasure, as well as the net positivity of the world's existence. That being said, we are pro-existence, at least (but very often not only) due to unknown unknowns, irreversibility, and/or pragmatic reasons.
Some forms of suffering are so bad you would end the whole world to make it stop. I would indeed be overjoyed if such suffering were to end - even if the price were to be no sentience at all. However, (1) on consequentialist NU grounds, I urge enshrining in law the sanctity of human and sentient nonhuman life; (2) the abolitionist project is in no way inseparable from the NU ethic of a minority of its advocates; and (3) a strong case can be made that the biology of involuntary suffering is itself a serious x-risk - or will be an x-risk later this century and beyond. For example, how many of the c. 800,000 people who take their own lives each year would take the rest of the world down with them if they could? A suffering-free world of passionate life lovers will be safer in every sense. Let's act accordingly.
Good for him for being consistent with his views. Ecocide is the logical end point of utilitarianism. But why stop at sterilizing Earth? Send AI and robots to end all life in the Universe. The Utilitarian Jihad.
On the face of it, classical utilitarianism dictates launching an omnicidal utilltronium shockwave. As a negative utilitarian, I'm more bioconservative. Genome reform can create life based entirely on information-sensitive gradients of bliss. Maximising the cosmic abundance of bliss will be nice, but it's not an obligation in the same way as eradicating suffering.
Why would ecocide be the logical end point of utilitarianism? I understand why it would be the end point for (a very strong) negative utilitarianism, but classical utilitarianism also values positive emotions. Utilitarians are often criticised for the repugnant conclusion, the exact opposite of killing everyone.
I personally think creating new happy lives is extremely valuable and hope I can have four or more children to give them the gift of living a happy life. At least partly, I have these beliefs because I am a utilitarian.
Well, you could chemically alter factory animals to not feel pain, or you could raise them freely in natural environments. Proper rotational grazing with symbiotic cycles of cows, poultry, etc can be very efficient. We could feed the world without factory animal farms. Or factory animal farms could be improved: I have experimented with quail in outdoor cages, and they can be very healthy and quite happy together being social animals.
In my view, the majority of suffering comes from things we could fix. So let’s focus on that first. I am happy. Pretty much always, whether things are going good or not in my life. I’ve also been on a primal raw meat diet for years, and I feel radiantly healthy. Pain and suffering is not very common in healthy people compared to the wider population.
Finally, this philosophy is well and good, but pain is a warning system the body uses to tell us when we are approaching death (damage to body/psyche). Since death cannot be mitigated, I have little interest in making the path there more comfortable.
We tend to think about it in terms of synergistic multidirectional efforts. From our FAQ:
"Given the complexity of the topic, limited tractability and impact of specific sets of interventions, diversity of moral views, and high uncertainty levels, we are in favor of a multi-directional approach to improve the fate of farmed and wild nonhuman animals. Most (if not all) of our team members are vegans or reducetarians, supportive of the development of cultured meat and plant-based alternatives, and in favor of measures making farming/transport/slaughter less inhumane, hoping that these synergistic value streams will lead to a large-scale change in the global attitudes about this cause area. We are driven by the universal, non-speciesist concern about the suffering of sentient beings, though we also fully respect those who want to support us primarily or exclusively with regard to the first, human-centered project. The introduction of modified lines should not be used as a convenient moral justification for mistreating animals; simultaneously, from the consequentialist and pragmatic standpoint, we recognize the limited outcomes of narrower and more isolated approaches, often driven by very noble intentions. The global meat industry continues to have a significant compound annual growth rate, driven largely by the steadily improving economic status of developing countries with different cultural and legal contexts, so the introduction of modified lines through market forces may constitute a very important piece of the puzzle where other strategies, due to the existing roadblocks, fail to produce (yet) a significant impact."
There is a strong evidence base indicating the widespread presence of overlooked and often extreme suffering that cannot be effectively mitigated, related to physical and mental health issues, aging, social and military conflicts, substance abuse, relationship problems, financial struggles, and existential matters, often entrapping people in vicious cycles (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/).
I agree with your argument that we could prevent most suffering by treatment of animals (and people). I'd go further and argue that the extreme solutions like banning meat-eating and ending pain distract from achieving the simpler goals.
If people were to treat meat as a rare luxury, we would dramatically reduce meat consumption and animal suffering and factory farming would become unnecessary. Most importantly, we could win political support from people who might support eating less meat but would oppose a total ban.
"Well, you could chemically alter factory animals to not feel pain, or you could raise them freely in natural environments. Proper rotational grazing with symbiotic cycles of cows, poultry, etc can be very efficient. We could feed the world without factory animal farms. Or factory animal farms could be improved: I have experimented with quail in outdoor cages, and they can be very healthy and quite happy together being social animals. "
Free range is a meaningless descriptor that can apply to a warehouse with a small outdoor corridor. Yes, it is indeed cheap to grow chickens in a warehouse, exceedingly so.
>But they cost more, so very few people buy from them. It's politically impossible to mandate them, because it would increase the price of all animal goods by quite a lot.
We regularly mandate things that increase costs of entire industries (relative to the absence of the mandate), such as airplane safety. The trick is, of course, to force every market participant to adhere to the rules. With airplanes, that is relatively simple because it is much easier to enforce the rules because there are far fewer airports, operators, and airplanes than there are animal farmers and e.g. cows. In the end, it comes down to enforcability of the rules. A higher price of meat for everyone would just result in a new equilibrium, but unequally enforced rules would be inherently unjust and unacceptable.
This reminds me of Brandon Sanderson, the well-known Fantasy author (my favorite author as well).
He often says about himself that he is very steady emotionally, unlike other people, and that he is almost always an emotional 7 out of 10 with almost no outside events impacting this.
And no kidding - he once did the whole "hot wings" challenge with his fellow podcast host, and he said ahead of time that spicy food barely affects him, and indeed he got to the spiciest things with seemingly not feeling them at all.
FWIW, as far as I can tell, he's a wonderful human being.
If the hope is for no loss if we go for zero suffering, then it may not be achievable. There are types of pleasure which are entangled with suffering. For me, it's hot spices.
I had covid, and my taste of taste was weird for a few years. Some foods I'd normally like tasted nasty, and my enjoyment of particular food might vary strongly over 12 hours or so. And I couldn't enjoy hot spices.
It's finally all back to normal with hot spices being the last thing to sort itself out and I'm pleased, but part of hot spice pleasure is something about pain.
Of course, it's not just hot spices. For some people, it's various sorts of physical endurance, and there's also S&M.
I'd trade my enjoyment of hot spices for enjoying life in general more, but I don't know that everyone would make that sort of trade.
It seems fair to say that we'd benefit from having tools that allow individuals to explore different tradeoffs in this space. I don't think we're anywhere close to the Pareto frontier.
The endorphin rush is pretty hard to achieve; I've hit it two or three times, and only by hitting levels of heat/pain comparable to the time I poured boiling water on myself. This is just barely shy of the level of heat where I just stop feeling anything at all - the nerves get exhausted or run out of some chemical and just stop transmitting.
I think I remember Tyler Cowen describing his emotional disposition similarly. I believe in one of his blog posts he describes feeling very few extreme emotions, positive or negative, but had a very steadily content baseline that rarely deviates regardless of circumstances.
"An adequate theory of value should be as true in the gas chambers of Auschwitz as in the philosopher’s study. In my view, Darwinian life is an abomination: life on Earth is virulent, self-replicating biological malware churning out suffering without end. Any sensitive soul should be appalled."
"One candidate solution to the problem of suffering is to engineer human extinction via radical anti-natalism."
To paraphrase the other comment, out goal is to positively contribute to the minimization of the maladaptive and involuntary suffering, with different team members having different philosophical views, including the axiological asymmetry of pain and pleasure. That being said, we are pro-existence and anti-extinction, at least (but very often not only) due to unknown unknowns, irreversibility, and/or pragmatic reasons. We will heavily emphasize it in our public communication.
It might be worth adding that we are, well, happy to be incapable of ending the world. On a purely personal note, chatting with David, one of the gentlest and kindest souls I know, give me a sense of meaningful life worth living.
"Our members have diverse views as to whether omnicide is the best course of action." Really now? That you remind us you're incapable of ending the world doesn't give much reassurance (most don't *need* to remind people of this).
What kind of answer would you then consider as satisfactory? Not a single team member is advocating for the omnicide, we focus on specific types of research and interventions intended to make lives of sentient beings better (just like pain research labs or animal welfare projects), and we are explicitly pro-existence.
It's natural for philosophers to openly reflect on the nature of hedonic tone and utility in the cosmic context, and the aforementioned quote from the 2015 high-decoupling-style musings of David does not include what he said later in the same answer, for example:
"(...) Creating a hyperthymic civilisation sounds almost as impractical as global anti-natalism. But CRISPR genome-editing, synthetic gene drives, and the new technologies of reproductive medicine will shortly turn the level of suffering in the biosphere into an adjustable parameter. Bioethicists need to acquaint themselves with what's technically feasible (cf. Genetically designing a happy biosphere). (...)"
It is important to account for the entire context and the writing convention.
Given a stated goal that would necessarily impact the whole world and overturn many longstanding assumptions, I for one am far more inclined to trust a group who'd admit to carefully considering the "everyone dies" option and rejecting it for specific, principled reasons, over one which failed to address it or did so with the slightest hint of dishonesty. http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff2400/fc02318.htm
Your use of quotation marks implies that you found this passage somewhere. I certainly don’t see it in the comment you are replying to. Citation needed?
I took the line "with different team members having different philosophical views" and rephrased it to make clear which particular "different philosophical views" team members had.
It was not a quote, but a "restatement in my own words" - also not a quote, even though I used quotation marks.
I was trying to find a half-rembered quote which I think *should* be Flannery O'Connor, something to the effect that an excess of sentimentality leads to cruelty, but I haven't been able to find it.
What Google did lead me to was this Wikipedia article, and the more the Far Outs peddle their stock answers, the more I'm going "Okay, the writers were correct":
""A sentimentalist", Oscar Wilde wrote, "is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." In James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sends Buck Mulligan a telegram that reads "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done."
...In the mid-18th century, a querulous lady had complained to Richardson: "What, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party". What she was observing was the way the term was becoming a European obsession—part of the Enlightenment drive to foster the individual's capacity to recognise virtue at a visceral level. Everywhere in the sentimental novel or the sentimental comedy, "lively and effusive emotion is celebrated as evidence of a good heart". Moral philosophers saw sentimentality as a cure for social isolation; and Adam Smith indeed considered that "the poets and romance writers, who best paint...domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno" and the Stoics.
By the close of the century, however, a reaction had occurred against what had come to be considered sentimental excess, by then seen as false and self-indulgent especially after Schiller's 1795 division of poets into two classes, the "naive" and the "sentimental"—regarded respectively as natural and as artificial."
I've often had the thought that it would be much better if nothing existed. But since most people don't seem to think that way, I wonder if maybe I'm secretly a biologically abnormal supersufferer (someone who experiences suffering way more intensely than average in many situations, opposite people like Jo Cameron), and so my basic empathic assumption about how awful most lives are is just wrong?
It would certainly explain why so many people disagree with antinatalism and are averse to legalizing assisted suicide, meanwhile I've felt that both positions were obviously morally justified and net-positive from the moment I heard about them. Maybe the level of suffering that makes those views "obvious" is just so far outside the realm of the average person's experience that they can't imagine any reasonably-likely-to-happen situation that would make it obvious to them.
Yes the band of people who believe life should not exist AND who haven't removed themselves from it, is probably very narrow. Your analysis of suffering vs will to exist is likely far, far towards the end of whatever curve that is on.
If you had actually done yourself in then your actions would match your world view and while it might be upsetting, it wouldn't be unheimlich or uncanny in the same way.
Living things, if they have wants, are designed in the main part, to want to be alive. To be the member of a vast crowd of sentient beings who want to be alive and to be actively arguing; "I probably shouldn't exist, and neither should any of you", will strike them as disturbing, sinister, frightening and strange. It is deeply against what the vast majority intuitively feel to be so and even stranger in that it is seemingly unacted upon (the strange one has not killed themselves, yet).
In popular fiction its the ideology of Kaecillius in the film 'Dr Strange', who leagues with the ruler of the Dark Dimension to end time and thence all existence and suffering. In DC comics the hypervillian ruler of the dark planet Apokalips seeks endlessly the Anti-Life equation. Its Supervillain vibes. Its the guy that Superman punches.
Well, I'm still alive because attempting to die doesn't guarantee success, and things can always get much worse if you fail. Also dying by itself seems like it would hurt a lot without access to sedatives and painkillers. Basically aversion to suffering is why I think life isn't worth living but also aversion to suffering is why I'm still alive. And the fact that this dilemma can happen is behind my perspective that both antinatalism and legalizing assisted suicide are obviously good and right.
Superficially I'm not too abnormal, so I imagine there *could* be tons of people like me who try to improve their lives and act like they don't want to die, but it's just because they're afraid of suffering more than they already are, not because they actually enjoy life. Maybe the only evidence that a person is living a serious net-negative life of this sort would be that, if you ask them, they seem to be absolutely convinced that they would rather have not been born and they say they would take painless suicide if it were an option.
I’m of the same mind. To me, dying, or not living, seem like reasonable alternatives to suffering. I eventually landed on rejecting anti-natalism for similar reasons to those you touched on earlier: that based on the popular resistance to life-ending alternatives to suffering, I concluded I must have an atypical reaction to suffering and could not in good conscience support such irreversible measures, though I strongly believe that providing more end-of-life options to those who report chronic misery is a moral good.
Personally I find this world view strange. For me to want to end my life I imagine I would have to suffer quite a lot. I think my instinctive will to live is quite strong, and I could handle quite a bit of suffering before tipping over to net negative. I also assume that this applies to most people (as well as animals), which makes me very skeptical of anyone who wants to end the world to stop suffering. Similarity or consensus bias applies I suppose.
On a scale from 1-10 where 10 is the most happy, how happy would you say you are on an average day?
1? I wouldn't characterize most of my days as happy at all. For about a decade I've a near-constant headache that feels like a sort of contained seizure, lots of sensory sensitivities that cause a constant background fight/flight reaction that has to be continually suppressed to avoid screaming, and I tend to be in pain with no obvious cause much of time. If there's a variety of discomfort, I'm probably experiencing some form of it at any given moment.
I didn't have all of that going on at a noticeable level when I was a kid though, and even then I had a negative appraisal of life and a favourable attitude toward ending it, so it's possible that I experience good things as less good than most people regardless of added discomfort.
I'd like to think there's something detectably medically wrong with me that could be treated, and I spent a lot of time trying to get tests done to figure it out, but they've all come back as perfectly fine and I evidently don't *look* like there could be anything wrong with me since in person everyone has always tended to treat me like I'm exaggerating or malingering. Most of the medical-ish labels that best describe me are things like "multiple chemical sensitivity" that are commonly regarded by professionals as somewhere between psychosomatic and made-up.
Sorry to hear that you are in such a condition. That sounds pretty bad, and I can certainly understand your other sentiments based on this. I have my problems as well, though not anywhere near the scale of yours. Over 4-5 years I had frequent episodes that felt like they could be heart-attacks and other diffuse and strange symtoms. Same as you, I got tested a lot, but the doctors find nothing. Luckely those have mostly stopped, but I still get very tired and have periods of brain fog. Starting excersising a lot is what have helped me the most.
Personally I tend to think of the division between existence and non-existence as cutting across the solution-space of possible entities, sort of like a political border divides physical territories. Some beings die, or fail to be born, who would have preferred to live; others live who would prefer to not; many more seem content enough to stay on whichever side they currently are, or even try to move further away from the border (to the extent that they can) so as to avoid being caught by its frequent and unpredictable shifting.
Perhaps existence and non are at war, in some esoteric sense. Perhaps if the border could be deliberately rearranged so that people were more consistently on the side they prefer, and surrounded by those happiest to have them as neighbors, that war would end, or at least de-escalate.
I feel like this too. Although my drive towards NU and antinatalism is more from being horrified by the suffering of others I perceive, rather than my own. Although I do wonder if I generally felt happier more of the time, I wouldn't see the world this way I suppose
Would you call Gautama Buddha a super-villain? (“I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering") Either way, I argue _against_ efilism / hard antinatalism:
Most people who favour phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering via genome reform aren't NU. (Indeed, I co-founded the World Transhumanist Association back in 1998 with a pioneer of existential risk as a serious academic discipline!)
Thanks. Wise words. More generally, phasing out the biology of involuntary mental and physical pain is potentially consistent with a wide range of secular and religious traditions - including the most life-affirming. So it would be a shame if the wider abolitionist project gets sidetracked by discussion of NU.
I don't think it's trolling. Someone who would destroy all life on earth can be described as a supervillain with the sole caveat that they lack the capability. It is useful to point this out under an article trying to raise funds and awareness: do I want to raise funds and awareness to someone who might decide to violate my wish to go on living?
I am absolutely not trolling and I am saying what I believe to be true.
It seems pretty central to me that we are dealing with someone who's basic premise is that life itself should not exist, and then they stepped back from that idea due to practicalities. My quote wasn't out of context, its what he actually believes. I respect him for owning it. He talks around it and tries to contextualise it but doesn't deny that its what he actually thinks.
You are dealing with someone who thinks that life should not exist. That should be a big deal when considering the entirety of their philosophy. To me its seems like a lot of you are being mildly crazy by refusing to notice a giant and simple truth.
If we're willing to rewrite our genetic source code and reprogram the biosphere, then life on Earth could be sublime. What's morally objectionable isn't life per se, but the horrors of pain-ridden Darwinian life. Maybe we differ here. But critically, you can believe that on balance life on Earth is on balance a priceless gift and wholeheartedly support the abolitionist project to make it better.
The number of people who consider "pain-ridden Darwinian life" to be morally objectionable is so tiny that it should give you pause. When your preferences are so out of whack with the rest of humanity, I doubt your ideas of how to make the life "better" align with theirs.
How much weight do you give the perspectives of the c. 800,000 people who take their own lives each year? The estimated 10 times that number who try and fail? The hundreds of millions of people world-wide who suffer from chronic depression or pain disorders? Critically, however, the case for using biotech to phase out the biology of involuntary suffering no more depends on whether its proponents are e.g. NU or CU than the case for pain-free surgery.
I really feel like you are falling victim of some cognitive bias here; 'wanting life to not exist' is obviously deeply enmeshed with a whole range of negative thoughts and feelings, because it usually comes with anger, wanting to inflict violence, wanting to hurt; it seems like this means you are unable to perceive of the concept of 'wanting life to not exist' entirely because of wanting to end suffering, in a way that is entirely disengaged from all the usual attachments.
I broadly feel quite similar to David Pearce here; right now there will be thousands of people (at least) in unimaginable, terrible pain - I feel utterly horrified by this, and I really feel that endorsing others living and being pretty happy, so that these people continue suffering intensely (ie choosing that vs 'pressing the red button') is at best short sighted and thoughtless, and at worst pretty sadistic.
I am not deeply read enough in Buddhism to answer with wisdom but key differences would be;
- Does this person think that life should not exist, and begin with that premise.
- Buddha did believe in something like an immortal soul I think? And varied layers of afterlife depending on what kind of Buddhism you believe in, with a peasants afterlife where you get to meet your family and then later a kind of philosophers afterlife where you abandon selfhood and are freed from the wheel and become one with the eternal but *something* continues on.
It's quite a stretch to construe the Buddha's teachings on ending suffering as suggesting efilism in any way. The Buddha taught the Noble Eightfold Path as the way to end suffering.
I think the route to fixing the problem of suffering lies in genome reform, not efilism. The precise views of the historical Gautama Buddha are inevitably speculative. But Buddha seems to have been a pragmatist: if it works, do it. Biotech and genome reform are transformative technologies that promise to fix the problem of suffering for ever.
Suffering is the first noble truth of the Buddha. Proposing the elimination of suffering from the human genome will result in an organism that is not human. Expect resistance from those of us trained in the humanities. What you are proposing has allure and attractiveness, but it is fundamentally inhuman.
To suffer, to struggle against suffering, perhaps to transcend suffering, these are fundamental not only to humanity, but I would argue that such struggle is inherent in some degree in all forms of life on our planet. I'm not saying suffering is the sum total of existence and meaning, just that it is a fundamental part.
I believe that suffering is part of what drives the behaviors, selections, and evolutions on this planet. Part of me honors and thanks you for helping us imagine what life could be without it, and parts of me recoil at the unnaturalness of it.
I imagine that the beings you propose creating via genome reform will not suffer as they decide that humans like me are an existential liability.
"inhuman"? I guess you're speaking figuratively. But are rare people who essentially never suffer really any less human than the rest of us? What about people who essentially _always_ suffer? And if the outliers were indeed somehow less human, would it matter?
"unnaturalness"? Look around. Compared to naked apes on the African savannah, our whole civilization is "unnatural." Wearing clothes is "unnatural". Pain-free surgery is "unnatural". Why should this matter?
Or let's try another tack. Imagine if we were to encounter an advanced civilisation whose lives are underpinned entirely by genetically programmed gradients of bliss. Would you urge them to revert to ancestral horrors? I'm guessing not. But why? To what extent are apologists for suffering victims of status quo bias?
Motivation? Yes, suffering and the promise of happiness alike can motivate. But all too often, suffering crushes the spirit. Information-sensitive gradients of bliss can motivate at least as powerfully as misery and despair.
Alas critics frequently approach this debate by asking whether they would want to get rid of the biological capacity to suffer in themselves. But as the technology matures, and the biology of suffering increasingly becomes optional, I think the real question to ask is whether we are entitled to inflict a genetic vulnerability to coercive misery on _others_.
"Existential liability"? Or tragic victim of late Darwinian life?
A similar idea crossed my mind a few years ago. The idea in other comments that there are "super sufferers" is also tickling and would fit Gautama as his sheltered upbringing led to overreaction.
In early childhood I thought that this was entirely self-evident, and lack of public prominence of it was due to the same sort of taboo that prevents open discussion of sex. I still think that it's self-evident, but nowadays it seems more likely to me that the majority of people have some kind of lower-level kludge in their mind preventing them from acknowledging it, because lack of such kludge would obviously have a negative effect on reproductive success.
It seems mostly self-evident to me too, I think there is at least some taboo (probably more than for open discussion of sex), even if there are probably other reasons too.
I've meditated before on the preponderance of suffering over pleasure within the domain of life, but instead of deriving from this an imperative to destroy life, I derive from it an imperative to swamp that suffering with as much engineered happiness as possible. Here's a post I previously made on the matter:
Because pain is a more direct and simple motivating principle than pleasure, we should expect net suffering to predominate within the domain of life, with this suffering increasing for every moment life continues to exist. Even if we were able to eliminate all life on earth this moment, the past net suffering would still have occurred, and there is likely life with the same negative utilitarian calculus countless other places in the universe. The only way to take this preponderance of suffering and make it so that it has been worthwhile is to use our opportunity of conscious and intelligent existence and take the dumb matter of the universe and construct as many new minds designed specifically to feel constant pleasure as possible out of it. Given how much more non-conscious matter there is in the universe than the relatively tiny amount currently engaged in conscious awareness, this would be able to swamp and overcome the net suffering of life and turn the universe from a place of net suffering into a place of net pleasure. So, it should be the moral imperative of all who love pleasure and loathe suffering to direct the technological progress of civilization towards the end of constructing as many minds experiencing constant pleasure as possible out of the matter of the universe. Unlike human minds, these artificial minds could be constructed specifically so they never tire or bore of pleasure, and every moment until the heat death of the universe is as joyous as the first. This may seem like a simple idea, but its importance cannot be overstated, as this program of converting the universe into minds experiencing pleasure is the only way to undo and reverse the natural tendency of the universe towards being a place of net suffering, and instead turn it into a realm of joy and contentment. The technological and philosophical abilities of humankind and any superintelligences we create should be directed towards this end of figuring out how to construct and propagate such minds, as no cause that we could engage in is more worthy.
Note that I am not a negative utilitarian. I believe that what matters is net pleasure: pleasure minus suffering. I believe this because I think that we can derive from conscious experience that pleasure can be directly and immediately felt as a good unto itself, and suffering as an evil unto itself. I don't take the negative utilitarian position of prioritizing minimizing pain before maximizing pleasure because I believe that when we experience "mixed states" where we're experiencing pleasure and pain simultaneously, it's whether the net pleasure is positive or negative that determines whether we regard this as a good or bad experience as a whole, and if the net pleasure is positive we don't regard this as a bad experience merely from the fact that some pain is present along with the greater quantity of pleasure. So, taken to a universal level, we can see that a universe with simultaneous pleasure and suffering is in a similar mixed state, and we can improve that state by increasing pleasure, not just by minimizing pain. So, the moral imperative in a world where life entails suffering is not to eliminate that suffering by eliminating life, but to overwhelm it with pleasure on a scale far beyond what life could ever naturally achieve itself.
I disagree because, based on my conscious experience, there is a level of pain/discomfort/suffering that mostly cancels out the capacity for genuine enjoyment of anything no matter how much enjoyable stuff you add. The unpleasantness just poisons everything. So naturally I'm a negative utilitarian, focused mainly on minimizing the far end of unhappiness. But more generally in my experience pain and pleasure don't add very nicely at any level. If a person gets a splinter (-1) while eating a really good slice of cake (+1), the experience doesn't end up being the same as if nothing happened. It's good in some ways and bad in other ways and that's all that can be said about it. Or that's how it goes for me.
It makes more sense to me to think of utility as a scale that reflects how happy one is with life and how much one wants to live. Then one could say that there is a point on that scale where life value becomes negative, and one would prefer to not exist - maybe similar to what you call net suffering. However I disagree that net negative utility can have been predominating in the state of life. If that was the case, I would have expected most people to prefer suicide over life - perhaps adjusted for the difficulty and stigma of committing suicide. This is not supported by the evidence. I would say that biological life are infused with a strong will to live, and are willing to suffer quite a bit before utility becomes net negative. I'm not really sure how it makes sense to just look at suffering and pleasure, as if that is somehow numerical values, state that the net is the only thing that matters, and conclude that life is not worth living. If I have a preference for living, I have net positive utility - It doesn't matter how much I'm suffering!
CW: suicide, animal suffering (maybe even a bit infohazardous, probably skip if you are suicidal)
So, I've expressed efilist views before on Zvi's blog. They often come from a place of depression and anger about the world, combined with a very pessimistic interpretation of Meditations on Moloch. I'm trying to stop believing these views, mostly because of Eliezer's "The Lens that Sees Its Own Flaws", but I do have some thoughts that might help clarify my view of efilism as well as answer a few comments in this thread.
First, if your goal really is to kill all life on Earth, killing yourself first is obviously a bad way of accomplishing this. Thus, efilism and suicidal intent don't necessarily imply each other.
Second, if we can say that evolution is selecting for anything at all, it's selecting for ongoing survival of the species of the world, and both suicidal and efilist (and anti-natalist, now that I think of it) views would be selected out over time.
I think we observe this in practice; even with the tragic 700,000 suicides per year globally (actually tragic, I'm not being sarcastic or snide here, I promise), suicide is actually pretty hard to do. People can have suicidal thoughts for years before doing it, some quick Wiki searching shows only about a 50% success rate even for attempts, and even the most blackpilled suicide advocates on the Internet, when asked why they haven't committed suicide yet, will often say how hard it is and how likely it is to fail in a life-altering way. It's actually really hard to kill yourself, and I do genuinely believe that is a very good thing.
Suffering is also kind of weird in a Darwinian sense. Pain evolved as a protection mechanism and suffering probably followed. But we know there's no group selection, every living thing is mostly out for itself and maybe its offspring, and we humans are one of a very few species that organize and help each other on this scale. Suffering is inflicted, en masse, onto other living things. Bacteria and parasites consume animals from the inside, carnivores eat their prey alive at times, and humans factory farm and, per Eliezer, have that little off-switch for their empathy named "outgroup" that makes awful, unconceivable atrocities when they're done against yours into rightful, just actions when done against someone who isn't yours.
Meditations on Moloch was depressing, to say the least. Multipolar traps, incentive gradients, short-term wins that become coordination traps that force everyone to sacrifice values to keep competitive. To me, there was no aspect of existence that Moloch would not leave alone, no joy or value or sacred duty that wouldn't be optimized away, and even if you stand up for your principles, you'd just lose to someone who didn't. More natural selection, culminating in, as Scott has written, the Disneyland with no children.
Efilism just seemed like the natural response. if Moloch guarantees infinite optimized suffering in enough time, if every good thing about life and nature would be optimized away, then there is no reason to keep anything around, knowing that joy will hit 0 and suffering would be unbounded.
But I was too pessimistic. Rereading "The Lens that Sees Its Own Flaws" made me realize that humans are the only things - ever - that have been able to reflect on their own minds and notice mistakes. We still run on instinct a lot of the time, but we can override it. Our minds quietly make all sorts of rational errors, but we can try to notice those moments and train against them. And even the coordination problems seem like they won't always hold forever.
Also, P.S. to any true efilists: false vacuum decay is cooler, faster, and more total than any anti-natalism could hope to achieve. And for anti-efilists, it also has the convenient property of being probably impossible to engineer, making it a perfect wild goose chase for the efilists.
Well, yeah, the impossibility is kinda the point. Use it to distract the efilists with something that would accomplish exactly what they want while also being impossible. It's easier than trying to convince them they're wrong.
I assume it is sort of a joke, but my point was to remind the efilists there is actually something possible that would accomplish exactly what they want, and it is the subject of this article.
And they don't really need to believe it has a great chance to work, it just needs to have a greater chance than any other plans they have, and they mostly not have any plan with any chance to work.
True, every efilist I've heard of objects to suffering, not life itself, they just view the two as inseparable. I don't think I'm onboard with removing suffering - we wouldn't want an animal to be happy as its being gored and eaten alive - but reducing the causes of suffering is something I can get behind. And, no, not via vacuum decay.
Maybe you wouldn't, but I absolutely would, and I think you would too, if you were the one being gored, eaten alive, and agonizing.
Edit: I think I misunderstood what you mean, do you mean you would want them to be happy if they are eaten, but not want them to be eaten even if they are happy (if this is it, I think it is much more reasonable than my first read) ?
But could it be that these folks are just deferring suffering to older age, where a lifetime of avoiding suffering thus leaves one with zero coping skills just when it becomes hardest? It's hard to not view this as another form of the peculiar American aversion to talking about death?
If we were to extrapolate from the example of Jo Cameron (which is a single but meaningful datapoint), she discovered her condition in 60s, and seems to have a decent health status and satisfying life outcomes for a 76-years old person. The emphasis on suffering minimization and adaptiveness is to be maintained throughout the entire lifespan.
Studying and skilfully relating to the issues of personal identity, including the termination of the closed individualist identity, is certainly within our scope of interest, just not the central focus of The Far Out project.
That seems pretty dry, doesn't it? How much experience do you have with the travails of the elderly in general and in specific? In other words, if you're just shoving all the suffering into the last years of life, is that, then, not a question of "eliminating suffering" but rather increasing the "brisance" of old age?
An argument that painlessness is deferring suffering to old age is like arguing that making people rich is deferring poverty to old age. That's not how it works. There's not a quota of suffering you have to get through in life. In fact suffering gains interest like debt; the more you have, the more you'll have in future.
I'm not buying that somehow the mechanisms used to induce the inability to suffer continue to work in the presence of natural breakdown of the body by age. It's just as likely that it works up to a point, the gradually or different, it doesn't.
The point is not that you're experiencing "everything otherwise suffered". Instead you're experiencing "normal" without 50 years of experience with dealing with it. That's what I mean by brisance. Same state, but with the decline experienced rapidly and all the more vividly.
And that's just one scenario. One can imagine others. Such as if you were able to sell inhibition of suffering, what if it's a drug you have to take every X days or it wears off, and you feel "normal" all the more vividly since you know what it's like without suffering. Nobody will exploit that for gain...
I don't see why it would be a problem to first experience it at 70 instead of 20, or whichever years we're using. The adjustment period would be the same.
The second paragraph is the current state of things; the older you get the more pills you take to feel normal, many of them more than once a day. But if you could replace every side effect medication with a dose of Heroin 2.0, that sounds like a deal.
It sounds like your imagining that "suffering" is a natural, basic feature of existence, and "not suffering" can only happen because of some special extra structure on top of that. But suffering is, like any experience, produced by a complex mechanism that is itself subject to external forces and decay. Why not instead not buy that the mechanisms used to induce suffering continue to work etc.? You know they must break down at some point, since the dead don't suffer, and if those mechanisms can survive up to almost the very end why shouldn't others?
I am curious to know the source for the claim that Jo Cameron lacks dangerous pain insensitivity. According to this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain she did not notice having broken a bone (a very dangerous sympton of pain insensitivity!)
The Wikipedia article on FAAH says of Cameron that "The frequent burns and cuts suffered due to her hypoalgesia healed quicker than average with little or no scarring" with three references.
One is an article from the British Journal of Anaesthesia https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6676009/ which says "She reported numerous burns and cuts without pain, often smelling her burning flesh before noticing any injury, and that these wounds healed quickly with little or no residual scar" but also "On clinical examination, she had multiple scars around the arms and on the back of her hands". It also mentions that IN MICE FAAH deletion produces "accelerated skin wound healing" along with various other things similar to what Jo Cameron reports.
I'm not sure whether after all this I believe that Jo Cameron actually heals unusually quickly or not.
Another thing that at least two of these articles mention is that FAAH is involved in _memory_. BJA article: Jo Cameron "reported long-standing memory lapses (e.g. frequently forgetting words mid-sentence and placement of keys)". FAAH deletion IN MICE produces "short-term memory deficits". Guardian article, as quoted above, lists "forgetfulness" as something produced by Cameron's mutations.
I am not sure that I would trade worse memory for immunity to pain, anxiety and depression, even if there weren't a risk of e.g. breaking bones and not noticing. (Of course someone who suffers more pain, anxiety and depression than I do might make a different tradeoff.)
As for Jo's adaptive and risk-averse functioning, it is certainly way better than in typical, dangerous cases of the congenital insensitivity to pain, and worse when compared to the average. Still, the ratio of "cumulative hedonic tone benefits" to the "trade-off in adaptive responses and potentially in memory" is unusually high - certainly high enough to consider cases like Jo a great starting point for the exploratory research.
It is worth noting that we do not currently consider Jo to be the ultimate and optimal model to exactly replicate, but her genome and phenomenology continues to warrant particular attention in the research and intervention design.
I wasn't intending to suggest that you're wrong to look at her case! I was commenting more on Scott's (obviously tongue-in-cheek, but still...) "The best neurotype belongs to a 76 year old Scottish woman named Jo Cameron".
The memory-emotion connection reminds me of ADHD, they tend to have poorer memories and subsequently forget grudges or emotionally taxing events more frequently than the norm too. Given that the brain preferentially memorises negative emotional experiences over neutral or positive ones, I wonder if there's a deeper link between memory and negative emotions.
Maybe Cameron does experience psychological suffering, but her memories don't contain an emotional component or context so she always remembers herself as being emotionally steady when recalling past events.
I find the description of her case a bit baffling too. If she cries at sad movies, is she not empathically sharing the pain of the characters?
And feeling that a husband's suicide is maybe "for the best", given his bipolar suffering - this doesn't seem too cold, it's maybe reasonable. But what if he had been murdered, and was leading a happy life with many unfulfilled projects? Would she still be back at work the next day? Not sure this behavior is consistent with love as I understand it.
Given that other FAAH-mutated people don't have Cameron's pain insensitivity, and given that a lot of people with pain insensitivity lead short dysfunctional lives, perhaps we should be very careful about generalizing from her case?
We also found the mention of crying at sad movies to be particularly intriguing; when studied, Jo scored 0 on scales measuring depression and anxiety (PHQ-9 and GAD-7), so one of the possible explanations is the presence of extremely low negative valence levels that remain barely detected/unreported at the declarative macro level, with a behavioral manifestation of crying largely retained. Another explanation refers to the complexity of mixed valence states, where things that are generally considered as sources of negative valence (very spicy food, touching scenes in movies) are enjoyable at the macro level.
One can cry at beauty. One can cry out of deep positive valence empathy. One can cry out of love. One can cry at something moving. Not all tears flow from negative valence states.
True, but I'm not sure we can pry apart all those cases of crying from our historic capacity for suffering. I might cry with joy watching my kid valiantly swim his first lap in the pool, but isn't that "joy" a complex emotion, tinged with awareness of his fragile finitude, the sadness that he'll someday succumb to something?
I wonder if that is a combination of having learned social cues ("this is what you are supposed to do in this situation") with the conditioned responses movies use to evoke reactions - setting up the situation with the lighting, music, all the rest of it to prime us that "now you cry"? In that case, crying at the sad movies is a reflex like sneezing when dust gets in your nose, and has nothing to do with feeling conscious emotion or identification with the characters in the scene?
See this skit about FPS games: "Oh right, you're supposed to be my best friend, I'm supposed to be emotionally invested in you. And there it is - trying to cram years of backstory into a few sentences":
In my experience, empathetically sharing the suffering of fictional characters (or of real people I merely read about and don't know personally) doesn't feel exactly the same as suffering oneself. It's hard to describe, but it's like there's no "edge" to it. There are some of the emotional qualities of suffering, but not the ones that make it really, really bad.
But isn't there also motivational empathy, motivational because it's painful to the empathizer? Yes, the empathic suffering is milder/different from the primary suffering, but it's bad enough to get the empathizer to do something about the bad thing happening.
We welcome various expressions of interest sent via the contact form, the response time might be somewhat longer these days: https://faroutinitiative.com/
We have a multi-layered plan, so regardless of the yet unknown technical viability of specific interventions tested within specific subprojects, in the long run, we optimize for delivering the most net positive value to the suffering abolitionism as a big-picture cause.
Fuck Brave New World...that book is a perfect counterexample to the idea that we should assume we learn things or are informed by reading. The message of the book depends on inducing a subtle fallacy in the reader. And particularly fuck all the educators and defenders of literature as a way of learning about the world and challenging our preconceptions who expose students to Brave New World but don't even mention his later pro-drug novel Island.
The book insists that Soma really actually makes the people who take it happy [1]. But then the book relies on the fact that as readers who aren't on soma we will think of his situation as unpleasant and undesirable. Indeed, the actions of the protagonist don't even make sense unless you assume Soma really doesn't make him happy and merely distracts him.
--
1: If Huxley just wanted to suggest that drugs like alcohol don't actually make people happy (as defenders suggest) he could have simply described Soma as making people docile or just distracting them. But he heavy handedly insists that Soma really does make people happy and eliminate these bad emotions.
I never got why people consider Brave New World dsytopic. My final written exam in highschool was on that book, and afterwards my teacher told me that she found it a bad idea to argue in such an exam that neither the book itself nor the questions asked in the exam make any sense at all.
It's because people seem to mostly engage empathy and other simulations of other people by imagining ourselves in their shoes.
If you've had a good experience on MDMA then you can probably do that with Soma but if you haven't -- as is true of most people when they first read Brave New World -- then imagine it sucking to be in that situation. These effect is amplified because the protagonist behaves in ways that accord with how you would imagine feeling in a situation where you weren't physically uncomfortable but felt unsatisfied and we're denied anything like rapturous joy.
Yes, and this approach is completely alien to me. It is written in the book that they are happy, and made very clear that this is a correct statement. For me there is nothing else to say.
But everyone is conditioned to be happy in the station they enjoy in life, and not to want more; they don't envy the classes above or below them, and they are conditioned out of wanting experiences not deemed appropriate to where they are:
"Mr. Foster was left in the Decanting Room. The D.H.C. and his students stepped into the nearest lift and were carried up to the fifth floor.
INFANT NURSERIES. NEO-PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONING ROOMS, announced the notice board.
The Director opened a door. They were in a large bare room, very bright and sunny; for the whole of the southern wall was a single window. Half a dozen nurses, trousered and jacketed in the regulation white viscose-linen uniform, their hair aseptically hidden under white caps, were engaged in setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor. Big bowls, packed tight with blossom. Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble.
The nurses stiffened to attention as the D.H.C. came in.
'Set out the books,' he said curtly.
In silence the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out--a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.
'Now bring in the children.'
They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its four wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their caste was Delta) dressed in khaki.
'Put them down on the floor.'
The infants were unloaded.
'Now turn them so that they can see the flowers and books.'
Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on the white pages. As they approached, the sun came out of a momentary eclipse behind a cloud. The roses flamed up as though with a sudden passion from within; a new and profound significance seemed to suffuse the shining pages of the books. From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure.
The Director rubbed his hands. 'Excellent!' he said. 'It might almost have been done on purpose.'
The swiftest crawlers were already at their goal. Small hands reached out uncertainly, touched, grasped, unpetaling the transfigured roses, crumpling the illuminated pages of the books. The Director waited until all were happily busy. Then, 'Watch carefully,' he said. And, lifting his hand, he gave the signal.
The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever.
There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.
The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.
'And now,' the Director shouted (for the noise was deafening), 'now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock.'
He waved his hand again, and the Head Nurse pressed a second lever. The screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.
'We can electrify that whole strip of floor,' bawled the Director in explanation. 'But that's enough,' he signalled to the nurse.
The explosions ceased, the bells stopped ringing, the shriek of the siren died down from tone to tone into silence. The stiffly twitching bodies relaxed, and what had become the sob and yelp of infant maniacs broadened out once more into a normal howl of ordinary terror.
'Offer them the flowers and the books again.'
The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of the roses, at the mere sight of those gaily-coloured images of pussy and cock-a-doodle-doo and baa-baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror; the volume of their howling suddenly increased.
'Observe,' said the Director triumphantly, 'observe.'"
"'Consider the horse.'
They considered it.
Mature at six; the elephant at ten. While at thirteen a man is not yet sexually mature; and is only full grown at twenty. Hence, of course, that fruit of delayed development, the human intelligence.
'But in Epsilons,' said Mr. Foster very justly, 'we don't need human intelligence.'
Didn't need and didn't get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow's, what an enormous saving to the Community!
'Enormous!' murmured the students. Mr. Foster's enthusiasm was infectious.
He became rather technical; spoke of the abnormal endocrine co-ordination which made men grow so slowly; postulated a germinal mutation to account for it. Could the effects of this germinal mutation be undone? Could the individual Epsilon embryo be made to revert, by a suitable technique, to the normality of dogs and cows? That was the problem. And it was all but solved.
Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head."
I think the view "but it's not a dystopia" comes in if you're imagining being an Alpha and extrapolating from our current world: if I were the same person I am but in that world where there's perfect happy drug like soma, it'd be great!
Only you wouldn't be the same as you are in this world, and that world is not our world. You might not even be an Alpha, you could be a perfectly happy Epsilon just sapient enough to do the hard physical labour needed for society to function. It's the worst of HBD taken to extremes: some (races) classes of humans *are* inferior in every respect and moreover they are *made* to be that way, to be natural slaves.
"On Rack 10 rows of next generation's chemical workers were being trained in the toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar, chlorine. The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundredth metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. 'To improve their sense of balance,' Mr. Foster explained. 'Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid air is a ticklish job. We slacken off the circulation when they're right way up, so that they're half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they're upside down. They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing on their heads.'"
"'Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let's have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet.'
At the end of the room a loud-speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.
'...all wear green,' said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, 'and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.'
There was a pause; then the voice began again.
'Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able...'
The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.
'They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson.'
Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafoetida--wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia."
"It is written in the book that they are happy, and made very clear that this is a correct statement. For me there is nothing else to say."
Yes. Humans worked upon from literal conception to be happy in the station assigned to them, as happy as a fern in a pot. Worse than the historical states of serfs or slaves, where someone from a lower rank might have a chance of breaking out of it by talent or brains or finding a patron; these are the future of humanity all eternally sorted into one life forever.
Would you be happier if your parents controlled every moment of your life so you only liked what they wanted you to like, had interests and hobbies they approved of, worked a job they wanted you to work, married the spouse they wanted you to have, had the children in the number and ratio of sexes they wanted? Every minute planned out by others with no choice for you? But you're happy, because your controllers give you doses of the happy drug at regular intervals.
Brave New World is that world but not even someone as close by blood to you as your parents are your controllers. Maybe it's a utopia if everyone is an Alpha and it is the Culture where the controllers give their pets all the treats their little meat brains crave, but BNW is not the Culture.
The utopia where they give electric shocks to eight month old infants.
I completely understand everything what you say, and it seems totally desirable to me to grow up and live a life as an Epsilon in Brave New World. I acknowledge that you feel different, but I can not even start to comprehend why.
To answer your question "Would you be happier if your parents controlled ..."
As a matter of fact, the answer is probably yes. From what I know about arranged marriages, people in them tend to be happier than people who could choose their partner. I am not super-sure about this, but it *doesn't matter*. The question in the book is not whether being controlled makes you happy. In the book, the Epsilon's are happy. All the time. Really, I would very much like to be an Epsilon in Brave New World, and I don't understand why others don't share this sentiment. It's a bit like discussing whether 1+1=2, and other keep coming up with clever arguments like "Ah, but did you know that there are numbers that don't give two if you increase them by one?"
I don't think it's that hard if you really take seriously the idea they are gloriously crazily happy all the time. I think lots of people would trade even very valuable things like intelligence for more happiness and they do all the time.
It's just hard if you don't imagine them as really being happy.
Happiness isn't a single thing. It comes in a vast variety of very different flavours. Losing intelligence closes lots of options for these. I'd rather an icecream than go hungry, but I really don't want your free infinite ice-cream forever if that means I can't have stuffed cabbage leaves ever again, and I think it would be wrong of me to make that trade for people who've never tried them and don't even know what they're missing.
"I don't think it's that hard if you really take seriously the idea they are gloriously crazily happy all the time."
But even in BNW they're not all gloriously crazily happy all the time; they're just happy enough for society not to crash down, and it's a level of happiness decided upon by the controllers. The animal appetites, as it were, are glutted and they get the doses of soma appropriate to their caste and to enable them to work as society needs them to work (in fact, in some ways it reminds me of the nice people on here talking about how they need Adderall or the analogue because it's impossible to be as focussed and productive at their jobs as required without it):
"The Main Day-Shift was just going off duty. Crowds of lower-caste workers were queued-up in front of the monorail station--seven or eight hundred Gamma, Delta and Epsilon men and women, with not more than a dozen faces and statures between them. To each of them, with his or her ticket, the booking clerk pushed over a little cardboard pillbox. The long caterpillar of men and women moved slowly forward.
'What's in those' (remembering The Merchant of Venice), 'those caskets?' the Savage enquired when Bernard had rejoined him.
'The day's soma ration,' Bernard answered, rather indistinctly; for he was masticating a piece of Benito Hoover's chewing-gum. 'They get it after their work's over. Four half-gramme tablets. Six on Saturdays.'
The World Controller is perfectly aware of the situation and says that this is the society humanity has wanted, so it's the one it gets, and all the talk of overcoming adversity and so on is nonsense:
'I was wondering,' said the Savage, 'why you had them at all--seeing that you can get whatever you want out of those bottles. Why don't you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus while you're about it?'
Mustapha Mond laughed. 'Because we have no wish to have our throats cut,' he answered. 'We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn't fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas--that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!' he repeated.
The Savage tried to imagine it, not very successfully.
'It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work--go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized--but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle--an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course,' the Controller meditatively continued, 'goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It's obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing.'
'What was that?' asked the Savage.
Mustapha Mond smiled. 'Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen.'
The Savage sighed, profoundly.
'The optimum population,' said Mustapha Mond, 'is modelled on the iceberg--eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.'
'And they're happy below the water line?'
'Happier than above it. Happier than your friends here, for example.' He pointed.
'In spite of that awful work?'
'Awful? They don't find it so. On the contrary, they like it. It's light, it's childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True,' he added, 'they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.' Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. 'And why don't we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure. It's the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes--because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science.'
'Do you remember that bit in King Lear?' said the Savage at last: '"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us; the dark and vicious place where thee he got cost him his eyes," and Edmund answers--you remember, he's wounded, he's dying--"Thou hast spoken right; 'tis true. The wheel is come full circle; I am here." What about that, now? Doesn't there seem to be a God managing things, punishing, rewarding?'
'Well, does there?' questioned the Controller in his turn. 'You can indulge in any number of pleasant vices with a freemartin and run no risks of having your eyes put out by your son's mistress. "The wheel is come full circle; I am here." But where would Edmund be nowadays? Sitting in a pneumatic chair, with his arm round a girl's waist, sucking away at his sex-hormone chewing-gum and looking at the feelies. The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.'
'Are you sure?' asked the Savage. 'Are you quite sure that the Edmund in that pneumatic chair hasn't been just as heavily punished as the Edmund who's wounded and bleeding to death? The gods are just. Haven't they used his pleasant vices as an instrument to degrade him?'
'Degrade him from what position? As a happy, hard-working, goods-consuming citizen he's perfect. Of course, if you choose some other standard than ours, then perhaps you might say he was degraded. But you've got to stick to one set of postulates. You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.'
'But value dwells not in particular will,' said the Savage. 'It holds his estimate and dignity as well wherein 'tis precious of itself as in the prizer.'
'If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices. You'd have a reason for bearing things patiently, for doing things with courage. I've seen it with the Indians.'
'I'm sure you have,' said Mustapha Mond. 'But then we aren't Indians. There isn't any need for a civilized man to bear anything that's seriously unpleasant. And as for doing things--Ford forbid that he should get the idea into his head. It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own.'
'What about self-denial, then? If you had a God, you'd have a reason for self-denial.'
'But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.'
'You'd have a reason for chastity!' said the Savage, blushing a little as he spoke the words.
'But chastity means passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the end of civilization. You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.'
'But God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a God...'
'My dear young friend,' said Mustapha Mond, 'civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended--there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears--that's what soma is.'"
Who the hell actually *enjoys* being intelligent? Sure, there's a sense of superiority that comes with it, but it doesn't actually make you happy on its own.
To some extent. But what people really hate is the gap between their social status and the social status they think they deserve.
And having high intelligence can fill your head with a feeling from an early age that you deserve high status. If you fail to feel as high-status in adulthood as you did in third grade, you'll probably be pretty miserable about it.
There's something to be said for going into your adult life without a whole bunch of beliefs about how amazing you're going to be.
Yes, but there are specific deprivations associated with low status (e.g. in the USA) that I don't think are present even for the epsilons in BNW. Yeah, they take orders, but I don't see them being humiliated or terrified, or deprived of food or sex.
I enjoy it. There's probably some element of smugness, but also looking for good logical associations is like flying over a landscape and finding the pretty parts. I would miss it if I couldn't do it. If I were (without changing) in the bottom 10% for intelligence, I would still like it. I would opt for being more intelligent if it were available to me.
A lot of people like walking. They don't need to be superior walkers.
>also looking for good logical associations is like flying over a landscape and finding the pretty parts.
Nice! Reminds me of Newton's:
>I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
I enjoy it in a sense that it allows me to solve problems. A few weeks ago I was literally jumping with joy because I found a solution to a stubborn problem plaguing the project I was working on. The sense of elation is way disproportional to any possible tangible benefit (it's not like my job was threatened or anything).
But maybe I'm mistaking the pleasure of an accomplishment with that of being intelligent.... hard to separate the two in this case.
Intelligence enables a great many joys and pleasures that are otherwise inaccessible. For those with learning difficulties, there are fewer options and their world is a smaller one.
It's hard to imagine wanting to deliberately shrink your world. Brave New World is being heavily discussed, but the relevant work here is Flowers for Algernon.
Compare also: "who the hell actually enjoys money? Sure, there's a sense of superiority that comes with it, but it doesn't actually make you happy on its own."
I enjoy being able to pursue intellectual interests that I otherwise couldn't, including my job. COVID brain fog was very frustrating for me because so many of the things I normally enjoy weren't accessible.
Yeah, I think Huxley pulls a couple of things like that. He likens the deltas to maggots for no good reason. He has a dance in, IIRC, Westminster cathedral, which I suspect for UK audiences is intended to trigger a "sacrilege!" reaction. _My_ reaction to all of these is "different times, different mores, WTF is the big deal?".
I loved Brave New World as a kid specifically because it makes you ask questions like whether it's better to be smart or accurately informed or better to be happy. I decided that I'd rather be the savage than happy, but if you come out in a different place, I don't have a strong basis to argue.
If I remember the novel correctly, even people who were following the soma regimen exactly still had to get treatments to experience the rush of serious emotion or of pregnancy occasionally. But yes, part of the point of the novel, not contradicted by Huxley later favoring psychedelics, is that a drug that just induces happiness doesn't create a meaningful life. We already know that opiates induce overwhelming feelings of love and happiness in users and no one thinks of an opium den as an ideal society.
Sounds like we just need a drug that stimulate the feeling of 'meaning' in addition to 'happiness'. But this would be a horrible piece of sci-fi so such a book would never get published or at least would never be popular. It's impossible to write a story in a world where there's no suffering and no downsides to the lack of suffering.
Yes, I agree that Huxley pulls a bait-and-switch in Brave New World. If soma _actually_ made people happy, then, as you say, a lot of the characters' actions make no sense.
In the context of the current post: soma _almost_ works, but it is portrayed as interfering a bit too much with adaptive functioning. The case of Jo Cameron indeed strongly suggests that some sort of "mood brightening" that _doesn't_ interfere with adaptive functioning is possible.
I think that, as _described_, Brave New World, with some fairly minor changes (replacing the deltas and epsilons with microprocessors), looks like quite a livable place. Consider the things that _aren't_ in BNW: paupers, incels, bible/koran-thumpers, wars (though the formation process was enormously bloody), and population growth. Yes, BNW loses scientific progress and high art. I agree with Mustafa Mond that the trade-off is worth it.
Unlike 1984, BNW is not "a boot stamping on a human face, forever". Peace, promiscuity, full employment, everyone engineered to fit the job they are designed for, soma, and a stable population, are nothing to sneer at. Remember that our economy (I'm writing from the USA) has pushed something like half of the workforce into the precariat.
I think the main problem with BNW is that it looks too much like a command economy - and those tend to become, not stable and prosperous, but murderous failures (Maoist China, USSR, North Korea, Cambodia). BNW's hatcheries count on being able to crank out the right mix of alphas through epsilons, and even the right mix of specialists, _decades_ before their labor is needed. I doubt that that is workable. The predestinators' task looks impossible to me.
BNW also portrays its upper management as _actually_ acting in the service of their society and ideology. "Happiness is a hard master--particularly _other_ people's happiness." I doubt that this is stable. Commissars are often corrupt.
Overall, BNW looks to me less like a dystopia (except for the deltas and epsilons) than like an unreachable utopia.
I think giving up scientific progress at any foreseeable point is way too much. Eventually we may discover all there is to now, but until then exchanging a positive rate for a level seems like a fool's bargain.
Many Thanks! I do indeed see giving up scientific progress as one of the largest downsides to BNW.
It is a trickier question than just a binary choice. Even in BNW, _some_ scientific progress is allowed, albeit heavily constrained. Even in our world, some fields are considered "solved problems" (or sometimes "past the point of diminishing returns") and funding for work on them essentially stops. And occasionally this choice turns out to be a mistake, and there is some important information that would have been found by further work in a "solved" field, which gets missed because the work isn't done. Science is, of course, always probing for information that we don't know yet.
Maybe one way to think about this is that in our world we choose which fields of science to pursue by balancing anticipated gains (unavoidably unknown) and funding costs. BNW could be thought of as looking at social disruption costs as well as funding costs.
Many Thanks! I concur with Cadre that "The problem for Huxley is that Mond is right. " And not just about sexuality. To my mind, perhaps the most damning exchange is:
> "In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
> "All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
> "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.
> "I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
In my view, John Savage comes off as a prize idiot in this exchange.
Many Thanks! If Jo Cameron didn't exist, or, more generally, examples of people who are happier than usual, yet equally adaptive and functional, then I would agree with you. To my mind, the crucial question is whether, or to what degree, unhappiness is necessary as a _signal_ as part of adaptive behavior.
It isn't very surprising that some people are born unable to sense pain. Any subsystem in our bodies has critical components, and it isn't surprising to see a failure mode. And it isn't surprising that people who completely lack pain sensors tend to do themselves severe damage and die early (presumably with Darwinian selection removing their genes from the pool, as you noted).
It _is_ surprising that the mechanisms of pain and unhappiness can be partially disabled _without_ damaging adaptation, as in Jo Cameron's case. To the extent that this is feasible it makes perfectly good sense to do so.
And John Savage goes _way_ overboard in seeking unhappiness _even by mechanisms that we successfully thwart today_. Claiming syphilis, starvation, lice, and typhoid is idiocy.
The fact that Jo Cameron is so unusual indicates to me that it probably isn't adaptive.
> Claiming syphilis, starvation, lice, and typhoid is idiocy.
True if he's rejecting modern health measures. Not necessarily if that's part of a larger package he can't pick & choose from. After all, the past had those things and was able to overcome them because it had scientific progress (one of the things being given up).
>The fact that Jo Cameron is so unusual indicates to me that it probably isn't adaptive.
Oops! I think the general discussion of her case has been using "adaptive" in an either nonstandard or ambiguous way. I agree that in the _Darwinian_ sense of "adaptive", the fact that her condition is so rare implies that it isn't adaptive. In the broader sense of more or less the opposite of damaging or counterproductive, I think Cameron's condition is at least not damaging adaptation in the way that people born with zero pain sensitivity are damaged.
>True if he's rejecting modern health measures.
Many Thanks!
>Not necessarily if that's part of a larger package he can't pick & choose from.
Ok. It depends on what all the components of BNW's package are. They are portrayed as having a much more capable biomedical technology than ours. Mond's list goes well beyond what we can prevent, treat, or cure. Also, while science is _controlled_ in BNW, it isn't described as having being brought to a dead stop. Even if it was a package deal, I still think Savage is a fool for rejecting it.
Well we know that he intended it to be one. He has said so.
And whether it is a dystopia or not is a bit ill-defined because Huxley has described the world in an inconsistent fashion so whether it's a dystopia or not depends a bit on which descriptions you go with -- but it's certainly not a good argument against drugs that produce happiness.
>Huxley has described the world in an inconsistent fashion so whether it's a dystopia or not depends a bit on which descriptions you go with
Agreed. There is also a lot that isn't described. We don't get e.g. a good picture of what the standard of living of e.g. the gammas is. Yeah, they are lower in the hierarchy than alphas or betas - but are they deprived in any sense that would pain them? They aren't short of food or sex (or presumably not sleep?). Any comment on my comment of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative/comment/56490956 ?
Regarding livestock suffering, I suspect we could get a decent fraction of the way there just by feeding them powerful opiates. Sure, as a person being a heroin addict isn't great it's not unpleasant even in awful conditions when you are actually on the drug and even though respiratory depression does seem to cap maximal doses some opiates show that affect to smaller degrees and a cow raised for meat only needs to get through a couple years.
Yes, there might be concerns about it affecting the people who consume the meat, but I don't think this is beyond the ability of us to solve, e.g., just ensuring it breaks down relatively quickly or is somehow unable to cross human BBB. And since there are crazy powerful mu agonists I think it could even be done relatively cheaply.
You might need to add an appetite stimulant but why not.
1) It begs the question of how bad that outcome really would be. It's not like you can't buy illicit opiates on the street in any metropolis at rates even poor people can afford *initially*. Given that methadone/buprenorphine maintenance are how we treat addicts its not clear to me that shifting the profit from cartels to us farmers and lowering prices isn't a net win.
2) If you don't agree, I suspect that if they were infused into some kind of unappetizing feed that was also spiked with some kind of drug humans found unpleasant that wouldn't be all that appealing to buy (yes you could extract but is that really that much easier than just meth synthesis)?
But I should have said that yes, I agree there are reasons people don't do this but I just wanted to point out that I think it is largely a matter of how much we care about animal suffering,
So I'm still 100% behind this idea and think it's a great thing but I just wanted to note that if we cared enough we might be able to do it now.
Don't we usually get around this with other drugs (including with controlled substances) by creating a vet version of the drug? Maybe it doesn't have the same GMP requirements, so it's not technically ingestible for humans?
I suspect the other major problem with feeding opiates to livestock is that they'd all have huge amounts of constipation. Then to fix that, you'd have to give them the opiate-specific anti-constipation drugs (which work really well!) and at that point you're adding a lot of vet-related expenses that farmers can't afford.
There might be multiple overlapping barriers to using this approach: aforementioned concern about large quantities of opiates being sold/stolen, total cost, negative effects of opiates on the nutritional value, safety, and/or taste of meat/animal products, as well as the public/consumer opposition to consuming meat from animals on heavy doses of strong drugs. Given the scale of intense suffering associated with factory farming, we obviously keep our fingers crossed for the emergence of novel and complementary technical interventions that may help minimize it.
Yes, I didn't mean to raise it as a reason not to pursue your approach. Exactly why it hasn't been pursued isn't that important -- people just seem to find the idea of drugging cows unappealing/objectionable even if they shouldn't.
Though I do suspect that there will be some resistance from the anti-GMO people to your solution and this example here suggests it may take some effort to convince them -- but still sounds like the most promising approach.
Thanks! The edits we have been researching should not require us to introduce species-foreign genes. In consequence, the produced lines of livestock animals should not be classified as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) according to the new regulatory paradigms.
Ohh really? So even in Europe that won't be so labelled? How does that work?
Surely you can't just get around the GMO label by insisting you started with a gene from that species and made modifications...after all every gene can be turned into any other with enough modifications. Does that mean you first have to find a member of the species with that exact gene sequence?
Thank you, but doesn't that suggest the opposite for the EU, yes it loosens the rules in the UK but it seems to imply that the EU rules would require such changes to be regulated/labeled as GMO.
The very cynical way to overcome this is to do away with cattle and pigs and livestock as food animals, and instead have clones of Jo Cameron or the genetically-engineered human embryos as food sources instead. They'll be just fine in factory farm conditions as they'll heal fast from any injuries, won't feel pain, and won't be distressed by the conditions they live in. We can even intervene to make them stupider than average intelligence in case any bleeding-heart types have qualms about keeping pain-free human animals as livestock.
Does she, though? That's the question raised by her stoic attitude to her husband's suicide. She might only feel rudimentary emotional pain compared to baseline humans. Anyway, that's what making the clones dumber is all about, to keep soft-hearted types like you happy! 🤣 "Too stupid to feel sad" our motto!
We're not getting clear information about her actual physical and emotional states. Obviously it's in the interests of the aims of the Far Out Initiative to claim that Mrs. Cameron is a totally normal person *except* she feels no pain and heals without scars, so isolating the magic genes and incorporating them into future humans would have no downside at all.
But from other accounts, she does have scars because of lack of pain perception, and her account of her reaction to her husband's suicide can be read in different ways. Maybe she's a good special needs teacher because she's kind and patient - and maybe she's kind and patient because of emotional blunting, so she can listen to a kid having a screaming meltdown and react with apathy instead of the impatience or concern another person might feel. "Jimmy's been yelling and crying for a solid hour and now he's blue in the face!" "Yeah, so? I care about that why?" "Well, you're just so... patient?"
Maybe she really does experience sadness and the rest of it the way we do, and in that case she doesn't have the claimed lack of anxiety and distress so the effects would not be present if we managed to copy her genome. There's too much on the positive side claimed by the Far Outs and not enough hard data from other sources to be able to make an informed decision on all the "we can totes do away with all suffering of all sorts!" aspirations.
Since I've been recommended to start the topic over: Until zero-suffering long-termists start talking about population collapse and dysgenics, I'm not going to take them seriously.
I wouldn't put it nearly as strongly as MA_browsing, but while reading the post I started thinking about population collapse too (perhaps for different reasons). Population collapse, which seems imminent, likely means economic collapse because the modern economy relies on an enormous amount of specialization which in turn requires enormous numbers of smart people. Figuring out and implementing a zero-suffering solution will likely require an advanced economy, so population collapse would probably undermine the whole scheme.
Of course, many EAers have strong beliefs that AI is going to do many/most jobs in the near future, so population collapse is understandably less of a concern for them.
...Statements like this makes me think of an old Woody Allen quote, I have forgotten from which movie:
"The rich do not have money problems. But they have all the other problems."
Meaning that they, like everybody else, struggle with their own or their relatives mental problems; from impossible beauty standards; from not feeling loved; from jealousy; from cancer or other somatic diseases; from the inevitability of death; from family members that hate each other; from children who have problems in school; and on and on and on.
The idea behind the superhappiness is that, using a wide range of interventions, we strive to shift the ordinary pain-pleasure axis (from -10 to +10) maximally close to the maximally adaptive gradients of bliss (for example, with -5 to +10/+15 as an intermediate milestone, and then all the way above the hedonic zero). The object-level problems you have listed can, and naturally should, be solved in synergistic and parallel ways.
Well...many, perhaps most, problems of the type I mentioned cannot be solved. Our task is to live with them. Which requires something else than both ability to solve problems and the emotion called happiness.
Food and warfare seemed like problems that couldn't possibly be solved in a lasting way for most of human history, and they still haven't been completely, but the past century or two have seen remarkable progress. Maybe those others will similarly become tractable once the right technical foundations are in place.
Well in a sense, that can-do attitude is an attitude I like/admire/respect/love looking across the Atlantic to the US: How about trying to fix things instead of learning to accept them! To ((mis)quote Bertold Brecht: " To forget, rather than to fulfil, your wishes counts as [European] wisdom." That said, if you read my list of problems, I think you will agree that even for a US American, not all of them are fixable:-). ....
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "task" here? When I think of a task, I think of taking some action. But you are talking about problems which can't be solved (at least at any given point in time, level of technology etc.). So at least the action of fixing the problem is not available.
>Which requires something else than both ability to solve problems and the emotion called happiness.
Is the "something else" part of what you mean by "task"? Could you elaborate on what you have in mind?
You could say it is about cultivating a certain approach to life. “Acceptance” is its core tenet.
What is sometimes referred to as Frans of Assisi’s prayer captures some of it: “God, give me strength to change what can be changed, patience to accept what cannot be changed, and wisdom enough to always be able to differentiate between them.”
“Keep calm and carry on”, the slogan introduced by the British during the London Blitz in 1940/41 when family members were killed left, right and center captures another aspect of it. (I notice that Jo Cameron is 76 years old so this slogan was probably part of her childhood, and it fits with how she dealt with her husband’s mental illness and death.)
From a psychological perspective, it is about developing resilience faced with the trials and tribulations in life that necessarily will catch up with all of us in the end. To learn to go gently into that good night, and accept the dying of the light. Despite Dylan Thomas encouraging his father to do the opposite.
I mean, that seems good to me. I'm one of those people who thinks life without challenges and overcoming adversity is meaningless, but it also seems to me that the current amount of challenges and adversity that most people face is greater than neccessary in order to obtain meaning. Superhappy people who still have other problems seems like a good thing, if they aren't horribly suffering they can focus on more meaningful challenges.
Jo Cameron had "major problems", like a husband who suffered from severe depression and then committed suicide. Yet reportedly, this did not impair her happiness in the least.
I think "happiness" is a misplaced word in this context. Perhaps due to the poverty of language to differentiate emotional nuances. The way she dealt with her husband's problems and her own grief is ordinary expected adult behavior. "It is what it is" . That is the socially expected way to react. I am not Scottish, but this is the way adults are expected to react also in Scandinavia where I live, and the rest of Europe is not much different. Nor is US mainstream culture, if the emotional tone of 10.000 western movies is any guide. (An empirical question, admittedly.)
But she said that her response was atypical, and seemed "cold" to everyone else, despite them sharing the same Scottish culture.
(Yes many cultures value "sucking it up", but this obviously depends on the level of suffering. People will tell you to suck it up rather than whine about the toe you just stubbed, but they won't tell you to suck it up if your child just died.)
Yeah well, but can we trust how she is referred..Perhaps, perhaps not. When she is quoted, she expresses herself in a way that is a socially "mainstream" way to express yourself where I live. Also, to "such it up" is not quite the right emotional tone, either, where I am from... emotionally It is more akin to a type of fatalism, although that is a bit too strong again..What I am driving at, is that instead of going "down" to her genetic level to find the cause of her attitude, perhaps it is more fruitful to go "up" to the (Scottish) culture she is raised and live in. If so, hunting for genes and the like is less promising. But by all means, have a go at it.
I think some people are thinking about ways to raise average human compassion 70%, but it's much harder to force humans to get an intervention than to put it into animals, and it's unclear if it would have other negative effects (eg children would be spoiled because nobody could bear to discipline them, or whatever)
I agree, I just think changing a trait in the population is more dangerous than having a few people with the trait. I know many great religious people, but a world where everyone was 70% more religious would be pretty crazy.
Maybe everyone 70% religious "in the right way" would be great, but perhaps that's a tautology on my part.
Everyone 70% more Buddhist might be just what we want here - detached from suffering, yet full of compassion for beings not yet on the Great Raft. I admit there's a paradox in this Buddhist ideal I've never understood, but why should I? I'm far from Enlightened.
Once we stop doing terrible things to them, our own [compassionate] suffering would reduce too.
It's just the standard pain response, extended across bodies, extended inter-specially. I feel their pain, so stop the source of that pain. The result is no pain.
(1) The animal is suffering physically, I feel their pain, stop the physical suffering by improving the bad conditions so the environment does not stimulate pain, now they are not in pain so I am not in pain
(2) The animal is suffering physically, I feel their pain, stop the physical suffering by engineering the animal not to experience any pain despite environmental stimuli, now they are not in pain so I am not in pain
I think people would still experience empathetic pain in the second case, because we do not think it right that a creature be treated badly and simply 'saved' from pain due to the ability to feel it being removed. I think animal rights activists and vegans would still want to shut down factory farms even if the chickens were proven not to experience pain (see the group on here recommended for funding who take lawsuits about factory farm plants in breach of regulations, with the ultimate aim being to make it so tedious, expensive, and nuisance-causing that people will stop farming animals).
When I think about my own response to cages filled with pain-insensitive birds, I empathize not with their pain [there is none], but with their reduced form of life, all the ways a bird can thrive that are denied them. A meat machine is a pretty degraded form of existence. But if our choice is simply between meat machines who can feel pain, and those who can't, I gotta choose the latter, and bet most people would, vegan or not. . .
If they were blissful meat machines, I guess you could make the Utility case for their existence. But I don't like the total picture, personally, where we've reduced billions of a once free bird into a static means to our appetitive end.
Many of us thought about this, but even if technologically feasible, it would be extremely difficult for the game-theoretic reasons: 70-99.99% of population with the kind-spirited and compassionate attitudes resembling these exhibited by the Williams syndrome patients could be exploited by the remaining 0.01-30% in ways that would make society largely dysfunctional and prone to large scales of suffering.
I don't think it follows, what disadvantage will the kind-spirited have that would allow the others to exploit them ?
If the general population is more compassionate, I expect more compassionate leaders (or at least leader with more compassionate political program), to be elected.
I also expect more cooperations between more compassionate groups.
Which I think will be two important advantages.
One disadvantage is that the more compassionate will spend more resources on others than on themselves, but most of it will also go to the more compassionate if they are the majority.
So we can expect the less compassionate to get richer than the more ones but I think we can also expect a better general distribution of resources, and a harder time to use this for political powers.
On a game-theoretic perspective, the more compassionate has some disadvantages, but they have it now, if more people are more compassionate, this disadvantages doesn't increase, quite the opposite I think.
Easier to lower the fringe's compassion by 50% or so. Arguments keep cropping up on the subject because a minority of people care way too much about animal suffering.
Unfortunately I don't think it would work well, because you have a lot of other ways to avoid changing anything even if you are compassionate :
- You can just not think of it, if you don't think of it, the compassion will not help.
- You can start to believe the situation isn't what it really is, like thinking animal don't feel pain, or if it is too much of a stretch, think they feel pain, but it isn't really suffering, or it is suffering, but not really like our suffering because they are not self-conscious or something. Or in fact they are ok, how can we know what they like or not ? etc…
- You can also be more compassionate on average, but not for some groups.
- You can dislike the situation, but feel completely powerless and unable to change anything.
I think we would have a better chance with more intellectual honesty and more courage, even if more compassion would still help.
I'm not sure I buy that Cameron's condition is better and still within a desirable range of human condition. She doesn't cry at her husband's death but does for sad movies? Something does not compute. Perhaps she doesn't really feel sadness as genuinely as most humans do but just responds to cues like swelling music that tells her she's supposed to feel sad.
Maybe it's possible that it can be a more logical position to take to not be sad at someone's death who was so close to you, but to me, that doesn't sound better, and it doesn't sound human. It sounds too cold to be human. She might have surface features of being a kind person, but if she really does not feel suffering to that extent, then I don't think that long term, her interests really do align with humanity's. It sounds like she's a character right out of The Giver.
Edit: Put another way, if Scott is saying that she is well adjusted and moral, how do we know that she is well-adjusted and moral to the degree that we think people really should be? Would her morality hold up under all edge cases and pressure tests that we would want a normal well-adjusted human's morality to hold up under?
The character of media reports makes them, obviously, less useful than the detailed microphenomenological interviews. One plausible (though not necessarily true) explanation could concern the difference between the painful grief in response to a tragic life event vs. intentionally watching sad scenes to enjoy the moving experience.
We are aware of at least one person who, through other means, achieved a very high degree of resilience towards suffering - and when they lost their close family members, classical grief was replaced by the feelings of tenderness, compassion, and care.
> She doesn't cry at her husband's death but does for sad movies? Something does not compute. Perhaps she doesn't really feel sadness as genuinely as most humans do but just responds to cues like swelling music that tells her she's supposed to feel sad.
This is also something that comes out in the infamous profile of Sanderson: https://www.wired.com/story/brandon-sanderson-is-your-god/ towards the end. He too seems to be pain-insensitive to at least some degree, but also oddly emotionally inert and seems almost to be writing to try to understand emotions.
> Would her morality hold up under all edge cases and pressure tests that we would want a normal well-adjusted human's morality to hold up under?
The morality of the vast majority of humans doesn't hold up under edge cases and pressure tests I would want a normal well-adjusted human's to hold up under.
And feeling very sad when you lost somebody is quite orthogonal to morality I think, violent criminals can feel it, while some perfectly moral people not.
I am not convinced about this narrative of Jo Cameron. Ok, she doesn't feel pain due to some genetic quirk. So what? Apparently she still senses touch and it helps her to avoid most serious injuries.
No pain during childbirth is not that surprising. My mom says that she didn't experienced any pain during childbirth. She had 8 children and they all popped out quickly and painlessly. Otherwise she has completely normal pain sensitivity.
Being able to go to work next day after the death of the husband? Many autistic people are like that. It doesn't mean they don't feel sadness or don't suffer from depression. They just haven't learned socially accepted reactions to life events. Often they are criticized as being too cold and emotionless during tragic events. It doesn't mean they are not affected by them. They just process these moments differently.
Also no pain after various surgeries, and was investigated by UCL researchers who did various painful things to her and confirmed she didn't feel pain at them.
Also, I think your mom might be unusual in some way, I'm not sure what.
I believe Jo Cameron experienced no pain. Maybe never been depressed too but hard to categorically say that she has never experienced suffering. Suffering can be of different types. Maybe she just categorized it differently from other people.
Maybe unusual, but not unheard of. Kaspars' description of his mom sounds a lot like my wife's description of her mom: many kids all delivered painlessly. (And his avatar image doesn't look like any of my brothers-in-law.)
Maybe because that pain is not significant in the grand scheme of things, i.e., compared to all the trouble needed for taking care of children. It may be severe but giving birth to children with bigger brains and more mental capacity is what ensured better survivability.
"This strange mélange of two basic adaptive strategies—an active brain with an inept body—is widely thought to have evolved because our unusually large brains and our peculiar, bipedal mode of getting around produce conflicting demands. This explanation is called the obstetrical dilemma. In humans, the size of the head of term fetuses is a tight fit for the mother’s bony birth canal. According to the obstetrical hypothesis, we need a wide pelvis to bear big-brained babies but a narrow one to walk or run efficiently. The compromise between these opposing needs is to carry babies as long as possible so that the brain can grow in utero and then—just before the baby’s head gets too big to fit through the birth canal—deliver the infant earlier relative to when other mammals deliver theirs.
...The obstetrical hypothesis is neat and readily comprehended, which helps explain its widespread acceptance, but new evidence casts doubt on it. A recent paper by Holly Dunsworth of the University of Rhode Island and colleagues reexamines the predictions and evidence supporting the obstetrical hypothesis and suggests an alternative explanation. For instance, human gestation is often said to be short relative to that of other primates, based on how much more growth is needed in neonates to achieve adult brain size. The shorter duration of gestation on first glance supports a prediction of the obstetrical hypothesis—that birth has evolved to occur earlier in hominids so that the baby is born before its head is too large to pass through the birth canal. Actually, the duration of human pregnancy (38–40 weeks) is absolutely longer than that of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans (32 weeks for chimps and 37–38 weeks for the latter two). When Dunsworth and her colleagues took maternal body size into account, which in primates is positively correlated with gestation length, they showed that human pregnancy is also relatively longer compared to that in great apes. No wonder that the third trimester seems so long to many pregnant women."
"Human childbirth is a relatively painful and complicated process in the animal kingdom.
Unlike other primates that are able to give birth unassisted, human mothers usually need help from their family or community to deliver a baby.
...A study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposes that human childbirth is difficult because of evolutionary trade-offs that ultimately help protect organs in the body.
The main trade-off for women centers on the pelvic floor, which is a group of muscles that stretches from the pubic bone to the tailbone. These muscles help stabilize the spine, support the womb, and control bladder and bowel functions. The pelvic floor also stretches during childbirth, allowing the baby to pass more easily through the birth canal."
The Guinea Pig has a similar problem and solves it by temporarily dissolving the pubic symphysis. (If the first pregnancy occurs too late, this process does not work properly, which is fatal. This is only a problem for domesticated guinea pigs, as wild guinea pigs are not sex segregated). I wonder why we did not evolve this - perhaps it's incompatible with bipedalism.
Cutting the pubic symphysis - symphysiostomy - is an outdated procedure which was used before caesarian section became more safe. Unfortunately it causes long term problems. There was a scandal in Ireland, where it continued to be used for religious reasons (it allows more births) without complete consent.
If "easily" means "painlessly," what would be the survival advantage? The physical risks of human childbirth seem to be just the cost of our big brains, as Deiseach notes below; but the subjective pain,, while unpleasant, but doesn't kill the woman, may encourage her to assume a more favorable position for delivery, and doesn't seem to be memorably unpleasant enough to motivate most people to avoid sex thereafter. It's not clear how selection pressures would operate there.
I think you're overthinking it? If giving birth is painless, you're more likely to want to do it multiple times and thus have more descendants? The effect would be reduced nowadays with epidurals etc, but I probably not to 0.
There are women who give birth easily. This demonstrates that there is variation available for evolution to select from.
While childbirth is something that is generally recovered from, it can be debilitating or deadly. As I understand it, even small advantages can be evolutionarily stable.
But does it give them more children and grandchildren?
I can see evolutionary pressure to not die during childbirth. But for the majority of human history, I think that pain during childbirth would not affect the birth rate at all. And people who avoid giving birth due to pain would tend to remove themselves from the gene pool.
And even if there were pressure, evolution might have selected human females for a greater capacity to recover from this particular type of suffering, rather than simply removing the suffering. It's not always clean and efficient.
It could be explained if there is one selection pressure to have the brain larger and the pelvis smaller, and another one, to not cause too much damage at birth.
Then with random variations, some childbirths are without problems, and others are deadly, because you were near the limit.
Apparently evolution instead chose the easier path of overwhelming women's brains with all sorts of drugs during childbirth which among other things make them forget how bad it hurts so that they generally don't seek to avoid it in the future.
My two cents: Humans seem incredibly under-developed evolutionary in a variety of ways, ranging from schizophrenia (a mental condition unheard of in non-human animals), our absolutely terrible skeletons, and yes our horribly painful & often fatal (in the natural environment) pregnancies. I think many parts of the human condition are just very new on evolutionary time-scales, and evolution just hasn't had enough time to smooth out the sharp edges. See also evolutionary psychology. Mostly bunk! Humans are new, we shouldn't expect evolutionary optimality to be all that predictive.
I don't know much about this. I remember this because about 2 weeks ago I had a discussion with my mother how people are different and during the conversation she mentioned as an example how she cannot understand childbirth pain because she never experienced it. And then she proceeded with graphical description how it happened with her first child. As it was the practice in the old Soviet maternity hospitals, women given birth were put on high tables and while the midwife was washing her hands, the child just popped out and luckily was caught by the midwife in time before it fell down from that high table.
Otherwise my mother is an average woman with normal pain sensitivity, her ups and downs, all range of human emotions and so on, with the exception that she had enormous energy of bringing up 8 children during Soviet times when getting basic things was much more difficult than today.
Then she told me a story about another case with another women giving birth to twins and the first child fell down from that high table and died because the midwife didn't caught him in time. So, apparently there are more women for whom giving birth is less painful but not too many, otherwise midwives would be better prepared for such cases. But maybe I shouldn't entirely trust this story because it is a hearsay. I trust my mother's story however, because it was her own experience. And having 8 children, she had previously detailed her experience in the maternity hospitals.
I think there's a lot of conflation here between "pain" and "suffering", largely because many people can't experience pain without also experiencing suffering, and so treat them as synonyms.
When I was small, my grandmother decided to give me a copy of Paradise Lost, but accidentally bought a Jehovah's Witness book of the same name. The picture above of 'Reprogramming Predators' reminds me strongly of the illustrations in it, showing Adam, Eve and all sorts of animals living peacefully together. Almost makes me wonder if there is a religious reprogramming route towards the same end?
"My other disagreement with neurodiversity advocates is that they insist no neurotype is better than any other."
This feels like a generalisation. Maybe some people say this but I think there are more reasonable positions within the neurodiversity movement. I see myself as a neurodiversity advocate. I think that some differences are positives that can be celebrated, some differences are only harmful because the world is geared to neurotypicals, some differences are advantages in some contexts and disadvantages in others, and some differences would be bad in most contexts most of the time.
To me neurodiversity is mainly about opposing an overly reductive medical understanding of difference.
It seems to be a miscommunication around "better". All but the most extreme neurodiversity advocates readily agree that having anxiety disorder (for example) sucks and it would be more pleasant not to have them (i.e. better meaning leading to improved life outcomes). But they also believe that having anxiety disorder does not make it OK to treat them worse, or to deny them rights (i.e. better meaning morally worth more).
These two meanings of better make conversation hard sometimes. It's just a problem with language
One concern I have, which is somewhat related to the hedonic treadmill, is that we calibrate our reactions (and downstream, laws) based around how people feel about what they experience.
If no one felt pain or anxiety, would we criminalize behavior that causes (used to cause) pain and anxiety? Will we care about an emotionally, or even physically, abused spouse or child? Would the 8th Amendment become meaningless?
Right now if I see someone punching a small child I know society will react and will support me reacting to prevent that. In this future world, even if we nominally agree that people shouldn't punch anyone and definitely not a child, our desire and willingness to intervene is going to be significantly curtailed.
My feeling is that the overall cruelty in the world will grow, slowly at first and then a lot in the first generations to grow up feeling no pain, to the point that we end up roughly where we think we are now between -50 and +50, but with actual daily experiences far far worse.
Some things would become impossible; if you feel pleasure from torturing a cat, and the pleasure depends on the pain, then if the cat feels no pain you derive no pleasure. Hence it would be pointless to be cruel.
I think you have a point about neglect and casual cruelty (being cruel not because you get a kick out of it but because you don't want to spend the time or money doing the non-cruel thing) will be tolerated and maybe even increase. If my donkey/employee/child is not suffering, then I can continue on doing the thing. The argument will then have to switch to health or something, and again we can argue "yeah but he's not feeling any pain or suffering because of that bloody wound caused by galling, so why do you care?"
Empathic concern - a warm, positive, goal-directed feeling - is distinct from empathic personal distress, and makes us feel good about helping others. You may find the following paper interesting: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-01016-017
Extrapolating from a single case, Jo is a vegan retired special needs school teacher with a highly compassionate and warm disposition. It is possible that the diminution of empathic personal distress associated with her mutations enhanced her willingness to engage in various social causes.
Or it's possible that it didn't. Working from a test case of one is extremely fraught, because we have no way to tell how much of the outcome is dependent on her or things specific to her.
While some people clearly gain enjoyment from helping others, it's uncontroversial to say that some people don't seem to feel the same and quite often seem to feel pleasure from harming others.
Yeah, but she wasn't brought up in a bubble or raised by wolves. We live in a society, as they say. She learned her values from those around her, and these are people who experienced pain, and sets of moral strictures derived over centuries from people who experienced pain.
Raise the child who feels no pain, no anxiety, and not much distress on the loss of an intimate partner in a Mafia household, and will we end up with a vegan special needs teacher?
My main worry is that she happens to be a rare combination of a) the genetic mutation, b) a genuinely nice personality, and c) a brain that didn't rewire itself to perceive pain in other ways. And that a person with only the mutation might be at least as likely to be unpleasant as anyone else, or that most other people with the mutation would still feel something close enough to pain that we couldn't distinguish it.
But that just means that more investigation is needed. I'm glad you're looking int it. :-)
Maybe, but there's a reason that we feel bad about people getting hurt. Empathy helps us determine what we should or should not do. If someone doesn't feel bad about what's happening to them (because they never feel bad) then someone else has less reason not to cause them harm. This seems especially obvious when the person causing harm *also doesn't feel bad* in general, so they aren't going to feel bad about the harm they're causing. They're not capable of feeling bad about doing evil.
We can hope that society suddenly becomes super rational and everyone makes the right decisions without emotional impulses and negative feelings. I sincerely doubt any of that would happen. Go read the arrest reports from where you live if you need a reality check on people doing stupid irrational things, even with a negative feedback loop that you want to remove.
When you say we need to safeguard suffering to keep people from doing “harm” to other people, what kind of harm do you mean that isn't in some way predicated on the suffering it causes? And is that harm actually greater than the problem of suffering itself?
Even if you put aside the current evils that people perpetrate on each other, the amount of suffering you have left is astounding in the form of disease, injury, sorrow., etc.
And empathy doesn’t disappear without suffering. You can share in other people’s positive feelings too. Suffering, on the other hand, is the definitive source of cruelty. It’s the leverage bad people in power use to control the less powerful. The leverage the slave owner holds over the slave is the threat of even greater misery should they disobey. The threat of greater suffering is what keeps the world’s most terrible rulers in power.
In addition to positive empathy, compassion (feeling for others without taking on their feelings) and simple preference don’t just vanish with the disappearance of human misery.
This whole argument suffers from an elision between “suffering” and “adversity.”
I think a degree of adversity is necessary to human flourishing. I think leading a life of padded comfort with no need to strive or struggle allows no chance to develop character, which as a virtue ethicist I think is central to living a full and fully human life. (And also essential to the creation and maintenance of healthy society — a strong polis depends on good moral reasoning, which in turn depends on character.)
While adversity is a necessary part of the normal human experience, I don’t think suffering per se actually is (suffering is a usual but not necessary side effect of learning to deal with adversity) but I have noticed that a lot of arguments against suffering, including here, tend to elide the difference.
The Scottish lady who doesn’t suffer certainly has experienced hardship and has learned moral character from it. She’s just given the struggle-bus the rest of us are on a skip. In another century she might be revered as a naturally spiritually gifted saint.
I think the causality as discussed here is likely swapped around — I suspect that it’s not so much that she was genetically gifted with an inability to suffer emotional pain (although obviously she seems to have a degree of that when it specifically comes to physical pain) and somehow (contra the many other folks with similarly limited ability to feel emotional pain, who end up with ASPD or similar) became a good person in spite of it.
It seems more likely to me that she was genetically gifted with profound moral insight and *that’s why* she doesn’t emotionally suffer.
In the cases of us plebes, however, it seems functionally impossible to pull apart the adversity required to learn empathy, grit, and moral character generally with the suffering that comes along with the adversity (before we’ve learned). Sort of like how it’s functionally almost impossible to pull apart bumps, scrapes, and bruises from learning to ride a bicycle.
None of this means that I or anyone else with my moral intuitions is happy to allow the hideous suffering of injured soldiers howling in pain as they lay dying on the field of battle. Please now. Adversity is necessary; hideous unremitting agony generally is not, and anyone who has developed moral character — which is usually (though not universally) developed, as mentioned above, through some degree of suffering themselves — the usual way we all learn empathy (as watching small children learn empathy tends to bear out).
If the pain-free suffering-free drug or biological hack was invented, I'd happily engage in lotus-eating, and I want to see the moral argument that says I shouldn't. If suffering is not something to be approved of, why do you want me to engage in struggle for the sake of it?
Character building? Moral fibre? That's the 'suffering is good' argument by the back door. You're not supposed to just loll around on the sofa enjoying bliss, you should be out there working and being economically productive? That's the last-gasp remnants of our friend the Protestant Work Ethic, Calvinist-derived, kicking in. If I don't *have* to work for a living (in the post-miracle world), then why should I have to go out and earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, or engage in some other socially-approved activity, rather than lolling around enjoying super bliss?
Work is the curse of the Fall, if we do away with the bitter fruits of the experience, why insist on the curse remaining?
Genesis 3:
"17 And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
If everyone engages in lotus eating, who is going to be ready to help when the inevitable earthquake or plague strikes? Or does this world abolish earthquakes and plagues, too?
But that is the point: with our No-Painz Brain Implant gently pumping out a steady stream of natural heroin, we'll all sit around happily and starve to death, as we experience neither physical nor emotional pain. Earthquakes and plagues? Well that's too bad, but nobody was *hurt* by the earthquake that killed them, so that's the good part!
That works will with antinatalism. "Just make sure suffering is eliminated - it doesn't matter if any meaning or pleasure is left behind". But most people would like to preserve meaning and/or pleasure. At the bare minimum, some level of human agency is required to prevent suffering from reevolving once we are gone.
Yeah, as I'd mentioned before, I cannot think of a good argument against wireheading. Sure, the thought of human civilization dying out in a puff of bliss makes me unhappy *now*, but if I were wireheaded, then it wouldn't.
Well, there's no good argument against it if you would provide informed agreement to wireheading if it was offered to you. But your argument seems to work just as well if wireheading was also forced on everybody, and there seems to be plenty of good arguments against that.
In the jargon of neuroscience, pleasure and motivation are "doubly dissociable". But it's striking that the happiest people today typically aren't lotus-eaters. Often the happiest folk have the broadest range of appetites and pleasures, sometimes enjoyed in states of "dopaminergic overdrive". Either way, the vision of genetically raising hedonic set-points world-wide _isn't_ the idea we should become "blissed out", but rather lifting default quality of life.
Adversity causes the desire to avoid it, and thus brings humanity to new heights. If at some point humanity is forever free from adversity then we will have achieved the pinnacle of success.
But this is likely impossible. Think first-world problems. The adversity through which we "suffer" some of humanity may indeed still strive to overcome, but the actual challenges are less and less likely to involve our survival.
No more do we fear being eaten by lions. We build buildings that are resistant to earthquakes. We bring forth food in such profusion that obesity is a pandemic. Yet we are still subject to extraterrestrial impacts from comets and asteroids, solar flares, pollution, and various diseases.
Note this applies to humanity as a whole. Some people still get eaten by wildlife, or die in natural disasters, and many don't have enough to eat. The struggle continues, and will probably continue forever.
Good point. I wonder if we’re already facing a deficit of adversity in the developed world, resulting in some people suffering from (and being unable to deal with) minor things that would not have bothered previous generations too much. The analogy would be stress wood - trees need some wind as they’re growing to strengthen their root networks and trunks. In its absence, as in the biosphere experiment, they sometimes just topple over under their own weight. I doubt that completely removing the experience of discomfort would be very good for us.
One strong argument about this line of reasoning would be to invoke the countless cases of people with profound moral insight who happen to suffer tremendously due to physical and/or psychological causes. Of course, it would be great to identify the hypothetical mutations that would determine deep moral insight, radically reducing the total amount of experienced suffering as a secondary effect - it just seems that the hedonic tone plays a primary role.
i think I'd prefer adversity/challenge not because it builds character or anything but just because it seems more interesting? to me compared to wireheading
or i guess think of it like a video game where you have challenge but its contrived and for the sake of fun
genetically gifted with profound moral insight sounds like a weird way of wording it. maybe you could say she was genetically gifted with enlightenment in the buddhist sense?
I'd like to see a Calvinist response to Pearce's idea. If you believe in The Fall, that life is now imperfect, and that Man's goal is to glorify God, is it okay, or even mandatory, to use a satisfactory happiness drug if one is found? Pastors do generally approve of anti-depressants and of anaesthesia for childbirth,, without saying you *must* use them to be godly. What of the happiness drug ? Forbidden, or mandatory? (both, in the sense of godliness, not law)
I think it would be hard to ground this objection philosophically. It seems like God created Evil in order for humans to be able to voluntarily choose Good (or something like this). If humans are always afraid to voluntarily choose Good because what if it messes with God's reason for including Evil in His plan, then the whole plan falls apart. My proposed solution is to assume that God always gets what He wants somehow or other, that any challenge to the Divine Plan is itself part of that plan, and so we should just try to be maximally Good and let God figure out the rest.
It is actually parallel to something else I was looking up yesterday: religision Jewish Zionism. As I understand it ome, Haredi are anti-Zionist because although they think it would be good for Israel to be restored, they think it impious to do it without God's miraculous power.
Is being blissed out on supertranshedonic drugs the Good, though? I feel Socrates might like a little chat about that.
If the super-drugs distract us from God, then they are not good. It has nothing to do with "but you *must* suffer or else you are not voluntarily choosing Good".
"Article 6. Whether pain has the nature of evil more than fault has?
Objection 1. It would seem that pain has more of evil than fault. For fault is to pain what merit is to reward. But reward has more good than merit, as its end. Therefore pain has more evil in it than fault has.
Objection 2. Further, that is the greater evil which is opposed to the greater good. But pain, as was said above (Article 5), is opposed to the good of the agent, while fault is opposed to the good of the action. Therefore, since the agent is better than the action, it seems that pain is worse than fault.
Objection 3. Further, the privation of the end is a pain consisting in forfeiting the vision of God; whereas the evil of fault is privation of the order to the end. Therefore pain is a greater evil than fault.
On the contrary, A wise workman chooses a less evil in order to prevent a greater, as the surgeon cuts off a limb to save the whole body. But divine wisdom inflicts pain to prevent fault. Therefore fault is a greater evil than pain.
I answer that, Fault has the nature of evil more than pain has; not only more than pain of sense, consisting in the privation of corporeal goods, which kind of pain appeals to most men; but also more than any kind of pain, thus taking pain in its most general meaning, so as to include privation of grace or glory.
There is a twofold reason for this. The first is that one becomes evil by the evil of fault, but not by the evil of pain, as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv): "To be punished is not an evil; but it is an evil to be made worthy of punishment." And this because, since good absolutely considered consists in act, and not in potentiality, and the ultimate act is operation, or the use of something possessed, it follows that the absolute good of man consists in good operation, or the good use of something possessed. Now we use all things by the act of the will. Hence from a good will, which makes a man use well what he has, man is called good, and from a bad will he is called bad. For a man who has a bad will can use ill even the good he has, as when a grammarian of his own will speaks incorrectly. Therefore, because the fault itself consists in the disordered act of the will, and the pain consists in the privation of something used by the will, fault has more of evil in it than pain has.
The second reason can be taken from the fact that God is the author of the evil of pain, but not of the evil of fault. And this is because the evil of pain takes away the creature's good, which may be either something created, as sight, destroyed by blindness, or something uncreated, as by being deprived of the vision of God, the creature forfeits its uncreated good. But the evil of fault is properly opposed to uncreated good; for it is opposed to the fulfilment of the divine will, and to divine love, whereby the divine good is loved for itself, and not only as shared by the creature. Therefore it is plain that fault has more evil in it than pain has.
Reply to Objection 1. Although fault results in pain, as merit in reward, yet fault is not intended on account of the pain, as merit is for the reward; but rather, on the contrary, pain is brought about so that the fault may be avoided, and thus fault is worse than pain.
Reply to Objection 2. The order of action which is destroyed by fault is the more perfect good of the agent, since it is the second perfection, than the good taken away by pain, which is the first perfection.
Reply to Objection 3. Pain and fault are not to be compared as end and order to the end; because one may be deprived of both of these in some way, both by fault and by pain; by pain, accordingly as a man is removed from the end and from the order to the end; by fault, inasmuch as this privation belongs to the action which is not ordered to its due end."
(I'd say this even if you didn't just have kids, but you did, so I'm adding this hedge up front.)
Would we deprive our children of all choice, of the ability to make any decisions, in order to prevent them from making mistakes and causing harm? Harm is bad, isn't it? Surely preventing our children from causing harm, even to each other, must be our highest goal in raising them? Or perhaps there are more important things than simply not causing harm? We hope, of course, that they will help the world more than they harm it, and we make efforts in that direction, but wouldn't it be better to be sure?
I was trying to make a point about the primacy of Choice and Freedom, over Evil and the Harm principle. This is all just my bizarre homebrew theology, but...
Instead of God creating evil so humans can choose, it's God creating choice, as a good thing in itself, which in turn allows the possibility of evil. Or instead of evil, I suppose substitute non-alignment with our creator? So if we create babies or AIs, and slave them to our will, they have no freedom of choice, and never become independent moral agents. By giving them freedom, and allowing them to make choices, we allow the possibility for them to do things that we don't agree with, possibly bad things that cause harm to other people.
In classical Christian theology, God is considered omniscient and omnibenevolent, and unity with God's will is defined as good, and opposition is defined as evil. We humans aren't omniscient or omnibenevolent, and so that doesn't perfectly apply to us, except when we get excited about the possibility of successfully aligning AI, or of socially engineering our children to be what we think of as good. In some sense, all progress has depended on our children not being forced into our exact mold, and being given freedom to be better than we are, even if they also have freedom to be worse.
I agree with what you say about not trying to second guess God (presuming God exists), and instead trying to be maximally good. (Assuming it's done intelligently and carefully and so forth, of course.)
> My proposed solution is to assume that God always gets what He wants somehow or other
I tend to think of this like the classic shell game, where the trick is that the object isn't under any of the shells, except in reverse. But the sequence of events is less important than the people involved; the fundamental building block is the soul.
>it's God creating choice, as a good thing in itself, which in turn allows the possibility of evil
Is there choice in Heaven? If yes, then there is also evil there, which seems contradictory. If no, then choice is not that great after all and non-Heaven seems unnecessary.
I tend to go for a more Orthodox view (if I can use that word, given how "unorthodox" all this is). Heaven isn't a place, or a state. It's an experience, a process. All the distractions of life are no longer present, there nothing between us and God but distance, and there's only one big choice, and our reactions to that are largely overdetermined by what we've done beforehand, and who we've shaped ourselves into being. Think of a star, shining in an endless void, and we decide to go towards it, or away from it, or cautiously orbit in a slow spiral.
As for pointless, who knows? Most sources seem clear that our choices here matter, and that it's important to get them right. After death, maybe it's harder to change. It seems like the time spent incarnate is important, and matters, and carries over into the next stage, but what lies beyond that, I dunno. It's past a couple of nigh-singularities. Probably, for most of us, too much knowledge would be a distraction from dealing with the stage we're currently in. Like a 10-year-old playing Settlers of Catan who starts gloating about winning and proceeds to make a bunch of bad choices because their head isn't in the game anymore. There'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done.
What's the argument that anything (other than specific religious worship) glorifies God? I think you're just supposed to do good things and make the world better and more beautiful. Though if you need chapter and verse, I find Isaiah 65:17-25 suggestive.
You’ll forgive me for saying that sounds like you’re injecting your own beliefs into a specific document.
The passage you cite is a poetic narrative saying what God is going to do, eschatologically: there is healing and redress available in the new heavens and new earth which are created after disposal of the ‘former things.’ Your vision of ‘just do good things’ is unclear in this context. I assume you think that we ought to be prefigure God’s apocalyptic priorities but that really isn’t contained in the passage.
On the other hand, rather than projecting ourselves into the Word, if we prefer seeking what is already there, we are directly told how to glorify God: fear God and keep his commandments, do all we do for His glory, love our neighbor—these priorities are written out over and over again. And yes, we’re told to do that in our daily lives and work, but we’re also told not to do many things in our daily lives: dishonor our parents, practice sexual immorality, lie, and steal.
The burden of proof is on you to prove that doing drugs glorifies God. I think you have a pretty steep and winding road to travel to come to that conclusion. So rather than play turn and turn about, I’d like to see someone answer the question: why do we think seeking pure pleasure glorifies God and what specific religion endorses it?
I am willing to bet that this argument is a straw man. Not a whole lot going on inside.
As an interesting fact, a befriended person who has a high degree of expertise in the Christian (particularly Catholic) teachings stated that our project, in principle, is generally OK from the doctrinal standpoint.
Perhaps it's rhetoric similar to "enslaved person"? It seems to imply a one-way and conditional relationship, which tends to be correct. We don't know how other people feel about us, and there are often unspoken limits to our feelings toward other people, which could go away if they turned out to be not who we thought/hoped they were.
Okay, I really need to see more about that. In principle, yes, reducing pain and suffering is not incompatible with Christian doctrine. Your association's basic assumptions, foundations, philosophy and aims? May be *extremely* divergent from what Catholic teaching takes as human flourishing.
It seems they've made efforts to minimize the scope of their organization's assumptions, foundations, philosophy, and aims, precisely to secure compatibility and support from a wide range of perspectives. From reading the Far Out Initiative's website, it would seem they've succeeded?
As an ex-Catholic, I would point out that while suffering abolition may not directly conflict with Christian doctrine, it would be a revolution in practice. The salience and relatability of the suffering of Christ on the Cross is such a fundamental aspect of one's relationship with Christ and understanding the need for him. Without suffering, the need for salvation through Christ would seem to be a more intellectual exercise.
There is also the fact many in the rank-and-file would be resistant, for much the same reasons any ordinary person would be.
"The world is on fire, and although some of us live on nice little islands of bearability, it’s hard to enjoy them when you can look just off your island and see everyone else on fire. If the fires got put out, maybe we could enjoy the other stuff more whole-heartedly instead of always looking over our shoulder at a world full of endless misery."
Completely agree. This does not, however, sound like Pearce's thesis to me. Pearce's thesis sounds more like "We can't ever put all the fires out, but if we made the people who are on fire feel better about being on fire, maybe we could enjoy the other stuff more whole-heartedly..."
And /that/ is why I do not find him convincing.
"To me, you either start with a deep hatred for the suffering of your fellow beings, and all of this makes sense to you - or you start from some other moral foundation and it seems to miss the point. Are any of these intuitions communicable?"
My position does not seem to fit in this dichotomy. Does it make sense?
That dichotomy reminds me of various takes from ideological positions that use flowery and positive language to describe their own position and wonder why people don't support their ideas. Something like pro-choice/pro-life or "justice" to describe actions that are not so clearly good or that don't understand the opposing ideas. It's hard to say if choice or life is better, as Life seems like a pretty obvious point, but the US is founded somewhat on the idea of "give me liberty or give me death." I don't think those descriptions for the positions are all that bad or wrong, but there's still a conflict between ideas we can universally agree are good.
Specifically in this case, I can have a deep hatred for the suffering of my fellow human beings, but believe that actually removing pain receptors could make things far worse for those human beings.
I agree, Pearce seems to be the philosophical equivalent of the “this is fine” meme.
This stuff is all a lot more convincing as a therapy for people who are suffering rather than a preemptive thing we would want to apply to the general population. Throwing a few philosophical assertions out there that we could preserve our preference architecture and wouldn’t just be wireheading, if not with the first round then in subsequent rounds, is pretty unconvincing. I’m not opposed to someone doing research on this, but my priors are that it would be a bad idea to apply broadly even if it works as expected.
I remember Prozac being hailed as the new wonder drug that would make everyone super-happy, so there were joking-but-not-really suggestions it should be put in the water supply.
And then Prozac became just another pharmacological tool for mental health services and not the wonder drug of universal happiness, so I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the Far Out (Man) Institute to find the miracle cure.
Presumably there will always be selection pressure against any form of wireheading. Wireheads don't want to raise baby wireheads. By contrast, in a world where prospective parents can pre-select the approximate pain thresholds, hedonic range and hedonic set-points of their future children, I don't envisage any loss of information-sensitivity, but rather selection pressure in favour of benign genes and allelic combinations for default well-being. No depressive wants to have depressive children. What's more, information-sensitivity to "good" and "bad" stimuli typically functions _at least_ as well in extreme hyperthymics as depressives (cf. the "learned helplessness" and behavioral despair of chronic depression.) OK, I'm glossing over the pitfalls. They are legion. But if we're ethically serious about fixing the problem of suffering, I don't know of any alternative to genome reform.
There is selection pressure against low hedonic setpoints: depression is unattractive, depressives find it harder than the norm to function in a variety of ways, coping with suffering takes time and energy away from pursuits such as having and successfully raising children.
If adjusting the hedonic setpoint upwards provides a benefit here without negative side effects, why hasn't natural selection already taken care of it?
Whatever reasoning we retcon here, why wouldn't it apply to wireheading?
Non-social animals can suffer greatly; but they don't seem to get depressed. Depression seems to be adaptation to group living. Depressive behaviour is associated with subordination and defeat, keeping one's head down, the "internalized correlate of the losing subroutine" (cf. "Subordination and Defeat, An Evolutionary Approach To Mood Disorders and Their Therapy" https://books.google.com.vc/books?id=cbGPAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Understanding the nature of selection pressure in a future world where prospective parents can choose the approximate hedonic range and hedonic set-points of their future children is challenging. But contra Huxley's Brave New World, we've no reason to think that lifelong happiness will turn the population into passive dupes of the ruling elite; if anything, we might expect the opposite - crudely, a society of insubordinate active citizens with challenges to match.
I guess maybe the right metaphor is "they're on fire, but now it's a kind of fire which isn't hot and doesn't harm you".
It seems to me that this puts into relief questions about what's ultimately valuable. Avoiding pain is a "cheap" philosophical solution - you'll do it whether it's morally valuable or not. Avoiding tissue damage also seems pretty cheap - pain or no pain, most people are pretty horrified by the idea of learning that they're sick or injured. What about things like "working hard"? If you don't mind being poor, because poverty doesn't bother you anymore, do you still want to become rich? What about "helping others"?
I think these are good questions but probably screened off by the fact that Cameron and other people with low pain phenotypes seem pretty normal.
I have no problem at all with removing pain/suffering which is not a symptom of anything actually being wrong.
I don't even have a problem with managing pain/suffering when the actual thing that is wrong cannot instead be fixed.
Imagine a nuclear power station. It has a whole lot of alarms. Sometimes something breaks and the alarms go off. Sometimes what breaks is the alarm controller, and the alarms go off for reasons unrelated to anything being wrong with the actual reactor. Either way, the crew wants to acknowledge the alarms then silence them, because they need to work out what the problem is, how serious it is, and how to fix it, and it is hard to think straight when your world is filled with flashing red strobe lights and 120db sirens. I have no problem at all with there being an off switch for the alarm system, or with people pushing that off switch as the first step of their troubleshooting procedure.
Imagine a new recruit on the first day. "These sirens and strobes sure seem to go off a lot. Seems a bit unnecessary. Can't we replace them with something less noisy and intrusive? Maybe a discreet light on the control panel?"
This is where I come in: while silencing the alarms as the first step of troubleshooting is just fine, and we absolutely want to make that part convenient, fast and efficient, anything that risks a delay to starting the troubleshooting in the first place, or a situation where the troubleshooting doesn't happen at all because we fail to notice or take seriously the more discreet alert, seems dangerous. (I bet we all know at least one person who habitually drives their car around with the engine fault light lit up!)
IMO it's not so much about values as about consequences. We're not as good at removing the causes of suffering as we could or ought to be, but I guess I just find it hard to believe that if we deconstruct all the 120db sirens and replace them with discreet little lights, we'll get better at actually fixing the things they alert us to instead of worse.
If the thing being pushed for was a switch or dial one could change at will, I'd be all over it in a heartbeat. But that doesn't seem to be what's being argued for.
I think the question of whether there really is an unseen harm is the heart of the concern about pharmaceutical alleviation of suffering. If you can't feel pain and you die, we immediately recognize that as a bad outcome. But who needs emotional suffering? Maybe it's a Chesterton fence that shouldn't be blithely abandoned?
In a recent book I read, a patient goes to her psychiatrist and says she needs to bump down her antidepressant dose. Confused, the doctor asks if it's working right, or producing intolerable side effects. "Oh it works just fine. But I'm still married to an alcoholic asshole, but I'm okay with that."
IDK, maybe if you've decided you want to stick it out "for the kids" and you don't want to fight for the next decade it seems like it'd be helpful to be able take a pill that lets you be okay with that decision day-to-day. But drugs don't usually work at the level of "this one thing I want it to affect". You take aspirin it gets rid of your headache, but also helps your shoulder pain whether you intended that or not. What if the complacency drug keeps your marriage intact, but also keeps you at the same shitty job instead of starting that business with your brother that's been your lifelong dream?
I think of those animals stuffed in cages with their beaks cut off, but they're cool with it and so are the farmers, and I wonder what the human analog of that situation might be. At what point does the goal of ending human suffering come at the expense of other goals of human flourishing?
This is coincidental for me - in a thread on the last open post, I discussed my horrible genetic mutation which prevents me from feeling the effects of opioids:
*****
Guess how fun it is to be someone whose *genetics* have decided to withhold the efficacy of opioid painkillers!
I initiated and paid out of pocket for pharmacogenomic lab testing which confirmed I have a mutation of CYP2D6, a gene involved in metabolizing a number of medications, but most notably opioids, after a wisdom tooth surgery and two separate abdominal surgeries left me wondering, "why do people claim opioids feel like anything?"
It's really that bad. For example, the day after my third surgery (a weight loss procedure: I had the "sleeve," which removes about two-thirds of the stomach, aka stomach stapling), the non-opioid surgical anesthesia drugs had fully worn off and I was in so much pain that I was *sincerely* contemplating building a time machine out of medical equipment to go back in time two days and tell myself to cancel the surgery.
At one point, a nurse came into my hospital room and injected dilaudid into my IV. "Don't worry, honey, you're going to feel just fine in about ten minutes," she promised.
When she returned fifteen minutes later, I said, "I'm sorry this is a dumb question, but what is this supposed to feel like? I mean, I definitely felt the injection go into my arm, it felt like a weird cold pressure, but what *exactly* should the medication itself feel like? Should I be feeling tingly or warm or something?"
"How are you even *talking* right now?" The nurse asked, round-eyed.
I ended up pacing and pacing and *pacing* to cope with the pain, pacing so much in my hospital socks on hard linoleum that I actually cramped up my calves, and so a few years I later paid $700 to get a piece of paper certifying that, NO REALLY, opioids don't work, use something else!
Then my primary care doctor consulted with the company's chief pharmacist who said there isn't really anything else, sorry!
****
Since there is pretty much *nothing* which can be substituted for opioids to treat acute pain, any development in pain relief / management is exciting for me, even if it's in the relatively distant future.
We are very sorry to hear about the complexities you have been facing. Would you like to email (https://faroutinitiative.com/) and get in touch with us, so we can explore this topic together?
"Then, when you’re rolling on the floor screaming and cursing your past self for making this decision, think of the people who live with chronic pain conditions and feel this way every day. Think of the wounded soldiers who lie on the battlefield screaming for water until they finally expire, or the animals who get eaten from the inside by parasites, or the mentally ill people stuck in padded rooms so they don’t try to kill themselves to escape the pain, or the chickens in factory farms that have their beaks cut off and can never move and are starved for weeks at a time and sometimes drown in their own waste."
But the thing is, even those of us in crappy situations are not at that level. The vast majority of people are not suffering anything like that. So it's a poor comparison because you're jumping from "wouldn't it be good to abolish this kind of horrible suffering?" which most people would agree "Yes, let's find a way to relieve chronic pain" to the point "How about we make *everybody* go around feeling 100 on the 100-150 bliss scale?" which seems improbable to achieve and does evoke "how are you going to avoid lotus-eating?"
I think most people today *are* living at the "100 on the 100-150 bliss scale" due to the massive progress over time when it comes to health, effective medicine, and the rest of civilisation. The thing is, that has now become the new normal, and we've found exciting new ways to be unhappy and miserable. See the explosion in mental health problems.
So if you do achieve a way to "let's get the brain to make natural heroin", that's going to be great - for the first six months. Then people will get used to feeling naturally high, and the new level of "but I'm not experiencing 150 level super-bliss" will kick in and we'll be miserable again.
That's part of the problem: pain versus misery. I support working on getting rid of pain. I don't know if you'll ever manage to get rid of misery.
And I think we could easily end up with the worst of both worlds: don't worry, our pain-free and suffering-free chickens are happy, they *enjoy* drowning in their own waste!
Doing away with horrible pain for the people suffering unbearable pain? Go right to it, good luck to you all!
Get ordinary people in an eternal state of bliss which won't degrade into lotus-eating on the one hand, nor on the other hand become a default state that everyone now demands as a right and indeed wants to turn the dial up because they're not happy because it's only bliss, it's not super-bliss? I don't think that will work as hoped.
As for the pain-free lady, I wonder: she's both not feeling the emotional grief of her husband's suicide so she can 'get on with things' and function as normal, but she also cries at sad movies? I don't see how that works. Unless it is that (1) she is following social cues about how you're "supposed" to react, so she cries at sad movies because that's what you're supposed to do, regardless of how you really feel or/and (2) movies are evoking responses on a different level than emotions and empathy, which is a clever trick and I hope somebody is researching it. It's catharsis, but not because we identify with the character and feel their pain, we're doing something like the knee-jerk reflex instead? Reflex tears not emotional tears?
"I think most people today *are* living at the "100 on the 100-150 bliss scale"
On the other hand...
(From GPT4)
1. *Increased Prevalence of Mental Illness:* Epidemiological studies have shown a significant increase in mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety, in modern societies. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports rising rates of these conditions globally, suggesting a potential mismatch between our evolutionary adaptations and modern environments.
2. *Lifestyle Changes and Stress:* Research indicates that modern stressors, which are chronic and pervasive, differ significantly from the acute, short-term stressors faced by our ancestors. Studies have linked chronic stress to mental health issues like depression and anxiety. For instance, a survey by McEwen (2000) highlights how chronic stress impacts brain function and structure, contributing to mental illness.
3. *Social Isolation:* Modern lifestyles often lead to social isolation, a factor linked to various mental health problems. Research has shown that individuals with limited social interactions and support networks are at higher risk for depression and anxiety. For example, studies by Cacioppo et al. (2006) demonstrate the adverse effects of social isolation on mental health.
4. *Disrupted Sleep Patterns:* The advent of artificial lighting and technology has disrupted natural sleep patterns, contributing to sleep disorders. Poor sleep quality and insufficient sleep are strongly associated with mental health issues. A study by Walker (2017) discusses the relationship between sleep deprivation and increased risk of depression and anxiety.
5. *Diet and Nutrition:* Modern diets, often high in processed foods and low in essential nutrients, contrast with the more balanced diets of our ancestors. Nutritional deficiencies, particularly in omega-3 fatty acids, have been linked to mental health problems. For instance, research by Hibbeln (2002) found correlations between low omega-3 intake and higher rates of depression.
6. *Physical Activity:* Our ancestors were much more physically active, and reduced physical activity in modern life is associated with higher rates of mental illness. Studies have shown that regular physical activity can significantly reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. For example, a meta-analysis by Mammen and Faulkner (2013) supports the role of physical activity in preventing depression.
7. *Cross-Cultural Studies:* Research comparing mental health in different cultures provides insights into how modern lifestyles impact mental health. For instance, studies of indigenous populations, who live lifestyles more similar to those of our ancestors, often show lower rates of depression and anxiety compared to those in industrialized societies.
>I think most people today *are* living at the "100 on the 100-150 bliss scale" due to the massive progress over time when it comes to health, effective medicine, and the rest of civilisation. The thing is, that has now become the new normal, and we've found exciting new ways to be unhappy and miserable. See the explosion in mental health problems.
I don't think it's at all apparent that these things actually make people particularly happy. I mean, there are things which historically made a lot of people really sad which we've done a lot to mitigate, like child mortality. In a lot of ways, our lives are much more convenient than they used to be. But there are also things that produce massive amounts of "wealth," in the sense that large numbers of people pay money for them, but hardly anyone attests to actually liking them very much, and a lot of people attest to disliking, social media being the clearest example. Wanting and liking are separate psychological processes, and the division between them means that people can be induced to pay for things that they know don't actually make them happier.
I think people from hundreds of years ago would recognize our society as offering massive conveniences over our own, but I don't think they'd tend to experience it as blissful, or find it difficult to understand how people today wouldn't find it so, given much opportunity to observe it.
Scott used the example of unbearable physical pain as an emotional arm-twister. Turns out I'm one of the people who don't feel that kind of emotional pain response to "isn't this awful, why don't we stop it?" so either everyone should emulate my "I'm not concerned at all since I feel no distress, and you want everyone not to feel distress, right?" or maybe feeling distress and discomfort does have a role to play in human society.
Anyway, getting back to it: most of humanity right now is not experiencing the kind of physical suffering and pain of the past. We've just had an entire debate around Hanson and medicine and the claim that there is *too much* medical intervention. People can buy effective pain control over the counter. They're generally not freezing or boiling in houses that are not suitable to shelter them. They generally have enough food. The bottom rung of Maslow's hierarchy is achieved for them.
Are we all now super-happy? You tell me. Removing dire pain is a laudable goal. But achieving that does not mean achieving the removal of suffering, since we'll get used to "I am not in constant pain or need" and then we'll find something else that distresses us and causes us to feel pain, for example, "I can't get a girlfriend, this makes me so unhappy I want to die".
>Scott used the example of unbearable physical pain as an emotional arm-twister. Turns out I'm one of the people who don't feel that kind of emotional pain response to "isn't this awful, why don't we stop it?" so either everyone should emulate my "I'm not concerned at all since I feel no distress, and you want everyone not to feel distress, right?" or maybe feeling distress and discomfort does have a role to play in human society.
As a prior, I think the supposition that sympathy and emotional suffering would be inextricably related seems plausible. But it appears that Jo Cameron experiences sympathy, but not emotional suffering (or at least, not nearly to the degree that most people do.) So it appears that they're not.
Given the nature of the hedonic treadmill, people's lives can be changed in ways that appear to be improvements without their being happier in the long term. But some people seem to be much happier than others. I think if we're going to achieve dramatic advances in human happiness, that's going to demand internal changes to human nature, not just external changes in our environment. But as the whole post discusses, that doesn't mean it's fundamentally impossible.
I've been thinking about neurodiversity recently, in the broader sense you describe here, although not the case of Jo Cameron specifically. But I've been thinking about something which might relate to why other similar mutations haven't led to similar instances of Jo Cameron's condition.
The human genome doesn't contain enough information to specify all the workings of a human brain, not even to within a similar order of magnitude. Some aspects of human brain function are hard-coded; nearly all functional humans have pretty much the same brain structures, and uses them for similar things. But if a person suffers brain injuries, they can adapt to using different parts of the brain than normal for necessary tasks. The different parts of the brain aren't devices for accomplishing specific neurological tasks, they're structures adapted to being particularly suited to being trained for certain tasks. When necessary, they can be trained to do something else. And the training process every individual goes through is idiosyncratic. It seems highly probable that two genetically identical individuals could end up with pronounced differences on the scale of their neurological processes, not simply because they're learning from different experiences, but because the software-level working of any specific brain isn't biologically hard-coded.
I think that different people are probably less like instances of an AI with different weights given to different qualities, but like different AI with similar-but-not-identical starting architecture, trained up from scratch through entirely separate processes. You might see more variation between them due to differences developed over the course of their training processes than their starting conditions.
As confrontational as MA_browsing was being, there is absolutely a core problem highlighted by Scott and FOI themselves:
"If you could CRISPR something like FAAH-OUT into cows, chickens, etc, you could create breeds of animal that don’t suffer. They think farms would go for it - non-suffering livestock isn’t just good press, it’s also healthier and (potentially) produces tastier meat. Then vegans could continue fighting for factory farming abolition as usual. But it wouldn’t be quite as desperate, and there wouldn’t be as many casualties along the way."
Pearce recoils from Darwinian life, but the fact remains that those at the top of the food chain are in a damn good position. The highlighted initial use case of this suffering-abolition initiative is *to make our slave-food sources not mind that they are suffering as slave-food sources*. Scott explicitly highlights that it'd put the vegan (read: abolitionist) cause on the back burner a bit. And after all of that, they'd expect some (all??) people to also sign up to this?
I'm sure many here would find the RW critique that EAs/Rationalists are like quokkas (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hhq727/rationalists_as_quokkas/) unfair but sometimes I really do wonder about the naivety. You don't even need to posit cases where we're having to battle against another Darwinian sharpened space faring civilization, you can just look at human bad actors. Would the world be a better place with a remnant lumpen proletariat on Soma and the top dogs without it? Maybe. What if it wasn't mere slavery, but eradication, that was forced on the proles?
You can wave away the objection by saying "well you see, we're merely adjusting our hedonic baseline without having any impact on behaviour" but that patently isn't true. On the FOI end of the scale, you'd at the very least be reducing unease, anxiety and so on (which all have some great uses!) and at Pearce's extreme everybody would have permanent MDMA brain.
MDMA is brilliant, but I wouldn't send my troops out to fight on it. I wouldn't want my ASI taskforce unit with the nukes to be on it. And I wouldn't want my star command making first contact with the aliens to be on it. I know the whole "hard times breeds tough men, who breed good times, which breeds weak men" thing is a bit of a trope but that really is the cycle. AGI may break it, but this won't.
(This is why something like mass Jhana, or a no downside designer drug, would be a much easier sell- *optional* bliss is great. But you'd best believe that if a fight came about, which in a Darwinian universe is inevitable, I'd be asking people to switch theirs off.)
I admit, however, that a world full of Jo Cameron's might be better than today (although I'm still hesitant with what exactly her physical pain situation is). Her situation sounds a bit like a stoic or equanimous (dare I say enlightened) individual. I'd be curious to understand what her internal states are actually like- I suspect she may not be pointing at the same things as other people when she talks about "sad" and such.
But MA is correct that whilst it'd be cool, it'd be largely irrelevant if our entire civilization collapsed at the same time. The next cycle might have a great time around though, so there is that. If we could do a bit of CRISPR on more important genes whilst we're at it then I'd be tentatively on board (although Pearce takes it too far).
To clarify, are you accounting for our stance on prioritizing the maintenance of adaptive responses and multidirectional approach to nonhuman animal suffering (https://faroutinitiative.com/FAQ)?
With all due respect, saying "we're aware of this objection and have a corporate stance that this should not be used to justify x" doesn't mean in practice it won't. The world is Darwinian, and just because some creatures decide to cooperate doesn't mean that others won't defect. I'm all for it, it seems like a straightforward better situation than the current one. But I'm not a factory farmed animal, I'm the one who eats the animal.
"The only Special Bonus Side Effect the London team was able to find is that apparently her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars."
Oh wow do I need to hear more about that. Is a link to more information available? Because that would be A) quite extraordinary and a feature we should absolutely be looking to spread throughout the human population, and B) a very strange thing to have in combination with insensitivity to pain. Granted, genetic interactions can produce some very strange phenotypes with changes in features that often seem to have nothing in common with each other. But I'd be very interested to know what the underlying molecular mechanism for that is.
It feels weird(†) to say this to you, but it seems like the obviously correct strategy would be to intensely investigate the healing topic *first*.
“Eliminate suffering” is kind of a weird/suspicious/risky goal from the point of view of people who are not already convinced about it, from the general public to philosophers and scientists. The mere existence of this ACT post is evidence for that.
But “we’ve got a lead on getting wounds to heal perfectly” is something to which mostly everyone will respond with something between “awesome” and “shut up and take my money”, without any need for extensive philosophical discussions.
That should matter even if you don’t give a damn about would healing and only care about chicken suffering. (Even if you _love_ the extensive philosophical discussions!) The fact that two unlikely conditions are coincident is pretty strong evidence that they are related, so studying one is likely to help with figuring out the other. You can probably get thousands of times more support for research on “clean healing” than “suffering abolition”, so even if there were just a 1% chance the two are related it would still be worth going for the popular one.
(†: I mean, you ’re presumably the expert here and thought about this old lady at least 10k times longer than I did. But in the spirit of the article’s “people are invisibly different inside” theme, maybe you’re much more sensitive to suffering than to “slow and ugly wound healing”, so maybe the above is less obvious to you?)
Somehow this ends with David Pearce ending up a multi-millionaire with a harem of biotech groupies in some compound, right? Did anyone else read that last paragraph and NOT have every "cult" warning sign flash in your head?
Jo Cameron is probably not the secret to the end of suffering. She's probably wrong and/or lying. The woman who claims to see 100x more colors is DEFINITELY lying (to sell her otherwise crap art, I suppose.) David Pearce while not lying, is probably the last person I'd trust on matters of this level of importance (what, you don't trust the perpetually unemployed domain-name flipping philosopher?)
I keep hearing "EA isn't a cult! We're more rational than everyone else". This kinda shit doesn't help your case.
I recently finished watching the Leftovers (brilliant, would recommend to anyone who hasn't watched) and have been thinking about cults a lot since. Cults or proto-cults often promise some solution or magical happiness, and spiral from there. The problem arises when the cult *could* be making real claims, or at least the possibility is there. In the Leftovers, a real supernatural event occurs, which leaves a space open for all sorts of cults to make claims.
Things like happiness on tap (neo-Buddhism) or genetic happiness editing (as claimed here) might be real. But they leave people vulnerable in the same way as described above. When someone claims that you need to join a commune because of the rapture it's easier to say "no that's a cult". But if someone says "hey trust me, I've got the answers" and it's maybe real, it's a lot harder.
"Jo Cameron is probably not the secret to the end of suffering. She's probably wrong and/or lying."
Your probablys are doing a lot of work here. Did you read the article? Jo was tested ("tortured" was the actual word used). Do you think she just pretended not to suffer?
"The woman who claims to see 100x more colors is DEFINITELY lying"
Tetrachromacy is a known condition and she's far from the only one.
Yes, I read the article. I think Jo Cameron is probably a sociopath with moderate analgesia. 100x color woman may have tetrachromacy but that doesn't mean she "sees 100x more colors" - that's the trouble with quaila, it's unverifiable from both sides.
" I think Jo Cameron is probably a sociopath" - you've never met her ("probably" - 50%? 10% - what's the range of your diagnostic confidence here?), but you think you know her better than the people who extensively evaluated her. Probably, I guess.
"may have tetrachromacy but that doesn't mean she "sees 100x more colors" " - how many more colors does an average tetrachromat see compared to an average human? Sounds like you think "100x" is too much. What is your estimate for an average increase in color perception for people with this condition? Why is it important to contradict her account and accuse her of lying? What difference does it make to the case made in the original article?
Look, when the first thing you do upon reading about two people you never met is to accuse them of lying, it doesn't tell us anything about these people. It does tell something about you. And what it tells is not quite.... flattering...
As for Jo Cameron - You've never met her either! We're working with the same information: Scott Alexander's reporting of the evaluator's reporting on Jo Cameron. Any or all of the folks in that chain could be lying, making mistakes, or be otherwise wrong in their evaluation. At the end of the day - I read this blog post, and my gut tells me: "she's prob a sociopathic analgesiac taking/being taken on a ride by the Far Out folks". I don't have a percentage - to have one would be incoherent; it's just personal judgement.
Regarding tetrachomacy, my understanding is that ALL colors are able to be created via red, green, and blue - so we're dealing with a philosophical problem - do they actually see "new colors" or do they see the same colors, but maybe with an increased ability to differentiate between edge cases? Does she live in a psychedelic dreamscape of colors never before seen by man? Or does she have slightly better color perception? We *can't* know. (But if you're trying to sell your crappy art, getting an article written about how you literally have superhuman abilities could help!)
"Look, when the first thing you do upon reading about two people you never met is to accuse them of lying" - do you accuse Matthew, Mark, Luke, or Paul of lying? You've never met them, after all ;)
But seriously, what *does* it say about me? - don't pussyfoot around saying it's "not quite.... flattering..." - just say it!
I've read about Jo Cameron before, her case isn't exactly breaking news. So now, I'm not working with only Scott's reporting. It is interesting that you assume everyone else is as ignorant of the underlying information as yourself is.
"Look, when the first thing you do upon reading about two people you never met is to accuse them of lying" - do you accuse Matthew, Mark, Luke, or Paul of lying? You've never met them, after all ;)" - thank you for making my point for me, no, of course I don't accuse these fine gentlemen of lying, I've never met them after all, what would make me think they are lying about anything? But you did accuse people you never met of lying.
What it says about you to me is this: a person whose first reaction to new information that disagrees with his/her priors is to accuse the sources of lying *may*:
- resort to lying easily (since it's the first thing that came to his/her mind - familiarity heuristic)
- lack critical information processing skills, e.g., upon encountering new information, instead of doing some basic digging just resort to "this sounds impossible therefore the source is lying" shortcut.
- have generally uncharitable view of other people: first reaction is not "this person may be sincerely mistaken" but "this person is a liar" - note also a classic attribution error here.
Any combination of the above, and that's just off the top of my head. Of course I haven't met you after all, maybe you're a great human who gets carried away by the anonymity and the disembodied nature of the internet comment boxes. But the words you put into these here boxes is all I have, so there.
"It is interesting that you assume everyone else is as ignorant of the underlying information as yourself is." Incredibly passive aggression! I didn't realize we had to have a dissertation in the topic before writing a comment on a blog post. When I comment, I assume that everyone has read the post, and is other generally knowledgable.
And why *don't* you think the Apostles are lying? They literally claim a guy came back to life! Maybe don't *assume* lying, but you can't rule it out, especially because people lie about claims like that *all the time*. L Ron Hubbard was def lying, as was Jim Jones, and probably Joseph Smith. I think I generally do have an uncharitable view of other people *in this context* - anonymous internet posting regarding claims and initiatives aimed at overturning fundamental aspects of reality. This isn't a "lack of critical information processing skills" but a damn good heuristic in an adversarial environment.
I don't jump to "this person is a liar" always - but if you don't think people on the internet are trying to lie to you, or at least sell you something, you may be a little naive. People lie. They do it all the time, even to themselves and those they love.
>Regarding tetrachomacy, my understanding is that ALL colors are able to be created via red, green, and blue
(tl;dr: wrong, but 100x is still bullshit)
Your understanding is wrong, at least in this context. All colors that *normal humans can see* can be created by mixing those three wavelengths, because of how normal human color vision works.
To elaborate, humans have three different types of cone (color-sensitive) cells in the eye, each with different sensitivity curves to different parts of the EM spectrum. These curves are generally called red, green, and blue, though there's significant overlap between the first two (see the image at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell). The brain takes note of how many times the receptors in these cells were fired, does some differential brain-math comparing the relative excitation between the three, and gives you a guess at the wavelength of the lights. This is what we experience as "color". (this is ignoring rods, which are sensitive to all visible light, and luminance, but those aren't relevant here)
That's why RGB works so well (for most humans): each wavelength is chosen so that it excites only (mostly) one type of cone, so we can generate that signal directly. Human color vision is 3-dimensional, and we can stimulate each dimension individually. Giving each dimension a value between 0 and 1 is a very good simulation of reality.
This doesn't work with tetrachromats - they have FOUR different cones (usually one closer to pure yellow), so their vision is 4D. For every color we see, sees an extra dimension of "yellowness" that doesn't map to the Red+Green yellow that the rest of us experience.
THAT SAID, "100x" is almost certainly pop-sci bullshit with no basis in fact. 3 continuous dimensions of color upped to 4 is not an increase of 100 - color vision doesn't work that way. The most honest way of representing it is that you're going from 3 bits to 4, which is an increase of (drumroll please) 2x.
Sure, you could do some sketchy social science and say "the average person can differentiate between colors with this minimum delta in hue/Cr/Cg/Cb/whatever", and extrapolate out, but that's still applying an arbitrary discretization to a continuous spectra.
I suspect that's exactly what they're doing, in fact - saying, "the average person can distinguish between 100¹ levels of red (¹well actually much less than that but we're rounding up) so her extra Yellowness dimension gives her an extra 100 colors for each color".
Thank you for a good explanation of the RGB vs. tetra.
To the general question of "how many colors can one see" - this is indeed a tough problem of discretizing a continuous spectrum. Experienced visual designers can differentiate much finer gradation of colors than layfolk - but it's still hard to quantify. Similar problem exists in musical tonal resolution: in the Western canon, an octave is split into 12 semitones, but most musicians can easily distinguish "quarter-tone" steps. I recall reading of people who could distinguish single cent steps (1/1200 of an octave), which is not that hard to verify with modern waveform generators and double-blind testing. Maybe similar color testing could be done with tetras to quantify their color resolution.
>so her extra Yellowness dimension gives her an extra 100 colors for each color
Yeah, that is how I'm interpreting what the "100x" meant too.
( Random musing - if we could easily interpret temporal changes in intensity as color, then illuminating a scene with a variable wavelength light source with the wavelength swept repetitively would effectively give us a _full_ _spectrum_ of the reflectance of every object in the scene. )
I thought a bit more about it, and realized that adding yellow adds more than just 1 bit (2x colors). If we just go by the simple 8-bit color representation, adding the yellow adds those 8 bits, or 256x colors.
> my understanding is that ALL colors are able to be created via red, green, and blue
Let me just stop you right there.
No.
Go read up on colour theory. And if you need something terse in an internet comment box, CMYK.
All colour perception is electromagnetic radiation perception, which is a spectrum. There aren't just three points on that spectrum. There are roughly infinite points on that spectrum.
You might want to do that yourself. CMYK has nothing to do with the discussion, as the subtractive color model has very little to nothing to do with human visual perception.
That is just wrong. There is a very simple psychophysics experiment to look at this. You give someone a white screen with a patch of light with some arbitrary visible spectrum, and you ask them to match the color with another patch, where the other patch is a mix of monochromatic sources that they can adjust the intensities of. If they need three monochromatic sources to adjust, they are a trichromat. If they need four, they are a tetrachromat.
Basically, they are matching the stimulations of their types of cones. If they have three types, they have three equations for three unknowns, and similarly for four. Qualia be damned - this measures the ability to match and distinguish patches of colored light.
Well, in terms of purely observable behavior, I’d rather be surrounded by “sociopathic analgesics” that behave like Jo Cameron than “normal” people who spend their days lashing out at each other when they feel bad, so there’s that.
Honestly, I'd rather be around the normal people. Even if I take everything reported on Cameron at face value, she's just too out there. The husband stuff especially. (This is a perfect analogy for my attitude towards the rationalist movement and engineers in general. Keep up the good work but I'd still rather keep my distance. I do not want engineers in my home and I do not want them meeting my family).
Not accusing Jo Cameron of anything here, but yes, there are many cases of sociopaths dedicating their lives to difficult, low paid work "helping others".
Not that they're representative of the entire org, but the Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal is a good example of this phenomenon - it *does* happen. Hell, most people who work in/around Capitol Hill probably qualify as "sociopaths dedicating their lives to difficult, low paid work helping others" - such work is good cover, after all!
This just beggars belief. Why should she subject herself to what is essentially torture at the hands of scientists, even if she was a sociopath? Why would she not request pain relief during childbirth? What point is she trying to make exactly? Simply not plausible.
So far, they don't seem to have bought a castle, or decorated it like the one from the documentary biopic "Young Frankenstein", so they're probably OK for now.
David definitely does not have any harem, he is a 100% celibate philosopher. Only a lot of friends of all genders around the world! And his good friend donated a million to the project, it's true. But David will spend it all on the project. Therefore, this is definitely not a cult!
Have you considered another possibility? The idea of fixing the problem of suffering via genome reform deserves to be mainstream. But one of the reasons that the abolitionist project is still fairly marginal is precisely the _absence_ of any charismatic, larger-than-life personality (with or without a harem!) to take the project forward. Sooner or later such leadership will emerge - the abolitionist ecosystem is (slowly) growing - but celibate NU philosophers with a depressive streak are unsuited to any such role.
Domain name flippers aren't "unemployed." It's a weird job but it's definitely a job. It's also weird to say "you can't trust a philosopher without a real job." By that standard no one should trust Socrates, Diogenes, Aristotle or any other philosopher whose job is lecturing on philosophy. Seems like a Philistine-like distrust of thinkers. Let's not assume the worst in people.
Domain names were the crypto of my youth, with dot.coms as the Bitcoin and other extensions the equivalent of altcoins. OK, I briefly winced (thanks), but I enjoyed Scott's piece. I haven't read better.
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6676009/: 'After operation, her pain intensity score was 0/10 until the next day when she was discharged home. The only postoperative analgesic she received in hospital was paracetamol 1 g i.v. in the PACU on the day of her surgery. She also received cyclizine 50 mg i.v. twice. Extraordinarily, she required no postoperative analgesics other than paracetamol for this known painful surgery (trapeziectomy), even after the axillary nerve block had worn off. She showed no pain from pinching or from peripheral i.v. cannula manipulation ... The patient had been diagnosed with osteoarthritis of the hip, which she reported as painless, which was not consistent with the severe degree of joint degeneration. At 65 yr of age, she had undergone a hip replacement ... After operation, her pain intensity scores were 0/10 throughout except for one score of 1/10 on the first postoperative evening. Her past surgical history was notable for multiple varicose vein and dental procedures for which she has never required analgesia. She also reported a long history of painless injuries... for which she did not use analgesics. She reported numerous burns and cuts without pain, often smelling her burning flesh before noticing any injury, and that these wounds healed quickly with little or no residual scar. She reported eating Scotch bonnet chilli peppers without any discomfort, but a short-lasting ‘pleasant glow’ in her mouth.'
If its possible to completely eliminate suffering, and the only observable difference is in how you talk about your experience and maybe some stuff visible on brainscans (and how do you know what to look for there?), then this has some insane implications outside this project.
If there is no practical reason for our "hedonic state" to be centered on 0 rather than 100, then its surprising that the range includes 0 at all. Absent any upper or lower bound, its likely that either all human experiences are positive, or all are negative. And even if we convice ourselves that humans really do thread the positive/negative boundary, the uncertainty would still apply to anyone who developed hedonic sensitivity independent of our evolutionary line, so cephalopod lives might be orders of magnitude more valuable than ours, or the worst thing to ever happen on earth.
The (evolutionary) relationship between the polygenic determination of hedonic baseline, phenomenology of pain, and adaptive response is very complicated. There are probably good reasons to expect the hedonic baseline of different species to be calibrated close to 0, and the uncoupling of suffering from adaptive actions is difficult, but important enough to warrant extensive research that may yield direct and secondary benefits. As for the average human experience, the vast majority of tiny life slices could be considered as cases of mixed valence; only the best psychedelic trips and some meditative absorptions could likely be close to pure positivity.
>There are probably good reasons to expect the hedonic baseline of different species to be calibrated close to 0, and the uncoupling of suffering from adaptive actions is difficult
Like what? What would be a reason for evolution to calibrate us close to 0, that isnt also a downside to us of calibrating higher?
If evolution is working out a psychology from scratch, and motivation by something other than suffering is possible at all, why would it be a smaller target to hit?
Furthermore, if such a state is reachable with a single mutation, that is strong evidence that its easy: We are only one mutation away from it even though we do have suffering-based motivation, and therefore arent even selected to have this other motivation.
>What would be a reason for evolution to calibrate us close to 0, that isnt also a downside to us of calibrating higher?
I suppose the idea is that there is a downside, but because we are all so Smart it can be overcome. Which may or may not be too naive, but on balance seems worth trying. Of course, I expect the whole robot apocalypse thing to resolve sooner than anything like this becomes practical, but it may as well be there just in case.
>There are probably good reasons to expect the hedonic baseline of different species to be calibrated close to 0
There was a neat little analysis someone did, which assumed that memory formation was expensive, so very good outcomes and very bad outcomes were remembered but baseline outcomes were _not_. So "0" had a real consequence in this model. They then concluded that whether life felt "worth living" or not corresponded to the _skewness_ of the distribution. I wish I could point to the web page, but I've just tried about a dozen searches with no luck.
Interested in how Pearce and the Far Out Initiative folks address what I would consider the most obvious use-case/systemic function for drugs that dramatically increase tolerance for pain and suffering in our current social/cultural/economic system: to allow existing Molochian power structures to push humans (and other animals) to previously unimaginable levels of indignity, violence, and squalor in pursuit of productivity. The "cruelty-free factory meat" is a fairly predictable example; we splice this gene successfully, agribusiness owners say "they're perfectly happy without beaks, light, or air now," then lobby to remove what flimsy regulation exists to protect animals currently and create perfectly efficient torture dungeons. This doesn't seem like a great outcome to me.
It's easy to imagine similar cycles with most human work as well. The natural appeal of a drug that claims to increase contentment and reduce pain will lead to some fairly substantial use initially, followed by competitive pressures effectively forcing total systemic uptake (happy workers = productive; workers who don't suffer = workers who do more that they previously wouldn't have; working conditions/expectations change, and even those who were skeptical take the drug to cope). I would guess there would be at least a few years of a lot of people genuinely feeling really really dope, but that the new suffering baselines would cause similar baseline shifts in labor law, business practice, military activity, and general ideology about what is OK and not OK to do to people (and likely other animals/the natural world), accelerating a huge swathe of the extremely destructive activity we already engage in as a species.
Of course there's also the possibility that workers who suffer less are more likely to refuse unpleasant work ("I don't actually need that extra money when I think about it; I'm content!"). That would be great! And it's what I imagine would lead to at least the initial period of people feeling fairly dope. Not everyone would, though, and eventually, those who were willing to use their new baseline for resource and social advantage would outcompete others and begin to control the rules.
Creating the type of utopia Pearce imagines through these technologies would require something that also curbs humanity's insatiable drive for *more* and somehow gets everyone in power to use it as well, despite it causing them to lose competitive edge for the current game.
Obviously this is all speculation, but it's important speculation to consider with any technology that aims to revolutionize human experience as we know it. I'm extremely sympathetic to the desire to biologically eliminate suffering, but the framing that Scott presents here seems to me a bit like hypothesizing about the explosive power of dynamite as a utopian construction tool without considering its use as a weapon.
Our stance on multidirectional approach to reducing the farmed animal suffering and maintaining the social capacity to challenge dystopian status quo is included in FAQ (https://faroutinitiative.com/FAQ). Primum non nocere; when investigating various interventions, we will strive to make sure that all these desired qualities - both at the individual and social level - are sustainably maintained, and perhaps we will learn how to failproof the emerging bliss-inducing technologies against the maladaptive failure modes. This constitutes a very general declaration, but it's probably good to emphasize it.
Respectfully, the answer to FAQ 7 is a statement of ideology/belief/prediction, not a safeguard, plan, or even particularly thoughtful analysis. The conformity induced by negative valence cuts both ways; it inhibits excessive cruelty and violence as well as exemplary compassion/morality. Initial techs will be blunt instruments even if successful, potentially able to reduce the negative experience associated with painful psychological states, but almost certainly unable to account for the infinitely varied ways that humans will respond to being released from those negative experiences. Jo Cameron for some; others, Charles Manson. And it only takes a small percentage of people willing to exploit things for competitive advantage to dramatically change the baseline for everyone else. That you're this confident/one-sided in your baseline assumptions about which way the scales will swing when negative valence inhibitions are lowered en masse increases my concerns substantially.
FAQ 9, tbh, I do not understand as a response to animal welfare concerns, though I do think it's wonderful that your team comprises mostly vegans. If successful suffering-blocking tech is provided to current agribusiness owners, in what way will they be prevented from using propaganda about the tech's efficacy to loosen cruelty controls and create more horrifying (from our current baseline) conditions to increase their productivity over the long term?
Re: FAQ 7, it is certainly not our intent to be overly confident or one-sided - when publishing the FAQ section, we wanted to provide quick answers under the heavy influx of recurring questions and with limited bandwidth. We are at the early stage, and there is certainly need to provide a nuanced strategy for a risk-averse rollout. Just as you note, the section primary contains predictions and statements of intent, not thorough safeguarding plans (sorry if that was miscommunicated). That being said, we listed some of the datapoints suggesting that anti-suffering interventions will be positive not only due to the directly resulting shift in hedonic tones. These include the case of Jo Cameron and the effects of elevated levels of endogenous opioids and BDNF, characteristics of the mesocorticolimbic circuit, negative correlation between the empathic concern and aggression, and the personal distress's potential in blocking empathic actions. We welcome further feedback on safeguarding this step, particularly in the context of game-theoretic arrangements, which is often the trickiest part.
Re: FAQ 9, the first line of argumentation is simple - as stated by one of our team members, "If I were forced to choose between being born as an animal in a factory farm with the capacity to experience extreme distress, horror, and pain, or as an animal in a factory farm without that capacity, the answer would be obvious - even if equally obviously I'd much rather just not be born to be murdered at all". The second line is largely about the diversification of efforts in the light of unknown unknowns (technological obstacles, growth rate of global meat industry, cultural shifts, etc.) - if the cultured meat sector were to eliminate the need for low-suffering livestock through legislative efforts and/or benefits concerning pricing/taste/nutritional value, everybody would be celebrating that as a win. Navigating the aspect of "ethical offset" will be, of course, tricky. Memeplex-wise, Far Out is connected to the ecosystem promoting more dignified treatment of nonhuman animals, spanning both welfarist and anti-speciesist stances, and that could carry some weight. On the other hand, there would have to be a way to make the business owners and customers feel contextually good (or less bad) about producing or buying "less inhumane meat", if the practical alternative is just more suffering with no capacity to coordinate meaningful anti-suffering action through other means.
Insightful points, Brian. Please see my recent post, which shares similar concerns regarding ethical implications and technology misuse.
To sum up my post, I argue that if Pearce's goal is to eliminate suffering, then using any technologies to further subjugate and exploit animals is a fundamental misuse. A dangerous precedent is set when genetic manipulation of animals for commercial gain is normalized in this way. This can undermine the public's trust and delay the use of such tech for human benefit.
Your point about "cruelty-free factory meat" is excellent. If The Far Out Initiative succeeds in their plans, animals could endure even more extreme conditions, resulting in environments that are highly efficient but morally abhorrent. Tools meant to reduce suffering will result in even greater exploitation.
The slippery slope extends to human applications as well. Competitive pressures could push workers into less humane conditions. New suffering baselines could shift societal norms and exacerbate already destructive behaviors.
The response from The Far Out Initiative leans heavily on ideological optimism without addressing safeguards necessary to prevent these dystopian outcomes. Their claims about "positive valence emotions" to drive non-conformity seem simplistic to me and overlook the complexities of the real world. The lack of safeguards is very troubling.
Yep. I recall that when antilock brakes were developed, people began driving faster in conditions that antilock brakes help with. What's more they (ok we) were found to drive just faster enough that roughly the same risk was present.
It's strange/weird/amazing that the basic idea "suffering is mostly bad, would be nice to have less" is controversial at all. I always hated the horrible "what does not kill me makes me stronger" quip. To paraphrase TLP, "pass me the hammer, I'll make you stronger". What does not kill often just maims for life.
Yes, I enjoy hard workouts and martial arts, and suffering is involved, but it's elective. I can stop if I want to. Unlike people suffering from chronic pains of unclear origin, or crippling anxiety.
That may be possible :-) but what I mean is that going into pain seems to be getting into a diminishing-returns territory. I don't go to failure in my strength training, tap out early in my grappling training, and max out cardio only occasionally as a test. It's, like, 90% of the benefit can be had with 80% of the effort, which conveniently avoids pain and injury.
"Then, when you’re rolling on the floor screaming and cursing your past self for making this decision, think of the people who live with chronic pain conditions and feel this way every day. Think of the wounded soldiers who lie on the battlefield screaming for water until they finally expire, or the animals who get eaten from the inside by parasites, or the mentally ill people stuck in padded rooms so they don’t try to kill themselves to escape the pain"
This all feels rather motte-and-bailey. I think the vast majority of people are supportive of research about pain and development of new treatments. But I think "pain" and "suffering" are two different things. You could develop a drug that instantly cures any physical pain without causing any side effects. But what would ending "suffering" look like? A lot of suffering isn't caused by physical pain. A loved one dies, a relationship falls apart, you lose your job, your favorite team loses the championship game, the store doesn't have your favorite flavor of ice cream--all of those things can cause "suffering" to some degree. Many religious and philosophical traditions offer suggestions for how to cope with suffering. Maybe I'm just not imaginative, but I don't know how science could stop us from feeling suffering without stopping us from feeling anything else. And even if it could, I think that seems like it would be a sort of cheap grace.
The conceptual confusion surrounding "pain" vs. "suffering" would likely require a separate article; in practice, many people use "suffering" to refer to the secondary, ruminating-reverberative aspect of negative experience that can be substantially reduced through a wide range of mental practices. We are interested in the minimization of maladaptive negative hedonic tone regardless of the source or its primary vs. secondary character, as long as we assign the highest priority to the most intense negative experiences, plus retain productive functioning in humans.
"Cheap" has a connotation of substandard quality, but in many cases, once something started being manufactured at industrial scales, it ended up beating the artisanal version on quality as well as price. Nobody hand-knits RAM anymore, the way they had to for the Apollo program, or equips armies by working bronze or iron without power tools.
I hope that guy makes progress. Still, this comment of yours gets under my skin:
> One might worry that she might lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement
I notice the distancing words "one" and "might" and "worry". But in general, this feels like a fallacy that is destroying modern life. Righteous anger is not a guide to truth. It's a lot easier to feel righteous anger than it is to be correct (let alone righteous). But when feeling righteous anger, people stop caring about being correct. It's an addictive drug, and we're in the middle of a massive epidemic.
I'm a big fan of Pearce and the whole concept there; I've always been a weirdo in that I have *never* — since I was a little kid! — agreed with the bulk of humanity (apparently) about stuff like... catharsis, sad music, sad stories, the necessity or benefit in any sort of suffering, the necessity or benefit of death and aging, etc. My entire life has been built around, essentially, wireheading as much as possible, and arguing against people who (I feel) swallowed the Cope-Aid® re: "human stuff" (you know, all that trash about finding strength in adversity and catharsis in tragedy and beauty in tHe NaTuRaL CyCLe and etc.).
When I was a teenager and found Pearce's work around the same time I found LessWrong, I could've wept: at last, other people who noticed and weren't afraid to face how miserable our natural lot was! No more was I alone against the incomprehensible cope from normies!
Anyway. Re: capsaicin, my buddy lost his ability to perceive spicy food when he got COVID. It has lingered afterward; if there's any interest I could film him chugging some Atomic Fireball sauce or whatever it's called (the one where you're supposed to use one drop per thirty servings of chili, you know).
Interestingly, it still gets him on the way out, though. Meanwhile, I can still perceive it when I eat it, but I've never in my life suffered any "exit effects", so to speak. Together, we make one whole anti-capsaicin Superman!
Speculating, it might be the case that what you refer to as the Cope-Aid® social conditioning - including optimism bias, just world fallacy, growth mindset, and similar concepts - is quite pleasant and somewhat adaptive at the individual and even broader levels, at least in the absence of effective interventions targeting the core underpinnings of suffering. On the other hand, in order to at least attempt conducting any major anti-suffering change, one must accept a fair share of grim realizations about the nature of reality, and until the major anti-suffering intervention(s) are available, it feels worse than the previous state.
In conclusion, it would be best to find a clever way to feel like on the Cope-Aid®, but think, prioritize, and work like the suffering abolitionist.
I genuinely enjoy sad music and tragic movies and books. Feel genuinely invigorated after watching Akira Kurosawa's "Ran" or a good "Romeo and Juliet." I assure you I'm not faking it. Maybe I've been somehow brainwashed into liking this stuff but I think the onus is on you to show sad stories objectively make human life worse. They have only been beneficial for me.
I believe that you and many people do indeed enjoy that sort of thing; and, contra my reply to "spooked" up there, I don't actually believe that this is an inferior or dumb way to be — I'm just messing with him because he's so mad about it, heh — rather, I just never *understood* it.
(If anything, it's probably an adaptive trait, since my resistance to any sort of negative feeling has driven me to some bad choices.)
What *else* I believe is that people who come up with reasons for why "actually, I wouldn't even *want* to be able to choose when and if I die, nor would I want that for those I love" — usually, stuff about "the beauty of nature's cycle" or "life would have no meaning if death wasn't omnipresent, sudden, and inescapable", things like that — are coming up with these reasons because it's too horrifying to face otherwise.
Or, put another way: I don't believe anyone would *really* choose these elements of world we now inhabit as an the ideal for how the world *should* be, were they to actually have the choice and/or to have grown up in a world without aging and sudden death and other tragedies. (Cf. Bostrom's or Eliezer's [IIRC] examples of the dragon and the "bonk on the head day".)
But I do believe that there *are* feelings that can be evoked and stories that can be told that both depend on this "sorry scheme of things", and are made more beautiful and deep and powerful for it. I just don't really *like* them myself, heh.
Thanks! I recall as a teen being disappointed at how few people seemed to share my enthusiasm for the prospect of wireheading. No more suffering. Perpetual bliss? What could be more awesome!? (last century the mesolimbic dopamine desire centres were still known as the "pleasure centres").Painfully, I learned the lesson that the only way to "sell" the abolitionist project and paradise engineering was to advocate ratcheting up hedonic range and hedonic set-points. Intelligent minds animated by "information-sensitive gradients of bliss" and a pleasure-superpleasure axis is a mouthful. But this scenario is still my best long-term bet for the future of life in the cosmos.
I wish we could get more of the LessWrong community on-board. I know in Serious Stories in The Fun Theory Sequence, Eliezer argues that phasing out all forms of suffering would make life boring, just as a story lacking any conflict is boring. So Eliezer instead proposes to abolish only the nastiest forms of suffering, while conserving its milder guises. However, this worry strikes me as misplaced. Future life could be underpinned by a biology of gradients of superhuman fascination. Boredom may become physiologically impossible - replaced instead by information-sensitive gradients of fascination.
Other people are sort of gesturing at this in the comments, but I feel like there's actually a lot of conceptual unpacking to do regarding Jo Cameron's condition, rather than just glossing over it so quickly. (I certainly don't automatically trust the scientists testing her to do that kind of work.)
She cries at sad movies (which is presented as meaningful and good), BUT she is in no psychological distress (so our theory about her condition holds up). Whoa! Hold on; that sentence doesn't quite make sense to me yet.
Ditto, as regards her passionate beliefs, and her dislike of certain politicians. Come on.
Couldn't we be looking at two different phenomena--one involving very atypical physical pain perception, and one involving her just being...very mentally healthy, in an ordinary kind of way?
Seems reasonable to hypothesize that those could be related somehow. Random / unavoidable pain can be pretty bad for "mental health in an ordinary kind of way." Learned helplessness and all that. Dose-response curve of such effects might very well continue straight on, without any weird inflection points conveniently close to the current population average, so that further reductions in suffering naturally lead to further improvements in the other good stuff. Worth a try, anyway, and, well... even if it did turn out to be two entirely separate phenomena, would you have any particular objection to researching and eventually duplicating them both?
There is indeed a lot of unpacking, and we are here to nitpick the details. Jo continues to constitute an important case, and we assign a high probability to the deep relation between her resistance to physical pain and psychological profile related e.g. to the levels of endogenous opioids, but we conduct broader investigations to acquire supplementary data and/or avoid the single point of failure scenario.
Yeah, it's not clear at all that she doesn't suffer tremendous psychic pain. She says her husband's death didn't bother her because he had been suffering for so long. Maybe she too had been suffering from his suffering and felt mostly relief upon his death. I don't see any reason to conclude her hedonic set-point is above zero. Agree with you that passionate political beliefs likely correlate with psychic pain of some sort. An enlightened Buddha supposedly goes around practicing simple acts of kindness not passionate acts of protest.
OTOH, we all know people whose hedonic set-points seem to be above or below zero, even though these people have the same capacity for physical pain as others. I find it strange to focus on Jo's case instead of looking at a set of people who seem and claim to be much happier than most other people and see what they might have in common which might be scalable. Of course, for all I know maybe that study is already being done as well.
I don't think LSD grants superspirituality or even spirituality (I have done it enough), and I'm generally pretty averse to radical techno-hacks, but I think the question of whether this is a good idea or not is ultimately empirical: if someone figures it out it just needs to be tried at some large scale that isn't total, then over the long-term we'll see if there are any adverse effects.
That woman really does seem to have the best neurotype though, but giving everyone the same neurotype seems a bit of a fool's errand. We can't even figure out non-depression and non-(pathological)anxiety, seems like dreaming about the Concorde without having a flying machine to begin with.
Gonna look into The Far Out Initiative though, thanks for highlighting this.
Maybe we should ask "What has she done with her life?" before granting her the "best neurotype" title. Notably, her accomplishments appear to be completely absent from the discussion.
I am perplexed by these philosophical arguments about pain. Pain is either useful or it's not. People already generally approve of alleviating pain that is not useful. What is left is, in modern developed societies, small bouts of pain that act as useful signals to take our hand off the stove, ease up on that type of exercise for a while to recover, etc. Surely I am not so uncommon in finding useful pain signals to be a beneficial sensory experience? After setting aside those two categories of pain, there is logically nothing left to argue about alleviating. If the idea is that some people's pain is so unbearable and untreatable that it's worth "cutting the cord" on their pain entirely, then those are pathological cases. Treating this like a philosophical argument towards humanity in general is illogical.
I think the argument is that, given existence proof of someone who seems to have a better useful / not-useful pain ratio than was previously thought possible, there must be an awful lot of non-useful pain still sloshing around untreated because it hasn't been properly diagnosed.
There must be a major misconception about pain that explains this obsession with Jo Cameron. My not-useful pain level is basically zero, and I'm not a special case. Many people are this way. If someone were to ask me how my life could be improved, I could list many material things, but it would not occur to me to mention physical pain. It just isn't a big deal for someone unless they have some pain-related pathology, and that isn't what this humanity-level philosophical argument is about. People are already trying to treat that. I do suspect your second point is true, and perhaps people experiencing chronic pain mistakenly think everyone around them experiences it and that it's our default physiology.
"My not-useful pain level is basically zero, and I'm not a special case."
Man, I don't know... I sense a contradiction: if your not-useful pain level is 0 (meaning right now - then it's trivial - or always?) then you are a bit of a special case. Most people encounter useless pain during their lives, a classic example being Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness - a pain that seems to have no useful purpose whatsoever and whose origins and physiology are still poorly understood (no it's not lactic acid).
I’m not hitting it as hard as you I’m sure. I’m old, for me it’s just a rear guard action against entropy. I still feel it on day 2 though. It’s kind of weird. Walking down stairs 2 days after the heavy squats. Oh yeah there it is.
Modern world, despite the gift of medical advances, is plagued by the bottomless pits of negative hedonic tone, both adaptive and maladaptive, with many maladaptive instances that cannot be effectively alleviated. It's not an exciting thing to communicate, but perhaps half of the humanity (not to even mention the topic of factory farming and wild animal suffering) is at least occasionally experiencing severe bouts of completely unnecessary and involuntary misery: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/
Alleviating intense suffering certainly carries less public appeal than the "one weird trick to make everybody happy" framing, but it's actually a prerequisite to ensure genuine happiness. For many, depending on the preferred terminology and ontological/computational assumptions, reducing suffering and increasing happiness is basically synonymous.
This is all well and good, but in my mind suffering abolitionism doesn't go quite far enough. It's not enough to just bring about superhappiness in already existing minds. If we develop the ability to do this, then the question becomes: why not generate even more minds to experience this superhappiness? If utilitarianism is the greatest good for the greatest number, the Abolitionist project deals with the first part, but we then realize that we can make even more good by addressing the second part, increasing the number of minds in existence. I believe that once we figure out how to instantiate arbitrary levels of happiness in a given mind, it will be our duty to transform as much of the matter of the universe as possible into minds experiencing constant pleasure for as long as possible. This is what the long term progress of human technological advancement should be directed towards: figuring out how to transform the dumb matter of the universe into new minds so that we can fill our light cone with as much pleasure as is physically possible. This might be something that is far further off than the project addressed in this article, but I believe it is still what we should seek to direct our technological progress towards as the ultimate end goal of human advancement. Hopefully just as Mr. Pearce and the Far Out initiative are advocating for suffering abolitionism, others can begin to advocate for this program of creating as many pleasure-minds as possible as something to be strived towards.
I'm as sincere as can be, I really do think this should be the ultimate end human technological progress should strive towards. We can directly experience pleasure as good in and of itself, something being objectively good implies an ought in its increase and maximization, so we should seek to maximize the total conscious experience of pleasure in the universe. After we've already maximized pleasure in extant minds, this implies the creation of even more minds to maximize universal pleasure as much as possible. So, the long term goal of humanity should be to figure out how to create new minds out of the matter in the universe, and how to maintain them in a state of maximal pleasure.
If one is a classical utilitarian, then one's long-term goal should presumably be a so-called utilitronium shockwave, aka a hedonium shockwave, i.e. optimizing matter and energy in our forward light-cone for pure bliss:
By contrast, a negative utilitarian can settle for a forward light-cone populated by complex minds and a rich civilization underpinned entirely by gradients of superhuman bliss.
We could split the difference between those two options, which is something I think you've addressed yourself in some of your writings. The near earth system could be preserved for a civilization of complex minds in superhuman but sub-hedonium levels of bliss, while the dumb matter of the rest of the universe is converted to hedonium. Since the near earth system makes up such a small portion of the cosmos, it would be a relatively small loss to the otherwise hedonism-optimizing system, while preserving a foothold of complex cognition as a "hedge" in case there is some sort of existential meaning beyond pure utility maximization that has value in itself. So in earth and its immediate surroundings we could still have minds engaged in art, music, poetry, and creative striving, while matter that would never have been conscious otherwise in the other 99.999...999% of the universe is converted to pure pleasure.
yes, exactly, you've nailed it! Of people familiar with the currently theoretical idea of utilitronium or hedonium, almost no one is opposed to converting inert matter and energy into such hyper-blissful states. And a strict classical utilitarian can sign up to such a compromise insofar as it's (presumably) the most politically realistic option.
Here is a moral intuition I have that I absolutely cannot defend from first principles, but I still feel very strongly about:
I think that when your husband dies, it is intrinsically morally good that you feel really unhappy. Not for the rest of your life, not even for a very long time (say, a few weeks or months?), and not so intensely that you cannot function or make permanent regrettable choices. But if your loss is real, then grief should be painful; otherwise, it's as if you have nothing to grieve.
...I feel dirty having written this. I haven't experienced the death of anyone this close, it seems I would want to opt out of this kind suffering at its worst; it'd be cruel not to give people the option. So I don't really know if this means that I REALLY stand by this intuition of mine, but it gives me pause one way or another.
How unhappy? If you feel a bit sad for a day, is that enough? What if you get so unhappy that you commit suicide? What if you feel somewhat sad for a month, or deeply depressed for a week? What’s the right amount of unhappiness to feel?
My father died of a series of heart attacks over the course of about six months, and while it was painful to watch him go, when he finally went it was more of a sense of closure. All the grieving was already done and I was back to normal two days later.
That is to say, when you can see it coming, it's a pretty quick recovery.
I would never "blame" you or impugn guilt but my first thought would be that something was off with your emotional regulation system, your relationship with your Dad or both. I wouldn't lose respect for you, but you are so psychologically unusual I would feel a bit wary, like I feel around docile but huge domesticated animals.
A very similar moral standard, near trivial to defend from first principles, is "when someone close to you dies, you should feel bad enough about that, in a foreseeable enough way, to want to avoid relevant negligence or malice." https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2017-09-16
I wonder if pain asymbolia can be trained. You hear of people getting into kink and gradually learning to 'enjoy' pain as just another interesting sensation…
Not as a matter of kink but a lot of pain can be somewhat neutralized by focusing on it, examining it, turning it over in your mind and at least to a degree reducing it to a a ‘sensory input’
Yes indeed. For martial arts, it’s useful to understand the difference between “annoying” and dangerous pain. An elbow digging into my thigh is sharply painful and really unpleasant, but the knowledge that it’s not damaging (a bruise at worst) allows me to deal with it deliberately. Whereas a mild sensation of pressure in the knee joint will cause me to tap out immediately.
Hmm... This reminds me of the quip that disgust is folk microbiology - useful if one doesn't have _actual_ microbiology.
In this case, unexamined pain seems to be an _approximate_ warning of impending damage - but trained martial artists have a _better_ estimate of what is _actually_ impending damage. Is this a reasonable analogy?
Yes, it's a good analogy. Goes both ways, too - I know which pain to ignore and keep going, and what not to waste my energy on because the opponent likely will ignore non-damaging pain the same way I do.
Has Jo Cameron's genome been fully sequenced and archived somewhere? Seems like if she can be convinced to donate her data to science, making sure her full genome is available in case FAAH-OUT isn't responsible might be a good use of ~$250--$1000 (+ data storage), or whatever sequencing costs these days.
I think by my time, there'd already been a generation of futurism and sci-fi that didn't pan out, and I grew up with the knowledge that these sorts of predictions would be disappointing.
I did some coding for a hearing aid company to automate their product testing around 2012.
The markup on hearing aids is obscene. The operation was unbelievably bloated with people who really served no discernible function.
Anyway, it was privately owned and had money to burn.
They did a mock up of a home 40 years in the future for marketing purposes. The furniture 40 years from 2012 looked very much like the projected furniture 40 years from 1967. I almost had to bite my lip to suppress a laugh.
I watched snippets of that half hour program about life in the year 2000 last night. It was pretty funny in what it got right and where it might missed the boat entirely.
I’m going to watch the whole thing with my wife today. Should be fun.
I think it's made massive inroads into the "pre-cooked meat" section of Costco. For myself, it seemed too long and finicky and machine-intensive for home use. For daily cooking, I prefer stuff that can be done in under an hour (Thai curries!), and if I'm doing something that takes longer, like roasts or baking, I tend to gravitate to older recipes.
> This might involve patenting it themselves, so that nobody else can patent it; after doing this, they would give the patent away freely.
Does this actually work? I thought I read that this is what happened with insulin, but look where we are now. (On the other hand, the ideas that have us the Internet were successfully released into the public domain, without there being patent trolls on it.)
All intelligent life feels pain, and the less pain you feel the less intelligent. As simple as that. We need pain for intelligent decision making, is the rational conclusion. If constant happiness with an indifferent baseline was evolutionarily viable, we would already see a large portion of populations with this disorder. But no, most of them get into accidents, not scared or warned by pain. The exception of one woman only proves the rule. A society of such people would be... strange... if not long-term unsustainable, due to the mutations from the "perfect balance" that exists in that one woman.
That saying is actually often misunderstood. The correct quote is "The exception proves the EXISTANCE of the rule". The classic example is a no parking 9-5 sign, which is an exception proving the existence of a rule allowing parking the rest of the time.
Well it can work either way. A sign that says “no children after 9pm” is both a rule itself and confirms the rule “children allowed until 9pm”.
This applies to house rules and the like but not scientific theories or classes. Exceptions can disprove the “rule” for classes of objects. That is a black sheep disproves the rule that all sheep are white.
My main concern with this is network effects. I can see living as a persons with no sense of suffering but I have a hard time imagining a society. Pain response is sort of “hey do something about this” and cold hearted evolution or God or whatever you want to call it probably didn’t preserve suffering through the ages for no reason. Very curious about where this goes, however. I have some ideas about NeuraLink tech on the future and how this handles people choosing their own emotional response.
> (yes, obviously there’s a hedonic treadmill - Pearce’s goal is to find some biotech intervention that works prior to the hedonic treadmill, giving you a hedonic treadmill around a different set point)
This is a one line parenthetical, but it feels like all of my intuition around the question kind of hinges on this effect. Many inhabitants of modern industrialized countries do live in a hedonistic utopia compared to most of human history/much of the world today, but don't seem to be proportionally happier. They can get seriously depressed by thinking about problems that are objectively much smaller than what people used to deal with all the time and, as far as I know, be fine.
The physical analogies would be things like bones atrophying if you lie around all day, or developing auto-immune disorders if you live in a sterile place. Medical interventions for these problems could exist at some point, but at least right now my intuition to the question "wouldn't it be nice to lay in bed in a clean room all day" immediately snaps to issues like these (also the fact that I get antsy and have to work off energy if I sit too much). I have no idea what my intuition would be if medical interventions existed for all of these problems. Similarly, I have no idea what my intuition would be if I live in a hedonic utopia with some psychiatric intervention to prevent a hedonic treadmill effect. Right now, my intuition is something like, "this feels like you must be incapable of learning, or like a child who wants to see something comforting and familiar all the time." Of course, it's possible to posit that the intervention doesn't have these effects, but I have no idea what this society would look like or what it feel like to live there. It seems like the thought experiment has devolved into "just assume we can have only good things but no bad things" which isn't very useful. It certainly doesn't tell you that it's obviously correct to search for medical interventions on the assumption that you will eventually be able to avoid all possible negative consequences. It's like... if you really think this way, why would you oppose humanity being replaced by an AI that can just set its hedonism value to the max? Whoever these hypothetical inhabitants of this utopia are, they don't feel like they would be anything like me.
Anyway, an anecdote. Scott, you once wrote that you remember high school being miserable, but later in retrospect thought it wasn't so bad (years later). A few years ago I did a hike where, by the end, I was pretty miserable. We had done what we set out to do and were just making our way back to the car, but it was hot, we had to fight our way through brush, deal with muddy ground, we'd been out for almost 10 hours, we were tired with no idea how close we were to the end, and it was just fairly frustrating. And yet within a few weeks, I was looking forward to the next one. Outdoorsy people even have a term for this because of how common it is, "type 2 fun":
> Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect.
I should say that perhaps Jo Cameron proves I'm wrong about all this, but it's tough to wrap my head around what, exactly, she feels, and what this initiative is trying to accomplish. If it's fine for her to feel angry about politics and cry watching a sad movie, is it also expected that I might go on a hike, want it to be done in the moment, and later decide I want to do it again? What makes the difference between that situation and one in which I later decide I *don't* want to do it again, i.e. type 3 fun?
I guess I could see a goal of "people get to choose which feelings they feel and how much of them they feel and when and why etc." I think this still risks some negative consequences (like any choice does) but more importantly, I'm not sure this is the goal of the initiative?
Did Jo Cameron's two kids inherit any of their mom's suffering resistance? I am guessing no, because it would have been Big News if it were straightforwardly heritable like that, but still, seems worth being clear on that in a narrative about this.
1. Pain is necessary; without pain we can and will die early and without warning. Insensitivity to pain may mean you put off getting it addressed until it will kill you. The fact that over time we die anyways and the body breaks down and causes pain is being mortal. you'd essentially need to solve mortality in both cases to solve pain.
2. Mental suffering is a result of individuality; the capacity to love as an individual means the capacity to suffer as one.
the problem with you all is you talk about things like buddhism but you are not religious at your core and you don't "get" it. The point of those kinds of religions is to eliminate the self entirely to eliminate suffering by killing desire. The self-the thing that makes Scott, Scott-is an active impediment to the end goal, which is nonexistence or reabsorption into a world soul. you are a drop of water meant to become part of an ocean.
if you think too much about ending mental suffering entirely, you will get into ideas involving this; individuality is the cause, or existence is. You will start to be a nutter. In some sense, you need to accept in order for us to be free, thinking individuals the potential for suffering exists.
3. Honestly we need to make society as a baseline more tolerable before we can get enough resources or effort to tackle huge existential or engineering problems. It's easier and safer to mitigate suffering that way than to go all abstract and utilitarian over "big picture" thinking.
>Pain is necessary; without pain we can and will die early and without warning. Insensitivity to pain may mean you put off getting it addressed until it will kill you. The fact that over time we die anyways and the body breaks down and causes pain is being mortal. you'd essentially need to solve mortality in both cases to solve pain.
I’d rather not experience any pain and die unexpectedly than experience lots of pain in an effort to delay inevitable death. If living means living in a largely negative state, I’m not sure what exactly you’re living for.
Pain serves a purpose. I think it remains to be seen whether or not it’s necessary.
i remember reading Stephen Donaldson's The Illearth War, and in it Thomas Covenant has leprosy. Leprosy destroys the nerves, and what impressed me was that every day or more he always had to check himself because he couldn't just know he was injured; he could feel perfectly fine yet be injured and it develop into infection.
without pain we'd probably all live shorter lives. play football? you'd need to inspect yourself after every play. I'm not sure how children would survive in that kind of system.
as for pain in old age, well at some point the only answer is to "play the man" and accept it as a possibility. There's a lot of "rather nots" you'll encounter as you get older.
You'll say this then at age 50 you'll have a doctor tell you that you need to drink this horrible laxative so you can shit nonstop till you are clean inside, then they slowly will push a camera up your ass to make sure no nasty polyps are growing in you. There's no shortage of fear and indignity in growing old but you'll adapt and live.
> You'll say this then at age 50 you'll have a doctor tell you that you need to drink this horrible laxative so you can shit nonstop till you are clean inside, then they slowly will push a camera up your ass to make sure no nasty polyps are growing in you. There's no shortage of fear and indignity in growing old but you'll adapt and live.
I am exactly 50 and I’ve had three colonoscopies to remove polyps. You might think that’s what makes life great and look forward to your kids having the opportunity to have cameras painfully shoved up their butts but I don’t. My mom recently died from cancer bursting through her belly after 7 years of severe Parkinson’s. My dad, a guy with a masters in mathematics from Cal has dementia so bad a few days ago he took off his pants to take a crap in his favorite chair. He shakes with anxiety over fears that his house is somehow no longer his house. Neither of these people, nor I myself, have “adapted” as you assure me we must, and my mom certainly didn’t live, as you suggest she should. It isn’t due to a deficiency in character that some people don’t want to experience agony.
i think you have to live anyways regardless of the potential for agony or lot, because no one is going to eliminate pain. You say fuck it and live anyways and adapt until your end comes.
i'm your age too and in my own family on the men's side its rare we end well; pretty much both male grandparents and uncles died in ways no one would like, one suicide. i work in a job with elderly people as customers and the amount of seeing them degrade fast and then die is chilling. The men ALWAYS go first.
but what are you going to do? i mean you have to make peace with death and part of that is realizing it doesn't always come well. otherwise the fear will eat you alive.
About pain? Look for new ways for future generations to alleviate it. Like this Far Out Initiative thing. If my son suffers less, then his kids suffer less, etc. I think it’s worth looking into. If a person who’s in pain says to me, I don’t want to be in pain anymore, I’d like to help them with that. You don’t have to choose that path for yourself. You can preserve a baseline of suffering for your personal betterment/enjoyment/whatever. I don’t think anyone should (or would) stop you.
if its a matter of better palliative care or drugs for end of life pain relief I'd agree but the idea you can dispense with suffering as a concept by engineering the human race is stupid.
Rationalists have this huge failure mode where they see a problem (rents are too high, for example) and rather than try to do realistic or immediate steps (become landlords, work in local politics) they try to solve the root with one easy trick (georgism!) and do virtually nothing.
suffering is not something that can be solved, only mitigated.
you have to live in the sense where you accept lack of control. you might suffer at the end of your life, or might not, but unless you want to suffer every single day over fear of that, or completely sacrifice any good in life by ending it early you make peace with it and live.
That's all very exciting. Obviously, you'd want very careful experimentation before introducing this kind of change into humans, which I assume is uncontroversial, and I'd probably want at least a few generations of unedited humans, which might be much more controversial.
A quick parable. When I was younger (maybe 10 years - 29 or so), I strongly believed that most negative emotions were immature, and that guilt, jealously, self-criticism, a desire for revenge, anxiety, panic, etc. were worthwhile if and only if they provided some benefit that couldn't be realized through a more dispassionate analysis. (I'm sure rationalism has some similar discussions.) I can't say whether the chicken or the egg came first, but I think I also feel those emotions much less strongly than most people, to the point that for at least some of them, I think I've only felt them once or twice in my adult life, and weakly at that.
Now that I'm older, I'm not so sure. I think my dispassionate substitute for those emotions is subject to a number of cognitive errors that I haven't been able to eliminate, and I may be missing something. I still wouldn't voluntarily choose to live a life with a lot more guilt and anxiety, but maybe if I had, I would have accomplished more of the things that are important to me?
I wonder if reducing suffering might have some similar unintended effects, to the point that I'd prefer to keep some suffering humans around for a while just to make sure.
I feel similarly, though maybe not exactly the same. I also felt that negative emotions were immature, but it turns out that very belief was maladaptive. Me— and people like me— who tend to feel emotion less strongly, usually feel this way for inauthentic reasons. In my case, it’s probably being cut off from my emotions and being good at intellectualizing them. In fair weather times, it’s a superpower and let’s me do work that most people can’t do. However, it is maladaptive in that it can build up and cause illness/breakdowns.
Granted, what I describe is an “inauthentic” sort of emotional regulation. Maybe a truly authentic sort of emotional regulation has all the positives with none of the downsides. Idk.
I think I experience much less in the way of negative emotions than others (plausibly also positive emotions). A Hindu roommate of mine said I was like a Buddhist* because of my blase attitude. But people who know me don't think of me as an example to emulate. In another comment I said we should ask why natural selection hasn't made Jo Cameron the norm, and I'm aware the same thing applies to me to an even more obvious degree.
*I should clarify I was raised a mainline Protestant and became an atheist without dabbling in anything like Buddhism.
"These are just a few of the images we've recorded. And you can see, it wasn't what we thought. There's been no war here and no terraforming event. The environment is stable. It's the Pax. The G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate that we added to the air processors. It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Well, it works. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work, they stopped breeding, talking, eating. There's 30 million people here, and they all just let themselves die. I have to be quick. About a tenth of a percent of the population had the opposite reaction to the Pax. Their aggressor response increased beyond madness. They have become... Reavers. They've killed most of us. Not just killed. They've done things. I won't live to see the results of our experiment. They were not trying to kill us all, they were trying to save us."
Let's do it to confined animals. Leave the human stuff for the future to worry about.
The presentation of the Scottish woman as atypical is puzzling. Everything she says about how she handles emotional grief is expected/ordinary social behavior, if you are an adult. Is Californian culture really that different from European culture? 10.000 western movies ( the archetypical US movie genre) does not suggest any difference. Granted, movies are not reality, but movies tend to mirror cultural norms.
"Not being bothered" is twisting my words quite a bit, as well as how Cameron is quoted... Emotionally what she says echoes that old slogan the Brits had during the Blitz in 1940/41: "keep calm and carry on."
Notice that I am referring to what Scott quotes concerning how she expresses her emotional pain. Her physical pain threshold is another matter, that might be atypical.
That said, women in Africa - at least in rural Uganda - are socially expected not to ask for pain relievers, and not to show outward signs of pain, while giving birth. They are expected to labour in silence. Which most of them apparently do (google for example Vieira Silent Labour).That is Africa not Europe, but illustrates that culture also plays a part related to how even physical pain is "emotionally negotiated" and expressed. Nutshell version: Expressing as well as not expressing pain are signals to others and to yourself of what kind of person you perceive yourself to be.
... My general point is that instead of going "down" to the genetic level, perhaps going "up" to the cultural level is where the source for expressed behaviours is mainly located. The biopsychosocial frame of reference etc...it's an empirical question in which direction it tilts, though, we probably agree on that.
I love the nominative determinism that the “Far Out” Initiative is hosted on this blog and Scott still doesn’t think he’s the ideological descendant of hippies even with all the drug research, Bay Area roots, polyamory, communal homes, etc.
Mostly? He points out some things right or wrong about their viewpoints (which “rationalists” in 2084 would also have with 2024 rats) but never acknowledges the spiritual lineage.
I relate to Jo Cameron on a few levels. I have had two unmedicated child births. I would not describe the sensation of my births as painful in the sense of any of kind of pain I’ve ever experienced. It was a big sensation, but I would not describe it as painful. I never felt the need or desire for pain intervention.
Perhaps also similar to Jo I have experienced the deaths of people close to me, and other big negatively-charged emotional life events with a sort of detachment. I have never had anxiety or depression except for a very short bout of PPD that was likely associated with blood loss and resulting iron deficiency from childbirth.
I have always felt that I am pretty weird for the ways that I just continue to be ok when other people around me fall apart given the same set of facts. I guess if I could sum it up: I don’t really suffer. Or if I do, it’s just much less than other people seem to.
I am happily married, have decades-old friendships, and normal attachments to my children. I am definitely not a sociopath or a psychopath.
I always chalked it up to lacking a kind of existential fear that most other humans seem to have going in the background at all times, and I just don’t. I’m baseline really happy most of the time.
Other commenter(s) have implied that childbirth could be a special case. What about other painful situations, like scalding, impact injuries, infections, surgery, etc?
Glad to hear you have a good psychological baseline! Me too.
Maybe I'm neuro divergent in how I process pain: I don't understand why one would want to eliminate the feeling of suffering rather than the cause of suffering. It seems to me like hearing a fire alarm that annoys you, and instead of attempting to put out the fire, instead turning off the alarm, like the meme saying "This is fine."
Pain isn't nice. If I am in pain then I want to be out of the painful situation, but I don't find memories of pain burdensome. If you tortured me for one hour today (without lasting damage) then tomorrow I would have the same experience of life (aside from having the opportunity cost of having one hour yesterday removed from my schedule).
I just don't get it. Messing with our systems of reward or pain seems dangerous (as e.g. opiates demonstrate well). There seem huge potential downsides, and to me, limited upsides. I would far rather spend effort actually making the world a better place, e.g., curing illness, preventing poverty, etc... than make people feel the world is better while leaving the actual world unchanged.
I have a lot of sympathy for those in debilitating pain, and I can see a real difference between being unable to live life (e.g., accomplish one's goals, spend time with friends, etc...) due to pain, and not being able to do that. These states of pain deserve care and attention, but a proposal to modify the human baseline seems a completely outmatched response to this (luckily) relatively rare issue that can often be addressed by e.g., treating the underlying cause of pain or specialized pain medication.
Eliminating ALL causes of pain is much much much harder then eliminating the perception of pain. Not only do you have to cure all diseases, but also you have to ensure no one ever breaks a bone or falls down again.
And yes, messing with systems of reward is for sure dangerous, but it seems pretty far off from involuntarily inflicting that on anyone.
I agree preventing all causes of pain is likely impossible. But I don't have a problem with most causes of pain. I have hurt myself in various ways over the years, and I don't really mind. As long as the pain isn't debilitating, and passes, then I am okay with it.
I've even had a medical condition that has knocked weeks of my life out with extremely intense pain. It happened sporadically each time for a day, for a few years. It was so painful I wouldn't be able to function for the day.
I'd rather not have had that experience, but tbh, it's not a big deal. I'm lucky enough to not have that disruption be to costly (e.g., not living on the poverty line). If given the option, I wouldn't mess with my pain response.
There's a theory that our brains (which evolved solely to propagate our genes, irrespective of life quality) are suffering-production machines that are constantly on the lookout for reasons to suffer. No matter how many causes of suffering you eliminate, the theory says, your brain will find an outlet for its "will to suffer." I think it's a plausible theory. Especially if you think that people who commit suicide seem to be experiencing maximal mental pain, even if their stated reasons for committing suicide can sometimes seem trivial. I'm thinking of the teen RobinHood user who self-murdered because an app glitch made him think he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm assuming the kid didn't understand the statute of limitations on debt. Ruining your credit for life is tough but it hardly seems like it calls for suicide. But to be fair to that poor kid, it's reasonable to guess he was experiencing as much mental pain as any other suicide.
I somewhat agree, for some amount of pain. But quite a lot of pain that people experience day to day is not really a signal of 'something bad or potentially harmful is happening'. The stove example is the other end of the spectrum here - sure pain in this situation has an obvious clear reason for existing. However chronic pain? (Which is much more common than you would think; I suspect makes up the majority of pain experienced by humans in the world) is not signalling danger, it's not making a sincere 'hey don't do that' signal - it's just misfiring. I see tonnes of examples of this all the time; migraines, neuropathy, osteoarthritis (this one is in *some* sense signalling damage but not in a way that is meaningful), fibromyalgia, IBS, endometriosis. People managing these things are not some rare tiny group of people with 'chronic pain' in a way that feels alien to you, they are every day people, living their life, loads of them, getting on with things, but feeling kind of miserable because of pain.
As I write above, I have a huge amount of sympathy for people experiencing chronic pain. I think they should be treated well and cared for by society. I wouldn't want anyone to think I don't support that. I think researching to address medical issues that cause chronic pain is great, and worth funding. I would love it if nobody ever suffered chronic pain again. I would love to able to cure all instances of nerves misfiring.
However, I don't think genetic engineering humans so that they have a fundamentally altered experience of suffering (not just pain) has much to do with treating chronic pain. It seems to me wildly irresponsible to start intentionally engineering different reward systems (pain and suffering being expressions of negative feedback) into the human genome.
If David Pearce's goal is to eliminate suffering, then the first application of his ideas should not be to further subjugate and exploit animals. This initiative sets a bad precedent by normalizing the genetic manipulation of animals for commercial exploitation.
People will mistrust any tech if its initial use is ethically compromised in this way, potentially delaying the adoption of these technologies for human benefit.
Does The Far Out Initiative truly view animals as mere commodities for human use? This stance undermines ethical progress in recognizing animals as sentient beings with intrinsic value. A slippery slope could lead to arguments for applying genetic technologies in unethical ways to humans. Recent events have shown how easily public trust can be eroded. What prevents these same arguments from being used to justify creating human slaves?
Commercial exploitation of animals is a gray area. But the genetic manipulation of animals for CALORIC exploitation is already normal. It's been normal for thousands of years. Humanity will continue molding animal genes like clay and I will never issue a blanket condemnation. I will continue to judge these things on a case by case basis.
What the Far Out Initiative is doing is a deeply pragmatic emergency stop-gap measure to minimize farm animal suffering while activists work on changing hearts and minds and tissue engineering technology gradually progresses to the point that it can produce animal-free meat with superior taste, nutrition, and price relative to animal derived meat products. All members of The Far Out Initiative are passionate supporters of animal liberation and shutting down the death factories as quickly as possible. We are a Public Benefit Company so that we can direct the revenue we generate by helping asshole meat industries transition to a suffering-free model into other potentially very high impact projects and cause areas, clever and out-of-the-box vegan activism among them.
In my view, any form of animal agriculture should be outlawed. Humans should be helping sentient beings, not harming them. And I'm conflicted. As you suggest, the biggest risk of ameliorating the lives of factory-farmed nonhumans is to legitimate their exploitation. Compare mandatory cameras in slaughterhouses. It sticks in the craw to "support" mandatory cameras because slaughterhouses have no place in any civilized society. We should be campaigning for their abolition. And yet at the same time, cameras massively reduce "abuses" and near-term suffering.
Do you agree with the Far Out Initiative's approach of focusing on farm animals first? Clearly it has some PR (Public Relations) issues. Couple of points:
1 - Might be worth always leading with what you just said. Don't direct people to the above ACX article as a way of introducing them to the topic (unless they have an open mind and always read all the comments before starting to form their opinion).
2 - Relatedly, regardless of how it is presented, this approach might be doomed to failure for PR / political reasons.
Happy to justify/explain/elaborate both of these, but only if you and/or the FOI would actually read my explanation.
What other approaches have been considered? What about providing a service that would allow people to include something like 'hedonic baseline' or 'pain sensitivity' as traits to consider during embryo selection? And at the same time trying to promote embryo selection in general?
Presumably this would involve focusing less on Jo Cameron, and more on relatively common genetic variation. I bet that both the above traits could be tied to polygenic scores. Other commenters here have talked about their own experience in relation to them. (Myself, I am, by default, content and happy with life. I've never had depression, and couldn't really imagine having anything like it except in some circumstances that would be exceptional (for a citizen in a liberal democracy in the 21st Century), and despite the fact that one aspect of my circumstances does seem to be positively correlated with depression in society as a whole. And my dad seems to be similar.)
1 Animal agriculture is currently the world's worst source of severe and readily avoidable suffering. So the prioritization makes sense. The biggest challenge is simultaneously working to mitigate its horrors and campaigning for its outright abolition. I'm heavily conflicted: https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#slaughterhouses
2. In my view, all prospective parents world-wide should be offered access to preimplantation genetic screening, counselling and genome editing. Access would be extremely cost-effective. All germline interventions could be framed as remedial rather than as enhancement. After all, no one in history by the WHO definition of health ("a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being") has ever yet been healthy. If our focus were just on physical pain, then offering prospective parents the option of "low pain" alleles of the SCN9A gene ("the volume knob for pain") would probably suffice: https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#physical What's tantalizing about the Jo Cameron case is the possibility that a couple of genetic tweaks could defang physical _and_ mental pain while leaving the bearer essentially "normal". The role of benign alleles of the FAAH gene in good mood, reduced anxiety and high pain tolerance was already known. Whether Jo's rare dual FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutation explains her condition, or whether her genetic make-up holds other surprises, won't be known until her full genome is put in the public domain. I'm impatient.
At this point, bioconservative critics start talking about reckless genetic experimentation. But this is precisely what all sexual reproduction involves: untested genetic experiments with sometimes tragic consequences. Not everyone thinks such experiments are ethically justified (“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?” Schopenhauer). But if one _does_ think such genetic experimentation is warranted, then one should at least attempt to load the genetic dice in favour of one's future offspring - in my view.
This issue reminds me of a couple others. There was some UTube guy who helped people and got attacked for it, I don't remember the specifics and didn't understand what the fuss was about. I think he was accused of "exploiting" the people he helped in order to boost his fame. The other more directly comparable issue is folks opposing CO2 sequestration because it doesn't reduce CO2 emissions but rather "encourages" them.
Did the lady Jo feel no pain, and no anxiety? Or did she just THINK she wasn't feeling pain or anxiety? What's the difference?
The whole point of emotions (such as pain) is to be aware of them. That's what being conscious does...
But I am trying to reach a state (as Hindu) where I am very much functioning in the real world but simultaneously aware that I am not this entity "I" that I keep thinking I am. The boundary between that "I" and everything else is arbitrary, I have been taught, by "Advaita", a Hindu philosophical concept. We dissolve into the universe as an entity, if we can only switch our thinking, rid ourselves of our ignorance (avidhya).
The boundaries are obviously not arbitrary. I prefer the term "nebulous" that David Chapman tries to popularize - it doesn't seem like popular culture has a ready conceptual handle for this general idea, which equally obviously is true. But, likewise, when various spiritual traditions try to fix that gap by completely denying boundaries they end up sounding crazy.
Scott says “Think of the wounded soldiers who lie on the battlefield screaming for water until they finally expire, or the animals who get eaten from the inside by parasites”
as an argument for being a pain abolitionist.
To me this is a bad argument since while, yes, it would be good if extreme, intense pain were eliminated, the anti-pain abolitionist in me is worried about eliminating subtle emotional pain.
Indeed, the worry about losing subtle emotional pain, for me, mostly starts as a desire to not lose that pain for yourself. So even the statement by Scott: “To me, you either start with a deep hatred for the suffering of your fellow beings…” is a bit disingenuous, as it paints the pro-pain position as being “uncaring for others” whereas in reality I am pro pain for myself and for others equally.
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I also notice a bit of an inconsistency with how things are presented here.
On the one hand Scott Says this about Cameron:
“One might worry that she might lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement, but in fact she has strong political opinions (she doesn’t like Boris Johnson) and attends protests.” –
thus implying that pain is not a necessary motivator for action. Presumably because Cameron cares about stuff other than limiting her own pain. I.e. Reducing pain and increasing happiness is not a complete statement of her values.
But on the other hand, Scott also says: “On the other, you have people like Epictetus and the Buddha. Even if you improved the world, they say, you would never be happy. If you want happiness, you have to look within.”
But wait? Who says we want happiness? I thought we wanted to deny Boris Johnson from being in power. Indeed, someone who never suffers ever still wants to remove Boris Johnson from power. So we can turn the statement on itself “Even if you looked within, you wouldn’t improve the world. If you want to improve the world, you have to look without.”
—-----------------------
As for the real crux of the argument which is
“Can people still care about improving the world without emotional pain” I want to say
1. To the point Scott makes that:
“Obviously there’s a hedonic treadmill - Pearce’s goal is to find some biotech intervention that works prior to the hedonic treadmill, giving you a hedonic treadmill around a different set point”
I would be very skeptical of any such intervention since “the hedonic treadmill” is such an abstract concept that includes all sorts of types of emotions: physical, emotional, psychological, social etc so that changing anything on such a fundamental level of your brain is inherently risky.
2. To the point that Cameron is still apparently an activist… I find in myself that anger is often a motivator for me to want to care about issues. Indeed, powerful anger can make people do crazy things. Things that maybe a fully rational person would not do. Sure there are other motivators too so if you removed anger I wouldn’t literally care about nothing. But I wouldn’t care about things the same amount. And I think real change often happens when you have extremely committed people to a specific cause. And that level of extreme commitment could be harder without anger.
3. To my thinking there are 3 basic motivators for political action:
a)anger/pain
b)Cerebral Effective Altruism type thinking
c)Social signaling.
I think if you removed (a). You are left with (b) and c. (b) is very small. I don’t think most people have the drive and perspective to be effective altruists. And (c) only works if some large group of people have a motivation other than (c). So even though a single person without (a) could still care about things because they live in a world where people do that and they learn it’s good to care about things, if literally no one felt any emotional pain, it wouldn’t obviously work the same way.
4. As I alluded at the top of my comment. I have a general desire not to lose the capacity for emotional pain. In general I have a desire for more capacity, for more ability to sense stuff. Just like physical pain can help you avoid fires, I have an intuition that emotional pain can also help you in some way. Maybe it’s not “you need emotional pain to be anti-boris Johnson” as disproven by Cameron. But in general, increased sensation-capacity is better than decreased sensation-capacity.
Sure if you told me there was a way to fully keep my capacity to sense the presence of pain and fully keep the capacity of the sensation of the presence of pain to motivate me, and it’s ability to help me empathize but skip out on the unpleasantness of the sensation itself, I wouldn’t necessarily be against that. But I would be very skeptical of any claim to actually accomplish that due to the subtleties involved and the inherent uncertainties. In fact, I can’t really conceive of any experiment that could convince me that the “emotional pain removal” doesn’t also remove any of the aspects of pain that I would want to keep.
Altruistic motivation in the absence of emotional pain is something that should be enhanced when the positive valence, warm, meaningful, connected compassionate aspect of empathy that actually motivates engagement is liberated from the personal distress aspect of empathy that makes us flinch away from thinking about the suffering the world holds and find altruistic engagement aversive.
It seems to me that there’s a dilemma for this view. Either this end to suffering has significant behavioral effects on people, or it doesn’t.
If it doesn’t, then in what sense is it really an “end to suffering”? Do people try angrily to avoid mere bliss rather than the better thing?
If it does have significant behavioral effects, then it seems to me that we really have deep questions to answer about whether these include apathy about real harms to self and others, even if not as obvious as the kids that burn themselves to death. What is stated here isn’t enough to reassure me.
I imagine that a growing sub-population of fearless, compassion-driven, anxiety-free, unshakably equanimous people with Cameron's condition would be very difficult for tyrants and demagogues to manipulate:
1. There is no status anxiety to exploit; they would not fear standing up and opposing injustice, which would make them much more likely to do so.
2. Fear and status anxiety-driven conformity would be absent.
3. Self-deception would plausibly be more difficult in the absence of negative valence "ugh fields" that we erect around ideas we don't want to consider and then subconsciously flinch away from when we detect a negative valence gradient.
4. Self-deceptive preference falsification should be much more difficult for the same reason: they would not fear honestly expressing their minds whenever and to whomever they wish.
5. They would not be susceptible to the negative-valence caricatures that politicians and other Machiavellian undesirables use to mobilize the population against groups they wish to attack.
6. Motivation is dopamine driven - it's vastly more about anticipated reward than anticipated punishment - so people with this condition will continue to want what they want and would have no fear of standing up to tyrannical governments that stand in the way of their exploration of the state-space of happiness.
I'd like to believe that this is true. Unfortunately, I've noticed a tendency for people in power to be miserable. Look at Elon Musk - the dude has money beyond the count of grief, money enough to enact his desires to the limit of what is legally and physically possible (and more, in the former case). And yet he appears to be miserable. There's a screaming wound inside him that cannot be satiated.
And look at every successful revolutionary - did any of them seem like they were particularly blissed-out and content?
Do you really think that the current masters of the universe are going to take the happiness cure? And, if they did, do you think that they won't just be replaced by people who didn't?
So don't you inevitably end up with a leadership that's just as grotesque and rapacious as ever, only now the rest of us proles are more tolerant and compliant? This is a recipe for dystopia.
Our leaders cannot resist taking conventional recreational drugs so they will never be able to resist taking the Happiness Cure. Whoever replaces them will probably succumb to temptation and start taking the Happiness Cure. But I admit I am at a loss to understand why suffering-free dystopias should be more off-putting then a utopia with suffering.
There are many competitive advantages that high valence brings. Imagine being able to build a project or launch a campaign without having to battle negative valence every step of the way. Even small inconveniences can prevent us from doing something highly beneficial. Imagine how much more innovation and entrepreneurship there would be with the huge barriers of anxiety, stress, and fear no longer blocking ambition. Motivation is primarily driven by anticipated reward, not negative valence. So, in the absence of negative valence one will still want what one wants and pursue the dopamine hit of obtaining it.
Here are a few counterpoints to the OP's claim that high valence makes us easier to exploit and the notion that misery correlates with success:
1. Happier people have more agency
Research suggests that happier individuals are more likely to care about and take action on social issues, indicating a higher sense of personal agency. A study found that happier people are more involved in civic activities, such as voting and volunteering, likely due to their greater optimism and trust in others.
Studies have shown that positive emotions broaden an individual's thought-action repertoire, enhancing creativity and problem-solving abilities. Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory posits that positive emotions expand cognitive resources, leading to increased creativity (Fredrickson, 2001).
3. Happier people are more successful
Research by Lyubomirsky, King, and Diener (2005) demonstrates a strong correlation between happiness and various measures of success, including income, job performance, and workplace success. Happier individuals tend to be more productive, perform better in leadership roles, and receive higher evaluations and pay.
4. Happier people are less inclined to tolerate abuse
Happier individuals are more likely to have higher self-esteem and a stronger sense of self-worth, making them less tolerant of abusive relationships. A study found that happiness and self-esteem are significantly correlated, with happier people being less likely to remain in abusive or unsatisfying relationships (Orth, Robins, & Widaman, 2012).
5. Happier people are less subject to social conformity pressures and peer pressure
Happier individuals often exhibit greater authenticity and self-assuredness, which reduces their susceptibility to social conformity. Research has shown that people with high levels of well-being are more likely to resist peer pressure and make autonomous choices (Sheldon & Houser-Marko, 2001).
There are a lot of fishy things about this. Anyone doing work with them in advised to conduct a background check on the principles. Request government ID.
First Jo Cameron was the answer, now FAAH OUT may be bogus.
Then minicircles were the answer, now CRISPR.
Smells like a scam that Scott got caught up in. Watch out.
Marcin is not being paid. Who is? Follow the money.
Scott mentions the clinic in Prospera may be fraudulent. What is the story there? Has The Far Out Initiative given them investor funds?
re: patent situation. I suggest he should patent it and sell the patent to the highest bidder, who will presumably have a strong incentive to market and sell it to make lots of money, and the proceeds can be used to do more suffering mitigation work.
I gotta suspect this is a utilitarian madhouse of sand that stems from thinking pain/pleasure exist on some kind of linear spectrum. But, still, I would love to hear more about how Jo Cameron's mind supposedly works. I had assumed people stay alive by noticing their bodies are hurting, painful, tired, and then being strongly motivated to change what's causing these problems. I find it extraordinary that someone could become a functioning adult without any of this motivational apparatus.
Cameron doesn't have complete pain insensitivity. She has an astronomically high pain tolerance: her nociceptive neurons send signals to her brain and she reported a pain score of 1/10 while convalescing from a hip surgery notorious for its agonizing recovery period. We aren't aiming for the elimination of pain signalling; we are trying to tone it down to a level where its a trivial inconvenience at worst. We will still know when we are being damaged and we will quickly respond out of the self-preservation instinct.
I agree with your observation that pain and pleasure do not exist on a linear spectrum. Pleasure and pain are vast multidimensional spaces. However, there is a "magnitude of badness" and a "magnitude of goodness" property that even the most exotic qualia possess, and this allows us to roughly say one thing is better or worse than another.
My understanding is that the ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ systems of the brain are correlated but distinguishable. Motivation is largely dopaminergic where as ‘pleasure’ is governed by the mu-opioidic system among others, and anxiety by the amygdala etc (obviously drastically oversimplifying) so you can actually have motivation with or without positive or negative affect.
I don't doubt that we can experience profound growth through suffering.
However, we can obtain many of the same forms of growth through (nearly) painless methods:
1. Read books on evolutionary psychology and how to navigate the dark side of human nature instead of learning about human shittiness the hard way.
2. Meditate to deepen your phenomenological acuity so that you can uncover self-deception and maladaptive tendencies, instead of suffering agonizing social drama that makes such realizations vastly more painful.
3. Practice Metta to cultivate self-love and self-acceptance that is internally centered and independent of the whims of others.
4. Acquire and cultivate coping skills through therapy or bibliotherapy.
5. Read philosophy
I think the "just world bias" is making people think that pain is necessary to develop positive characteristics, while flinching away from the idea of exploring more humane strategies to deliberately cultivate these virtues.
There's a line of thinking in dealing with chronic pain that says it's not the pain itself that causes it to be perpetuated, it's anxiety and catastrophic thoughts that cause ordinary pain to be prolonged and become chronic. One name for the approach to that is Pain Reprocessing Therapy. If a drug could address this, that might cause a decrease in suffering without a decrease in compassion.
My mom is one of those people who feels pain in a negative situation, for instance when her husband died, but she tends to get over it quite quickly.
I want to talk about the AI-generated image of a post-suffering utopia. It looks suspiciously like Waikiki Beach, with a beautiful natural environment despoiled by a bunch of skyscrapers.
Ignoring the practicalities like how we are going to feed all these people without roads and ports to spoil the view (maybe food is delivered by hang glider), does anyone really think that a tiny-footprint ultra-dense city seems like a nice place to live? It seems like the logical endpoint of a lot of "urbanism" but it also seems deeply depressing (much like Waikiki).
"If you could CRISPR something like FAAH-OUT into cows, chickens, etc, you could create breeds of animal that don’t suffer. They think farms would go for it - non-suffering livestock isn’t just good press, it’s also healthier and (potentially) produces tastier meat. Then vegans could continue fighting for factory farming abolition as usual. But it wouldn’t be quite as desperate, and there wouldn’t be as many casualties along the way."
This is the most vile and reprehensible thing I've ever read from Scott's pen. This scenario is a literal nightmare. I couldn't read the rest of the article but I skimmed it for some indication that this was irony, without success. It should not be lost on you what this would mean: a million chickens squeezed into square-foot cages standing in their own shit and covered in ulcers (as they are now, for instance) all thinking the chicken equivalent of "well, bad things happen in life, you just have to move on".
I have never posted a comment here before but I'm posting this one. I assume that's some of that righteous anger I would still feel when I couldn't otherwise tell that I'm being abused.
I figured that the real argument implicit in that fictional work would be better than whatever I could write. Well, I will try, in short sentences.
Slavery is bad. I should not need to explain this. To enslave is a moral ulcer for the slaver. To remove the slaves' suffering is to make them complicit in their situation. And the situation isn't even any better for them. They still get beaten and worked to death. You want to be on the side of the ones who would do this?
Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general during the American Civil War:
>>> It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.
To what extent is this - in Scott's terms - pure and raw cope? It has *some* merit, I suppose. Obviously when something is painful or inconvenient, you have to be more careful and not trigger-happy when doing it. It's good that shit smells like shit, or some would eat it and die.
The problem with this in the case of war is that it hasn't worked for millennia. For millennia, people have murdered each other, ate each other's dead meat, raped each other, etc etc etc... It didn't decrease war one bit. When the concept of "Laws of War" began appearing in the late 1940s, you would have thought that - because it made war less awful - it would have the effect of increasing wars, but no, not at all, both wars and casualties of war has been decreasing since WW2.
As David says again and again and again in this thread, this isn't Brave New World. Signals don't have to be pain, you're perfectly well capable of steering your car even though there is absolutely no pain involved in hugging a couple of cars at 20 Km/h without causing a major accident. If you think "Well if I do that there would be lots of money claims involved and a massive headache in resolving the conflict which will involve insurance and courts and...." then all of that would still exist in a pain-free world, it wouldn't be the strawman heaven world with rainbows and ponies you're imagining, there would still be conflict and lawsuits and money and all the other negative signals that people use to dissuade each other from anti-social behavior, it just wouldn't be all attached to that ancient led that lights up whenever the signal is delivered.
Humans are consistently awful at sensing and empathizing with others' pain. Slavery was outlawed several times during its history by several benevolent dictators, and each and every time it came back after the dictator died or was deposed. Slavery was abolished once and for all when - for the first time in history - we could enslave non-thinking beings. It's likely that meat-eating - a practice whose victims are not recognizably human and can't advocate for themselves, for one difference from slavery - would be orders of magnitudes harder to abolish peacefully or even with reasonable 3x-as-the-wars-of-slavery casualty budget.
It's likely that the vast seas of people uninterested in animal welfare won't begin to give a shit unless and until cloning and lab-grown meat reaches the markets, only then will the first culture and law-making war around meat-eating begin in earnest. Unless you have a technology that will make humans directly feel all the neurological pains of exploited animals in their heads, opposing the mitigation of their suffering while the battle for their emancipation rages is just cruel.
Alternatively, consider that your argument is a general-purpose argument against mitigating any animal suffering at all. Why give animals medicine? That can prolong their suffering. Why raise them as free-roaming and respect their social structures (e.g. by not putting aggressive males into tiny enclosures together)? Those are all bandages that don't solve the problem and can be used to justify even more farming and exploitation of animals. Except they are bandages that **do** decrease animal suffering, and what animal rights advocate won't like decreasing animal suffering? There will **always** be people who point out to any remotely humane procedure and say that it is enough and that we don't need to abolish the entire immoral practice from its roots, to allow those people to ruin mitigations is beyond cruel and idiotic.
The obvious question is why did natural selection make Jo Cameron an unusual mutant rather than the norm.
> The world is on fire, and although some of us live on nice little islands of bearability, it’s hard to enjoy them when you can look just off your island and see everyone else on fire.
It does seem like our physical pain set-up is way overpowered. The worst pain people can feel seems a couple orders of magnitude too high to do the necessary job of teaching us not to do things that will injure us.
And it also happens in situations where there is nothing to be learned -- as when someone is dying from a painful illness or injury. Can anyone think of some benefit we incur from being built so that we can experience extreme pain for long periods of time?
There's already a consensus that we should try to control extremes of pain e.g. when someone is injured or dying. I think this debate is about whether to remove pain in more 'normal' situations – e.g. your dog dies, should you be sad? you see someone being mugged randomly, should you feel bad for them? you stand on broken glass, should the stab of pain overtake all other thoughts or should it be presented as more neutral information along the lines of 'oh look there's a bird'?
Yeah, I get that. I was more asking whether there's any evolutionary advantage to our present set-up, where we are subject to extreme physical pain. I suppose it's simpler than a set-up that allows for more modulation. Right now the set-up seems to be something like the more tissue damage there is, the more pain. So to have the pain max out at a 6 because that's enough to convince us to avoid whatever gave us the level 6 pain, no matter how much damage there is, is a more complex set-up. And to have no pain in situations where there is nothing to be learned, because the subject is dying, requires more intricacy still. On the other hand, fear of extreme pain is very stressful for us, and chronic moderate pain makes many people low-functioning & joyless -- some even commit suicide. And we also take a huge hit if we must witness our loved ones suffering greatly. So I'd say the cost to the organism of the present pain punishment set-up is pretty high.
Probably the evolutionary advantage is that experiencing a minor pain as a leg is being chewed off, or the animal starts walking on hot coal, wouldn’t be as much as a deterrent as an incredible pain.
Imagine an animal encountering lava for the first time and deciding to walk amongst this shiny new thing.
The body has only a fraction of a second to encourage the animal to run away before serious injury occurs.
As for why it is long lasting when not needed - It does look like animals that are being eaten alive give up, and stop threshing around and there’s some evidence of an endorphin flow.
However humans seem not to have that ability, not with chronic pain anyway.
I think that’s right. Without experience or instinct, pain and pleasure are an organism’s primary teachers. But it seems pain has greater depths than pleasure, and I imagine that’s because the stakes are much higher. Pleasure encourages you do keep at something, so there’s less urgency. Pain encourages you to stop doing something (maybe something fatal) so time is of the essence. Pain in extreme cases needs to communicate to an organism that not only must it run screaming from the source of it, but pain also needs to leave such an indelible impression on the organism that it will never go near that source again.
Maybe humans, with so many other ways to determine what is good or bad for them compared to other organisms, don’t need pain to be such a severe teacher. Its utility is arguably diminished in the face of human technology, expert instruction and reason.
To say that pain is an outsized source of misery in the world sounds a little silly, but I don’t think it’s wise to give it so much control over our modern lives.
There are a lot of arguments that I could think of against this, but they're all really just problems that need to be solved. There's nothing in the laws of physics that says we need to suffer. Why shouldn't we have heaven on Earth?
There's a woman named Steph Davis who's done lots of unroped climbing of long, difficult climbs, and also lots of wingsuit flights. She wrote a book about it, and while she did experience fear at times, she seems not to have been much subject to it at all. The first time she jumped out of an airplane wearing a wingsuit she was ecstatic from the very first second she was airborne. She has been doing these jumps for 20 years. In 2010 she saw her husband die during a jump, and in 2013 her second husband. She's still wingsuiting and loving it. She's now 50 years old -- so has survived for more than 2 decades doing these extraordinarily dangerous things. Oh, and she has a brother who's the same -- I believe he also does wingsuit flights. If not, it's maybe skydiving. And his job? -- Critical Care Medicine. He's a physician in the ER. These 2 thrive on thrills. If not fearless, they seem to be very low-fear people. Wonder if anyone's studied them.
I've read both of Steph's books, and she sounds quite sane and very happy. Writes well, too.
Sounds horrible, and I mean that genuinely. Engaging in a needlessly risky hobby that kills multiple people you know is not sane in the slightest. And she apparently is wasting her entire life on it, no kids, no family, and is even working hard to popularize that lifestyle. I feel very bad for her poor parents.
Fortunately, Jo Cameron doesn't experience thrill, so if her condition is fully replicated in others, the dangers posed by fearlessness will be partially mitigated by the absence of a thrill response that could be triggered by risk-taking.
Coupla mighty judgy responses here -- as though you don't get there are a lot of different ways live life besides the way you do. Seems to me one has to work pretty hard to make a case that Steph's doing harm. " She might be in some sense complicit in her husband's death". Well you put in so many qualifiers that your point's hard to refute -- sort of like trying to push back against a cloud. But for the record she married committed wingsuiters who had been flying longer than she had.
All this makes me think of a remark of Tom Wolfe's in Kandy Colored Tangerine Fake Streamline Baby. He described a newpaper article about the kid who'd decorated and amplified the hell out of his car. Article made no criticisms at all, but was woven through with irony and subtle sneer. Wolfe: "It's a way of saying, don't worry, these people are nothing."
Yes, I am judgy about people who wingsuit, free climb high cliffs and do other extremely dangerous sports. In my view, extreme sports show a lack of respect for life and a sense of callousness towards friends and loved ones. Dying in a wingsuit accident is a vicarious act of violence against those left behind to grieve.
Wow, there are quite a few differences between free climbing high cliffs and shooting heroin into your foot. I'll bet if you were taking some kind of verbal ability IQ subtest for a job where questions were of a "what's the difference between" sort, you'd have no trouble listing 6 or 8 essential differences between the 2. But here you are not motivated to be accurate, but instead to show contempt. If I said there was no difference between posts like yours and farting through silk would you agree?
I'm not sure if we are considering primary suffering or the mental discomfort of imagining other beings suffering.
Mormons are frequently invited to ponder the cumulative suffering of all beings across space and time as something that Jesus experienced in Gethsemane (to effectively atone for all the suffering inherent in Life/Creation). Whether we believe this or not, there is a violence in prompting a congregation or population (including children) to imagine or conceptualize this.
I believe efforts and intentions discussed here are more to address/alleviate the discomfort experienced by many a brilliant and sensitive mind in *imagining* effectively infinite amounts of cumulative suffering (some quite exquisite) as we are made aware of it through observation, experience, and information transmission.
I think I suffer about one or two standard divinations less than people on average. It has something to do with my mild autism and mild masochism. Some things I just do not notice. Some things I find actually pleasant - unreciprocated love, for instance, was a huge source of pleasure in my teen years. And some - most of fear and disgust - I've trained myself from experiencing through a self inflicted exposure therapy.
I do not grieve much. I do not hold grudges. It's quite hard to make me angry and I'm quick to forgive. I do cry while watching sad movies, occasionally, but this sadness feels pleasant. And I do not fear death, I used to credit this to mental adaptations from my Christian youth where I was completely confident that I will go to Heaven after death and so got accustommed to thinking about it as a good thing, but it probably has more to do with my general psychological profile.
My girlfriend seems to be in the opposite direction. She suffers a lot. Took us some time to get accustomed to our differences in processing negative emotions - I can just switch to a happier though and find a silver lining very quickly, while she needs much longer time in the state of feeling how awful everything is and receive empathy.
On the other hand, I suspect that I may not feel pleasure as intense as other people as well. Recreational drugs are rather uninteresting to me. I once made a New Year resolution not to drink alcohol for a year which not only I kept but then stopped drinking it completely, because this year of abstinence made me loose the ability to find alcohol pleasant at all, which wasn't much to begin with.
There seem to be a lot of variance in humans regarding the way we process emotions, positive and negative alike. And the quest to find some optimal value is an interesting and noble one. I'm mostly satisfied with the way my own psyche is, but there are a lot of people for whom it can be very helpful.
I came to the comments in a rapture. The idea of the abolition of suffering is extremely new to me and captures my imagination. I can’t conceive of the world that we might create if it becomes possible to end individual suffering. Thank you, Scott, for being the one place I come to find ideas that can light up the world
Ever since I was a teenager, I've been able to imagine a button in my brain that I can press, that makes me happy.
"Pressing" it gives me physical chills and makes me smile
The weird (I mean, it's pretty weird already) thing is that I don't "press" it all the time, in fact it took this post to remind me that it's a thing that I can do and I haven't done in months
Somewhat related to this, in my early twenties I had to teach myself how to feel dissatisfied, as it was pretty clear that if I continued on the path I was at, I'd end up homeless somewhere under a bridge enjoying life
One thing rather curious to me is that this topic causes a near-instant disgust reaction, and in general the entire concept of hedonism is intuitively horrifying to me. Meanwhile, I arguably already have a mild form of what is proposed here compared to most people - I feel emotions and sensations, but I seem to be able to simply ignore them much more easily than most. This includes pain.
As such, this is imo similar to poverty/wealth: Getting people out of [negative thing] is quite valuable, but once you're out, you hit diminishing returns quite quickly.
(If any hedonist is curious about my moral stance, I find life and flourishing intuitively valuable. Good or bad feelings are mostly an orthogonal issue - if they help with flourishing, I'm in favor, if not, I'm against. So I'll probably always be in favor of some level of negative emotions, including pain.)
Edit: I'll also note here that Scott's summary of Jo Cameron seems unusually uncritical. As others write, she does seem to have quite a few scars due to accidents, calling the scar-less healing into question, and there's a good chance that she was plain lucky not to be substantially hurt by them. At least, "most people with pain resistance mutations die or get substantially disabled from them, but some are lucky to have enough mild accidents to learn from them and/or live relatively risk-free lives that they get through, in a way that is not generalisable to the entire population" is much more plausible to me than "there happens to be a mutation that allows you to feel almost no pain, but without the usual drawbacks of feeling no pain". Doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate it, but most reporting around this just smells fishy to me, overly exited and not nearly critical enough.
> Our physical differences are easy to notice. Everyone knows that some people are black, some white, some Asian or Hispanic.
I suppose this is my hobby horse now. Being Hispanic isn't a physical difference; it's purely cultural. Hispanics can be white, black, red, yellow, brown, mestizo, zambo, mulatto or whatever.
One problem with abolishing suffering is that it would eliminate all the art, music and other great creative works that can only come from the minds of tormented people. I once asked David Pierce about this (he's pretty accessible) and he didn't have a good response. He just said ending suffering was more important.
Also, if technology lets us achieve medical immortality and our lifetimes become infinite, then a period of suffering in your life becomes vanishingly small in importance over time. Let's say you have a ten-year period when you're in a bad marriage and have a bully boss. For a normal person, that's 1/8 of their life, but for someone who lives 300 years before finally dying in a freak accident, it's 1/30.
You might derive important life lessons from the bad 10 year period and also produce good artwork or stories as a result of it, and in the long term, time would heal your wounds from it.
First, many apologies for not offering an adequate reply.
Allow me to cut-and-paste a paragraph I wrote elsewhere.
"The fate of the arts?
Glorious beyond human imagination. Perhaps compare personalised medicine. Artificial intelligence will soon outperform hard-won human expertise in all medical specialities. Likewise, artificial intelligence promises original, inspiring, soul-stirring personalised music, literature or visual art tailored specifically to your individual psychology: artistic genius that surpasses any human creator. And artistic creation is only half the story. Our neurological capacity for artistic appreciation will be revolutionised too. Compare how neuroscience is poised to decipher the molecular signature of pure bliss; the brain’s ultimate “hedonic hotspot” has been narrowed (in rats) to a cubic millimetre. Neuroscience will also decipher the molecular signature(s) of pure beauty. Armed with such aesthetic knowledge, biohackers may launch the most profound artistic revolution of all time. The neural substrates of beauty-perception can be enriched, purified and amplified at will. If given a glimpse of superhuman beauty, not even the basest philistine would wish to preserve the visual squalor and cultural wasteland of Darwinian life. Everyday post-Darwinian life will be more sublime, and subjectively more meaningful, than anything physiologically feasible today."
Hi David (see I told you all he was pretty accessible),
Seems like you're claiming AI will be able to make art better than humans, including works of art that only tormented humans are capable of making. That means nothing will be lost if suffering is abolished among humans because AI will be able to generate world-class dark and depressing artwork if anyone cares to see it.
However, what about the ethics of forcing AIs to make that artwork? Wouldn't it require us to simulate an environment full of suffering for those AIs so they can get the right inspiration for making the artwork?
Apologies for the lazy cute-and-paste. People don't believe me when I say I type only with one finger until they see it; but it's true. Imagine if I could type with 10!)
If AI were a subject of experience, then yes, compelling AI to simulate suffering-inspired art would have troubling ethical implications. However, for technical reasons I think AIs with existing computer architectures are just zombies, incapable of solving the phenomenal binding problem and maturing into full-spectrum superintelligences:
AIs with existing architectures are only capable of generating output contained within the multidimensional space defined by their training set. Without a significant breakthrough in our understanding, the moment we hand over creation of new things to these is the moment we lose the possibility of ever experiencing anything outside this space.
I absolutely expect some form of breakthrough will come, but it is unclear whether the reasoning about AIs being zombies will apply to whatever systems we end up with once this problem is fixed.
But we have a superpower that classical digital computers lack - phenomenal binding. Binding is the bedrock of mind, sentience and the entire empirical ("relating to experience") realm. The ignorance of digital zombies can't be overcome: it's architecturally hardwired. As far as I can tell, the future belongs to super-sentient, genetically rewritten, AI -enhanced full-spectrum superintelligences - our biological descendants.
Compared to mature full-spectrum superintelligences, classical digital zombies are just toys.
The problem is that (e.g.) mass market food hyperoptimised to trigger our reward and pleasure receptors to the greatest possible extent isn't haute cuisine; it's a McDonalds happy meal or a KFC bargain bucket.
In our glorious new utopia, all human experience will be the equivalent of free KFC bargain buckets, forever, and we will be perfectly content with that, because even those still aware there might be other possibilities in life will not be capable of feeling their lack.
Health considerations aside, if everyone in the future eats KFC and McDonalds, that's absolutely not a problem. I appreciate fine cuisine and avant-garde cinema but I would never be such a pretentious snob as to assume my highbrow druthers "matter" in a cosmic sense. My appreciation for art films over Marvel is a simple matter of taste. I also don't care for the taste of papaya but it matters not a whit.
Take the blue pill and you end up living in a full immersion virtual reality Matrix that is run by AGIs who tailor every moment to your particular needs. It's a world of your choosing (medieval, space exploration, WWII, etc.) where you do whatever you want and are always encountering challenges and intelligent NPCs that are exactly what you need at the moment.
Take the red pill and you get computers implanted in your brain that deliver electric stimulation and dump synthetic hormones and neurotransmitters in such a way that you are in a semiconscious altered state of mind, buffeted by one wave of indescribable pleasure after another. The technology also has ways of preventing your brain from habituating to its effects.
Which pill do you take, and why?
Depending on which pill all of humanity decided to take, would there be any difference to the Earth or whoever stays awake running the technology?
The equivalent of the McDonald's Happy Meal and KFC bargain bucket is the red pill. If you're in a state of constant, ineffable rapture, then not only are you incapable of exploring other activities and interests, but you're not even able to engage in higher thinking.
I think my Red Pill scenario is actually a variation of the Repugnant Conclusion. If you accept the premise that we should optimize human pleasure, the endpoint is trillions of human brains floating in vats of liquid with wires stimulating their pleasure regions forever with no letup.
What if I told you that long-term machine-brain interfaces fail due to the body's immune system, and even the best chemistry of materials science won't be able to get around this basic issue because it's not a problem that can be solved by chemistry?
What if I told you that the multisystem integration and sequencing of embryological development preclude most of the extreme promises made by biohacking enthusiasts? — and that even if they could solve implant problem of DBS electrodes, messing with the body's immune systems that identify foreign materials would probably lead to catastrophic health failures?
What if I told you that, despite the glib claims of some neuroscientists, we don't have a good model of how consciousness works, so even if we get past the first two issues we won't be able to map our the sum of our consciousness plus our memories into a software platform? And of course, we don't even have a software platform that can maintain conscious state.
What if I told you've that Moore's Law expired over a decade ago, and we'll probably reach the limits of the number of circuits we can etch on a chip (at great cost) within the next decade? And quantum computing as it's understood now will be unsuitable for generative AI (which would be required for these sorts of advanced simulations).
What if I told you that even if we could map consciousness into software, the data centers to support this sort of AI will consume too much energy to be economically feasible? In fact, unless we finally are able to make fusion energy work as a power source, we won't have enough energy to support today's massive cloud data centers (and humanity will be living at the economic level of East Germany in the 1970s — if we're lucky).
What if I told you that Scientism is the irrational belief that Science can go on making new breakthrough discoveries forever, despite every indication that Science as an enterprise hasn't made any great advances in the past 50 years?
I feel like I did when I told my stepson there wasn't any Santa Claus.
I'd tell you you're naive to assume those trends will constrain technology at the far future era when we will actually have the ability to implement David Pierce's ideas. That's the problem with you people. You can't think but five minutes in front of your face.
Fair enough. But substitute "Jesus" for "Science" and this sounds to me like my Fundamentalist neighbor who's sure he and his family are going to be lifted into the Rapture any day now.
"we'll probably reach the limits of the number of circuits we can etch on a chip (at great cost) within the next decade"
We can start stacking thinner and thinner wafers on top of each other like some kind of silicon layer cake. We've barely started to explore that design space.
We can also compute with things other than electrons; e.g., photons. We've barely started to explore that design space.
The real, pressing, immediate limit is how much waste heat we can remove from a given volume of space; because computation takes energy, which then has to go somewhere, and we are already firmly in the territory of "this thing goes through more energy than my space heater" at the high end. The laws of physics are breathing down our neck on that one.
|We've barely started the to explore the design space
But we come up against physical limits in whichever direction we push. With miniaturization, resistance goes up while capacitance goes down, so it becomes more difficult to perform correct computations. And ultimately, computation is limited by the speed of an electron moving through transistors. Of course, at the chip level or multi-chip wafer level that can sorta kinda be solved by parallelling computations, but then there's an upper limit when it comes to moving data in and off a chip. Currently, the max we can transmit over an optical or copper link (with PAM4 signal modulation) is 112 Gbps/channel. Infiniband and Ethernet can stripe data across 8 channels to reach 800Gbps tput. But that requires FEC to correct for the high error rate. FEC requires computing power and it generates heat. Last I heard (before I was involuntarily retired from the networking side of the industry), we're not going to reach 224Gbps/channel without QAM, and probably a new more-CPU intensive FEC. Queue longer development times plus significantly more heat dissipation issues.
Although the cost per circuit is still dropping, the cost of development, the cost of manufacturing, and the cost of running the computations are increasing (estimated in a to be a second order curve — the curve of Moore's Law in reverse). Spintronics? Optical Computing? They're at least a decade out if at all. Quantum computing? Possibly. But that's only suitable for certain types of algorithms. Excuse me if I'm not an optimist.
> Artificial intelligence will soon outperform hard-won human expertise in all medical specialities
They need to stop hallucinating, or we will still need the humans.
Edit. That response was a bit pithy. So to elaborate I’m working in a company where we try to use AI to test students on parts of their course - a lecture, part of a book, whatever.
We can right now only use this as a game, with a disclaimer that the results are not to be taken seriously.
Yes. Even the intuitively wildest aspects of the abolitionist project have ancient roots. Consider the herbivorization of predators - prophesied (without any technical details) in "peaceable kingdom" of the Biblical Book of Isaiah:
I'm not especially devout but I consider myself a Christian and I also find this interesting and amusing. I see rationalists tie themselves in knots trying to intellectually justify their visceral aversion to wireheading and it just can't be done very easily. So much more efficient to say "it's against God's will" and spend the rest of your day more productively.
Frankly, most long term plans fail. Yes, many of our technologies advance - but a good chunk of that is unpredictable roadblocks or successes. I'm leery of treating anything as serious (e.g. some of the genome modification proposals in this post's comments) till there is a prototype working in a lab. And, even then, most lab prototypes don't make it to general use.
Why do you think there’s a category of “great works can only come from tormented people”? Not-suffering clearly doesn’t result in an inability to perceive or evaluate or empathize with bad things.
Even if there were a particular genre that somehow requires alchemizing intense psychological suffering to produce, are you really arguing that its “natural” existence (as opposed to simulation) is worth…well, *literally all of humanity’s suffering*? You say “ending suffering is more important” isn’t a good response, yet your comment only says “this vague subcategory of potential art is more important”.
That also implies it would be a good thing to torture people if that produces “great art”. An Art School of Omelas!
Also, “short periods of suffering are inconsequential if you live long enough” is absurd because the significance of experiences is not simply divided by percent of lifespan, and time does not, in fact, heal all wounds (see: Trauma). It also implies torture and abuse is fine as long as the victim survives long enough relative to its duration, or you just sincerely believe they have an immortal soul.
"Why do you think there’s a category of “great works can only come from tormented people”?"
One glance at the artwork of H.R. Giger or Zdzislaw Beksinki, and I can tell neither came from the minds of non-tormented people.
"are you really arguing that its “natural” existence (as opposed to simulation) is worth…well, *literally all of humanity’s suffering*? You say “ending suffering is more important” isn’t a good response, yet your comment only says “this vague subcategory of potential art is more important”."
No, I'm not arguing that and never did. I think there's a case to be made that some fraction of the human race should not have its suffering abolished. The pain and misfortunes they endure could produce things of value to themselves and everyone else.
"Also, “short periods of suffering are inconsequential if you live long enough” is absurd because the significance of experiences is not simply divided by percent of lifespan, and time does not, in fact, heal all wounds (see: Trauma). It also implies torture and abuse is fine as long as the victim survives long enough relative to its duration, or you just sincerely believe they have an immortal soul."
But if the thought experiment is taking place within the future scenario that David Pierce envisions, then the technological means to cure that trauma must also exist. You could experience some awful thing, improve your character and learn valuable life lessons to pass on, perhaps be inspired to make a creative product that derives from your bad experience, and then swallow the pill to get rid of your PTSD and transform your memory of the past event into something emotionally neutral.
> One problem with abolishing suffering is that it would eliminate all the art, music and other great creative works that can only come from the minds of tormented people.
One problem with abolishing slavery is that it would eliminate all Art, Music, Diaries, and other great creative works that can only come from the minds of enslaved people. And one problem with abolishing war is that it would eliminate all Art, Music, and other great creative works that can only come from the minds of fighting people.
Pete Seeger observed that there are so many songs about unrequited love because if the love is requited, then the song writer has better things to do than write songs. Those missing never written songs may be a great loss, but the song writer will gladly accept the tradeoff.
> Everyone knows that some babies are born with one arm, or three eyes, or webbed fingers.
I didn't know that. Where does the third eye appear?
There's a lot of awareness of third nipples, but I think people tend to assume that they appear on the line between your normal nipples, a la Blade Runner. In reality, they appear just where you'd expect if you were familiar with nonhuman mammalian anatomy, on the lines between your nipples (at one end) and your groin (at the other). And, also as you'd expect by comparison to other mammals, you can have more than three, but there's no awareness of that either.
Wikipedia suggests that there are animals which develop an eye from their pineal gland (a "parietal eye"), but that no mammals can do so. I can't find anything suggesting that humans can have a third eye.
Given that the human pineal gland is well inside the head, even if some people were born with eyes there, no one would have noticed.
It's not obvious to me why pictures created by here would look any different, to me, than pictures created by anyone else. If she paints in strange colors as a result of differences in her vision, that tends to suggest that I can see colors she can't, not that she can see colors I can't.
I struggle with the sanctimonious correction at the bottom of the piece:
>> The original story stated that all men have one X and one Y chromosome and that all women have two X chromosomes. This statement neglected to include those with Klinefelter Syndrome and transgender individuals. We regret the error.
The original statement was fine. But if you're going to correct it, at least be correct when you do. Why spit in the faces of the Turner's Syndrome people? Where's the sympathy for XYY men? CAIS? Out of all groups mentioned so far, CAIS patients seem the most likely to be offended/hurt by the original statement.
Imagine a world where, due to *magic*, there was 0 chance of any physical injury? In this world, would it matter if you were psychologically incapable of suffering pain or not? I don't think it matters much. If anything I would prefer not to tamper with my psychology, maybe?
So, the question is, how much do we want to take pain as a bad thing in itself, and how much is it an indication of a bad thing happening?
Have caught up on the discussions and collective sentiments, and I must say it's been a ride.
Folks have caught sight of a utopian vision and rush headlong towards it, barring only a few doomers with uninformed implausible scenarios that have been considered and roundly rejected. Everything has been taken into account except the tiny possibility of being wrong. Modify all the kids! Happiness, free, for all, and may none leave unsatisfied!
...David, please. I know you're reading this. For the love of all that is good. Put an off switch in. A simple, reliable off-switch that the population who get this spliced into their genome can toggle at will in the comfort of their own home, without needing a specialist's cooperation and/or large sums of money. Not a would-be-nice-if premium extra that the organisation can throw under the bus when the money runs low or the research hits a dead end or Moloch looks an investor in the eye while whispering elevator pitches of a more efficient Disneyland; but a core founding principle: no human will get given one of these adjustments without a way to turn it on and off.
Yes, it'll take more research and more money. But we're meant to be the responsible people here, the humble people who take into account even X-risks we ourselves find unintuitive.
Lead the initiative with that; top, front and center: we are building a utopia and /people can choose to enter or leave as they please/.
There was a saying in the Soviet Union. It doesn't translate well - the original is snappy and has a nice cadence to it - but it goes: "We tried to make things better, but it all turned out like it always does."
The road to hell is paved with broken utopias, cemented together by unforeseen consequences. Just this one time. Just in case it turns out, after the fact, that it wasn't such a great idea to turn the dream into reality after all, and we start to wish it was a dream again. Do the right thing. Humor the risk-averse naysayers and turn them into loyal customers.
A pill/injection would likely work pretty well for that. There may still be permanent consequences, but that's a lot easier to undo than invitro gene splicing or whatever.
Strong agree on being aware of *unintended* consequences. We call them unintended for a reason, because we didn't think they would happen, but they did.
But its mass adoption is scarcely imminent - I gloss over the technical challenges. That said, it's worth recalling that all children born today are unique, untested generic experiments - and the upshot of such reckless genetic experimentation is often tragic.
Sure, and we're skeptical of all the doom / x-risk scenarios as well. I hear you.
Let's just make certain, though. Y'know, because we're all fallible humans who might not have thought of /every/ contingency. Right now, commitment, front and center: you won't be forced to stay in my utopia if you decide it's not for you after all.
Yes, it's a long way off. But if we can write thousands of words about transhumanism and genome editing the kids, we can spare a couple for this, so it's definitely in place from the start, as a core aim that informs every aspect of the movement, and not an optional afterthought that people might maybe start taking seriously once it's too late.
Because eastern europeans at least all know how things go when you have to put a giant fence around your utopia to stop people leaving.
oh, I hear you. It's easy to slide from being an advocate into a propagandist. Whole treatises could be written on the ways things could go wrong with genome reform. But suppose we _don't_ upgrade our reward circuitry. Suppose the age-old genetic crapshoot continues indefinitely. If so, then the cruel biology of mental and physical pain will proliferate indefinitely.
You hear the concerns and the requests for a commitment, and claim to understand and even share some of the concerns, but you seem strangely reluctant to say the words, even here buried in the comments section of a relatively niche forum, never mind anywhere that might be even a little binding like on your actual website or in a far out initiative communication.
The provided Wikipedia link indicates that increased pain sensitivity after a platypus scratch lasts days to months, not years: "Information obtained from case studies shows that the pain develops into a long-lasting hyperalgesia that can persist for months but usually lasts from a few days to a few weeks."
The "woman who can see 100x more colors than normal" actually just sees more dimensions and nuances of color on objects than normal. The actual colors themselves are the same, as described in the article.
These inaccuracies aren't important to the main point of the post, but I expect ACX to have higher standards of not presenting misleading facts to make things sound more impressive than they really are.
From the link in Scott's article: "This Woman Sees 100 Times More Colors Than The Average Person"...
> One percent of the world’s population is thought to be tetrachromatic, but it’s not easy to demonstrate empirically.
I guess I must be a person who has 100x more questions than the average person. Or maybe I'm 100x more disbelieving — but this article raises all sorts of questions for me. The author's breathless sense of wonder made me initially suspicious of the claims. After all, if it's not easy to demonstrate empirically, how *do* they demonstrate it?
I checked out Google Scholar, and the most recent pro-tetrachromacy papers seem to come out of KA Jameson's lab at UC Irvine. In one paper (linked below), she has n=4 subjects — one subject who seems to display hypersensitivity to colors (presumably due to tetrachromacy), and three controls who are the presumed trichromatics. Of course no one has done a microscopic dissection of the subjects' retinas, so we don't really know whether the experimental subject actually had four color cones. Excuse me if I'm unconvinced — intrigued but unconvinced.
And here's a response to the tetrachromacy arguments for enhanced color sensitivity. These researchers claim enhanced color sensitivity can be explained by higher levels of melanopsin in retinal ganglion cells.
Another question I had was whether people could be trained to distinguish a wider variety of hues? Way back in the early 90s, while working at the Getty, I remember being told by the color reproduction team that the human eye can distinguish 23 million distinct hues (that's much more than the 1 million in the article that Scott referenced). I don't know if this was one of those unattributed factoids that get passed around like urban myths, but the Getty team felt that 8-bit-per-pixel computer monitors, that could only display 16 million hues, were inadequate for their work.
It's clearly a marketing shtick for this woman to say she can see more colors. What the researchers believe is that she has a fourth cone between the normal human ones for red and green. So maybe she can see more variation in orange-yellow hues than a normal person? But she perceives light in the exact same visible spectrum as everyone else.
> Of course no one has done a microscopic dissection of the subjects' retinas
There was a molecular genetic analysis, so her genes do in fact encode an extra cone in the retina. That's not quite the same as showing the cones are actually there. Personally I think an eyepatch would fit her quirky artist persona well.
It's not clear that someone could see extra colors even if they had say, a cone in the UV spectrum. There needs to be properly developed structures in the brain. It might be enough for the existence of the mutant cone to train the proper neural pathways, which maybe happened in some animal studies. But the literature is very conflicted and unsure about this.
If someone had a cone in the UV spectrum, presumably that cone is going to be sending its signals somewhere, so you would expect that person to be able to perceive colors in the UV spectrum. Is there any reason to believe in a genetic basis for neural architecture encoding color processing in a 3-dimensional LMS color space, as opposed to this being something that emerges from having 3-dimensional input into some sort of general capacity for processing color?
nit: While I've heard of tetrachromism, and _haven't_ heard of a cone that peaks in the UV in humans, people who have had cataract surgery and where the replacement lens is UV transparent _can_ see UV light, albeit as stimuli to the normal 3 cones. https://www.2020mag.com/article/uv-vision-seeing-invisible-ultraviolet
Many Thanks! Yes, I think Rothwed was writing of a hypothetical of a cone with sensitivity that _peaked_ in the UV. And that, AFAIK, indeed doesn't exist for humans (finches, on the other hand, have a 370 nm peak cone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy ). But our existing cone cells seem to be (unselectively!) sensitive to near-UV. From the wiki page:
>The photoreceptor cells of the retina are sensitive to near ultraviolet light, and people lacking a lens (a condition known as aphakia) see near ultraviolet light (down to 300 nm) as whitish blue, or for some wavelengths, whitish violet, probably because all three types of cones are roughly equally sensitive to ultraviolet light (with blue cone cells slightly more sensitive).[17]
>With primate neuroscientist Jerry Jacobs, Nathans genetically engineered mice so that instead of seeing only two-color receptors as mice normally do, they were able to see three color receptors as primates do. This project strongly suggested that the primate brain is not unique in its ability to analyze color at trichromatic level, but that each mammalian brain has an inherent plasticity that will allow it to process an additional complexity of color signals.
Yeah, that's an intriguing experiment. It leaves open the question of how far that sort of plasticity might extend. (Is it easier to go from 2D color spaces to 3D than from 3D to 4D? And wtf is going on in the brain of a mantis shrimp?)
Yes, that is a fascinating experiment. But the mantis shrimp 12-color theory may have been debunked. Did you know that you could train shrimp to respond to specific colors? I didn't know that. Or maybe that's also dodgy science. I'm getting very cynical about scientific claims in my old age.
>That's not quite the same as showing the cones are actually there.
Dim memory from very long ago:
THere are some techniques in nonlinear optics (4 wave mixing?) that let you produce a _very_ sharp focus even through pretty cruddy optics - basically you construct a wavefront that compensates for the distortions. One thing that was done with it was to stimulate _individual_ cones. So you could get a situation where e.g. light that normally is around the peak of someone's "red" cones could stimulate just one green cone, and they saw a green point. Something like that would allow a nondestructive functional equivalent of microscopic dissection of the retina.
>Even when corrected with the best spectacles or contact lenses, normal human eyes still suffer from monochromatic aberrations that blur vision when the pupil is large. We have successfully corrected these aberrations using adaptive optics, providing normal eyes with supernormal optical quality. Contrast sensitivity to fine spatial patterns was increased when observers viewed stimuli through adaptive optics. The eye's aberrations also limit the resolution of images of the retina, a limit that has existed since the invention of the ophthalmoscope. We have constructed a fundus camera equipped with adaptive optics that provides unprecedented resolution, allowing the imaging of microscopic structures _the size of single cells in the living human retina_.
But do those genes actually produce an extra cone? No one seems to have confirmed this. According to Wikipedia tetrachromacy may be linked to two cone cell pigment genes present on the X chromosome. And it says that these genes in XX situation *could* produce the extra cone cells. It all sounds like unconfirmed speculation — but people are credulous, so it gets a lot of traction. However, that would suggest that color hypersensitivity is limited to females and people with Klinefelter's syndrome. Have any males with tetrachromacy been identified?
> "In humans, two cone cell pigment genes are present on the X chromosome: the classical type 2 opsin gene OPN1MW and OPN1MW2. People with two X chromosomes could possess multiple cone cell pigments, perhaps born as full tetrachromats who have four simultaneously-functioning kinds of cone cell, each type with a specific pattern of responsiveness to different wavelengths of light in the range of the visible spectrum.[9]
> I can’t find anyone claiming to know exactly what went wrong with BIA 10-2474 (see here for what we do know). But the FDA released a statement a few months later saying they were confident that it was a particular feature of BIA 10-2474 and not a problem with FAAH inhibition in general.
This seems right, both Perplexity and FutureSearch conclude that off-target, neurotoxic effects were almost certainly responsible. (Also the dose in that trial was 10x what was necessary for FAAH inhibition.)
So this is not really evidence that drugs that target FAAH are dangerous.
I'm curious how you asked FutureSearch. I tried to ask it some questions about the past to see what would happen and I got errors. Is it better at that now?
I guess in a pain free future, only a subset of pleasures will be available. I wonder how restricted the set of pleasures will have to be for a stable equilibrium to be possible. Schadenfreude is pretty awesome, I'm not sure if I can do without.
I suppose we can still crush our enemies, drive them before us, and hear the lamentation of their women. It would be a sort of mild, intellectual sort of lamentation, but that's OK with me, I'm more about the crushing and driving.
Tertullian believed one of pleasures of Heaven was taking delight in the torments of the damned. In reality, any form of Schadenfreude just expresses our epistemological limitations. The craniopagus Hogan sisters, who can partially share each other's thoughts and feelings, are in one sense the most cognitive advanced beings on Earth. The rest of us are trapped in solipsistic island-universes of ignorance.
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
Consider why mirror-touch synesthetes can't experience Schadenfreude. Or the Hogan sisters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1Mac4FeKXg) whom I alluded to above. How might our conception of knowledge and understanding change in a future world where reversible thalamic bridges allow "mind-melding"? In a Darwinian world, egocentric virtual worlds are fitness-enhancing. But perhaps our successors will find such virtual worlds - and the possibility of callousness and even Schadenfreude they allow - as a form of adaptive psychosis.
I broadly agree, I tend to phrase this in the pseudo-Computer-Science terms with the saying of "All humans are a single program, run multiple times". If we imagine that DNA is the "Source Code" of humanity, then every human is just a single "execution path" through that code, a different arrangement of activations and deactivations.
I would object to taking this to absurd lengths, though. I don't feel kinship with war lords or child rapists. They *might* have been relatable or recognizable in an earlier part of their career, but some crimes are too horrific for me to even imagine a sequence of events that would persuade me to commit. So there has to be reasonable limits for "We're all a single program run multiple times".
In practice, me neither. But perhaps this just reflects our mentalizing deficits. For example, if Hitler were just a brain-in-a-vat, we might feel compassion for this poor psychotic creature tormented by alien demons conspiring against the noble Aryan race to which it belonged.
> Yet why "lock in" mediocrity if intelligent life can lock in sublimity instead?
So on a personal level locking in just mediocrity would have an appeal because altering into an entity that experiences sublimity just isn't actively appealing to me and I'd prefer not to have permanent mental changes which i don't actively want. (though not locking in either and just leaving whether to switch to sublimity to my future selves and sticking with mediocrity for the short term would be more appealing still)
Additionally when I imagine scenarios in which ending aging and/or uploading have been solved, but not the inevitable heat death of the universe, it'd seem likely to me that there would, in the very long term be a tradeoff between how super super super etc sublime an entity's experiences can be and how long those experiences can last for (holding the amount of negentropy they have access to constant) and I'd rather not jump straight into reducing my longterm lifespan by even just 0.1% for something I don't even actively want.
Agreed. As a NU, I've given much less systematic thought to the kind of practical, technical, ethical and political challenges of moving from a civilisation with a hedonic range of, say, +20 to +30 to a civilization with a hedonic range of, say +40 to +50, let alone the highest theoretically feasible reaches of the hedonic scale.
I get annoyed when people use acronyms that I have no idea of what they mean. It conveys an attitude of "I'm an insider, and if you're an outsider who doesn't know it then I don't care whether you understand what I'm trying to communicate". A quick internet search yields 43 possible meanings for NU, none of which make sense in this context.
If you read the rest of the comments here, you'll figure out that it means "negative utilitarian." (Not that I'm blaming you for not wanting to read through the entire comments section — heck, even Substack apparently doesn't want you to do that, judging by how long they take to load...)
And my point is that I should not have to figure out that it means "negative utilitarian". That's not one of the 43 possibilities I found searching on-line, so according to "the internet" it must be something confined to a small niche.
Dino, you are absolutely right. Apologies. As Quiop kindly points out above, "NU" = negative utilitarianism, the view that our overriding moral obligation is to minimise and prevent suffering. Contrast classical utilitarianism (https://www.utilitarianism.com), which gives equal weight to maximizing happiness. Classical utilitarianism is sometimes misnamed positive utilitarianism.
Somewhat related, I'm concerned about the "reading level" of your writings. I haven't read the other web sites involved, so maybe it's not an issue there, but here your "reading level" is "graduate school". This commentariat knows that when you say "valence" you aren't talking about electrons and orbitals, but in the outside world the reaction would more likely be "whatchu talkin about?" Your cause is controversial, so you need to be persuasive, and you can't persuade someone who doesn't understand what you're saying. For the general public, I suggest a "reading level" of "high school", and try to write like Scott here.
Considering that JZP150, a FAAH-OUT inhibitor, recently failed in a trial, it makes me skeptical that FAAH is the underlying cause of Jo's perpetual good mood. I think the initiative really needs to address this point.
Is there any reason to believe that a CRISPR intervention will work despite drugs that don't?
It will be great to get Jo's full genome in the public domain - and likewise the genome of her later father, who shared similar traits. The role of the FAAH gene and its variant alleles in mood, anxiety and pain-tolerance has been known for some time, both from "animal models" and human studies
Jo's "case" is unusual because of the rare dual FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutation, but it will be interesting to see if her genome has any other anomalous features.
There are downstream changes to the expression of genes, plausibly caused by her 8kb FAAH-OUT micro-deletion, that directly and substantially impact systems we know regulate pain intensity and mood. The endocannabinoid system plays an important role, but downstream changes in gene expression caused by her mutation likely contribute more to her unique phenomenology than FAAH/FAAH-OUT.
If they don't, we will just target the genes of interest directly. This will likely have to be the strategy for species with less similar variants of FAAH/FAAH-OUT.
The point BNW is making is that you can't have a healthy or good society merely by simulating positive mental and emotional states. Actually having a meaningful, loving relationship in your life is different than if some opiate makes you feel like and meaning while under its effects.
You're right about BNW. But we're all dependent on endogenous opioids to function. Some people in one's life are more effective at triggering their release than others. And one advantage of hedonic recalibration is how healthy relationships can be enriched and sustained with better default mood. By contrast, depression can have a disastrous effect on personal relationships, both intimate and casual.
Yeah, I'm not against antidepressant or therapy or etc. It makes sense to get yourself to a healthier place mentally where you can sustain meaningful relationships more easily, but it's key that the relationships are what's important, not arbitrary mental states unlinked from external relations.
Indeed. Hence the critical distinction between being blissful and "blissed out". Hedonic recalibration allows information-sensitivity to "good" and "bad" stimuli to be retained while hugely enriching default quality of life. Despite (or because of?) being chronically mildly high, Jo Cameron's personal relationships are at least as rich those of as neurotypical folk.
> And most of us realize that very poor people struggling to put food in their mouths can’t fully enjoy love, family, beauty, etc.
Don't people in poorer cultures generally report being happier? I feel like a combination of atomization, areligiosity, life being easier and more boring, etc., make people in Western cultures more resentful about minor hindrances.
("The researchers found that national wealth indicators such as per capita GDP negatively correlated with average mental wellbeing scores.")
Some studies adjust for "objective" measures of (un)happiness rather than relying entirely on self-reports.
In making the case for genome reform and a biohappiness revolution, it's important not to underplay in any way the roll of environmental stressors. But only biological-genetic interventions offer a long-term solution to the problem of suffering.
I emphatically agree with you about not romanticizing life in poorer countries. Indeed, the biggest risk of citing studies like the ones above is of reducing concerns about social justice and the urgency of promoting economic development. Despite these worries, we need to take on board what such studies - and modern neuroscience - tell us about hedonic adaptation and need globally to raise hedonic set-points via genome reform. If instead we opt to conserve the genetic status quo, then horrific levels of suffering will persist indefinitely.
For sure, there's a reason everyone wants to move to wealthy countries. But if we're looking at mental wellbeing or happiness then it's worth looking into the relative differences and why they might exist (tighter social circles, clearer purpose, whatever they may be).
I am lucky in having a favorable hedonic set-point, and my positive experience living with it (e.g. saved me during the pandemic) leads me to think that improving the hedonic set-point of people in general would be a good thing. So I hope this project succeeds, and when the magical substance that causes this effect appears I will gladly try it. Reading the comments here, I note that some people disagree with me. I respect that disagreement, and think those people should be free to choose to continue as they are, even if that means suffering needlessly.
The disagreement puzzles me. No one is proposing coercive bliss. Rather, the idea is to phase out the biology of coercive misery. And when the technology of hedonic uplift becomes widely accessible, I wonder how many people will actively say "no" to a higher hedonic set-point?
Agree no one is proposing coercive bliss, but I get a vibe from some comments here expressing fear of something similar. Trying to steelman it - maybe a fear of "everyone else is doing it" peer pressure? Or just "all the cool kids are doing it". And I get the impression there are some folks posting here that would actively say "no".
indeed. Over the years I've found a surprising number of people entertain the dark suspicion that someone, somewhere, is plotting to force them to be happy. Our Darwinian biology of coercive misery and malaise is surely the real problem. But yes, to spike guns, it's worth stressing time and again that we are talking about phasing out _involuntary_ suffering. As it happens, I also tentatively predict that (eventually) all experience below hedonic zero will be relegated to the dustbin of history; but this prediction is a distinct issue.
I lead the team and was a first author on the first analysis (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf7497) of BIA 10-2474 in grad school (my PI discovered FAAH). The tl;dr is that it was a fairly promiscuous serine hydrolase inhibitor (the general class of enzymes that FAAH belongs to). It should never have gone into humans without chemo-proteomic analysis that we did to show this. It's hard to prove exactly but it is very likely the BIA 10-2474 tox was off-target not on-target.
(This is all slightly complicated by the fact that the Bial team did do an extensive set of pre-clinical tox studies in mice, rats, dogs, and monkeys at doses ~100x those which caused the cerebral hemorrhaging/death in humans and didn't see much negative signal.)
Luckily many other FAAH inhibitors have gone into humans and none showed anywhere near the level of AEs as the Bial drug. Unfortunately though none have shown any super promising efficacy either. The general consensus in the field is that (for pain at least) FAAH inhibition just doesn't have as much oomph in humans as it does in other species. There is another endocannabinoid degrading enzyme known as MAGL which degrades 2-AG (related to anandamide and at least 10x more abundant) for which inhibitors are being explored in humans, and it will be interesting to see how those, or partial/dual FAAH/MAGL inhibitors work.
MAGL and 2-AG are on our radar. We find the pro-motivational effects seen in MAGL KO mice very interesting given our goal of maximally adaptive (in the context of a modern technological society rapidly entering the 4th industrial revolution) suffering abolition. FAAH inhibition alone contributes what appears to be low-moderate anti-anxiety and anti-nociceptive benefits, but it appears that genes downstream of FAAH/FAAH-OUT - known to alleviate anxiety and diminish physical pain - are likely the more central factors creating Jo's phenomenology than FAAH/FAAH-OUT itself. There's more to say here, but, alas, strategic constraints are a factor.
There is no possible way you could eliminate one of the most widely felt experiences in all of humanity and not expect some second order effects. Maybe it's good changes or maybe it's bad but it would be massive and for that reason alone, people are right to be skeptical.
People are right to be sceptical. But the biology of mental and physical pain is shortly going to become genetically optional. As a society, we need a debate on whether to conserve it - or switch to a more civilized signalling system.
This reasoning ignores an important factor: “The most interesting feature of Cameron’s condition is her total normality. One might worry that a person who couldn’t suffer would be cold and psychopathic, but in fact Cameron was a special education teacher known for her kindness…. One might worry that she would be unable to relate to regular humans, but she’s been married twice and has two children, who she’s on great terms with.”
The factor this reasoning ignores is that Cameron interacts only with people who can and do suffer, and who have been conditioned to interact under the assumption that all others can be hurt. If Cameron were to live in a society with many others like her, would she still be this kind? Maybe not. A lot might get unravelled in a society of non-sufferers. There’s a strand in evolutionary psychology literature that sees the capacity to suffer as essential to maintaining cooperation (see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46444721_Evolution_of_vulnerability_to_pain_in_interpersonal_relations_as_a_strategic_trait_aiding_cooperation )
It's possible. But consider the intensely pro-social effects of the empathetic euphoriant and "hug drug" MDMA (Ecstasy): https://www.mdma.net. People who take MDMA together get off on each other's shared joys. Sadly, today's empathogens like MDMA are short-acting and potentially hazardous. But hypersocial MDMA-like consciousness is one post-Darwinian option for future civilization.
Since the majority of comments here appear to be making the case that living things with the capacity to suffer are either better off because of it, or foolish to think it could be otherwise, I’d just like to come down squarely on the other side and commend David Pearce and the Far Out Initiative for imagining thoughtful alternatives to this position and hope they continue their well intentioned work. Thanks for listening carefully to people’s objections and thanks for trying to help.
Thank you. A lot of critics focus (rightly) on the important functional role that mental and physical pain typically plays in our lives. But this role is often conflated with a much stronger claim, namely that the experience of suffering is functionally indispensable - that our lives would be impossible without it. Yet just consider the unfolding AI revolution. We're seeing an ever-increasing separation of intelligent behaviour from mind and consciousness. Scott touches parenthetically on my fondness for AI art. It's striking how a few well-chosen prompts can now generate personalized art that stirs (in me at least) an aesthetic response stronger than to multimillion dollar artworks hung in Louvre - and without even a faint twinge of the soulful suffering allegedly needed for great art. This lesson can be generalized to life itself. I don't know what balance of smart neuroprostheses and information-signalling gradients of bliss will underpin future civilization. But I can't see any long-term role for experience below hedonic zero at all. It won't be missed.
I mean, Jo Cameron is normal in every way.. Makes sense. Suffering is prerequisite to exceptionalism - at least exceptionalism that is more a product of internal decisions than circumstance.
Artificial intelligence shows high intellectual performance is possible without any suffering at all. Yet what about humans? Chronic unipolar depressives rarely achieve much. Bipolarity involves great suffering too, but in the (hypo)manic phase, bipolar disorder is associated with unusually high achievement in the humanities but not the sciences. The person I know personally with maybe the highest hedonic set-point is transhumanist polymath Anders Sandberg; his intellectual output is enviable. That said, I don't want in any way to make light of the far-reaching intellectual implications of a civilizational shift away from suffering. But I've yet to see any evidence that the ghastly raw feels of mental distress are computationally indispensable.
AI (and likely zombie AGI) demonstrates high level logic is possible without any suffering (or joy, or emotion, or appetite), this logic function precludes these while enabling their mimicry (as a psychopath would mimic emotion). Thus, correct there is no evidence that mental distress is required for computation.
In defining high level function we need to decide if it requires a three part consciousness that is not alien/ramen per Orsen Scott Card, ie logos/spirit-emotion/appetite and thus human relatable, or not.
Was Anders not enabled in reaching this hedonic set point because of his awareness or experience of (potential) suffering?
I don't think so. Anders says he finds it hard to stay sad at funerals: death and misfortune diminish his well-being; but he has "a ridiculously high hedonic set-point". As members of the transhumanist community can attest, he's also extremely likeable and socially responsible. Unlike Jo Cameron, Anders reports having a normal pain-threshold, but I don't think it's ever been rigorously tested.
(btw, I discuss such "case studies" only with express prior permission. But I think they are important in preparation for when - I should probably say if - human society decides genetically to elevate hedonic set-points world-wide. Extreme hyperthymics are much less well-studied than depressives and bipolars)
I read over his old blog entries, and it's true anecdotally that he comes off as not having suffered, or not concerned with bringing this to attention. His exceptional /particular intelligence may lead him to not spending the time/focus on suffering - may allow him to essentially move on 'ridiculously' more rapidly than most toward 'the utilitarian good.' Without his ability to suffer and thus empathize (consciousness) at some de-facto low level I am not sure he would be driven toward this output for 'good' - would have the insight that it was 'good'. I do agree finding a way to raise the set point could be highly worthwhile and helpful for special cases; though perhaps this is more about degree/type of intelligence that avoiding pain , if goal is not to drive people toward 'normality' - fitting in and getting on with it as a path of least resistance. The incentive to create a false narrative (which I do not see you doing here/now, I see intellectual honesty) and potential risks of carelessness are a concern (:
Thanks. Agreed. I've read an advance copy of Anders' 1200-page magnum opus "Grand Futures". The abolitionist project occupies a modest unfinished section; Anders thinks it will happen: I don't know the details. But Anders' "master narrative" of life in the universe clearly differs from suffering-focused philosophers and researchers who find it self-evident that life on Earth is a story of suffering and its eventual conquest. My "master narrative" focuses on the pleasure-pain axis (and in future, the pleasure-superpleasure axis): all futurology has an element of disguised autobiography. Let's just say I hope the future belongs to folk like Anders and Jo Cameron and not to depressive negative utilitarians. I hope that one day NU will be literally unthinkable.
Article is reek with false information regarding Jo Cameron's condition. Almost making her condition very positive and having less cons. Nothing but a bias and propaganda article.
Could you possibly say more about what you have in mind? Although Jo has always thought of herself as "normal", her nociception is impaired. But have you other worries?
Bit late to the discussion here but I searched over the comments and didn't see the point below:
Given "concern about "a few other people in the UK Biobank with Cameron’s pattern of FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutations, none of whom had any unusual pain resistance.":
Has Jo Cameron's microbiome been sequenced/profiled?
Here's a paper on the interplay between gut microbiome and macroscopic human behavior and experience: The gut microbiota–brain axis in behaviour and brain disorders
I don't know feasibility or if they'd be interested, but it might be interesting to try a microbiome transplant with those other people sharing the knockout. I've never heard of it but potentially this could be tried with an animal study but I'm not aware of cross-species microbiome experiments (human -> animal).
Interesting speculation. One complication is Jo Cameron is vegan - a transition that will presumably have had a substantial effect on her gut microbiota.
I think I remember one of your articles where you said something like (very sorry if I misquote/don't represent your opinion, all mistakes mine) you have a bigger impact by preventing poor babies from eating lead than increasing education spending in places with lots of poor people.
I've been thinking a lot about meditation and jhanas recently, and if teaching everyone how to reach jhanas could solve a lot of problems like the opiod crisis, and this article seems to be the same idea, but at the biological level.
It gives me lots of hope for the future.
In case it can give you some extra hope, many Far Out team members are interested, or even directly involved in supporting research concerning the deep end of contemplative practices and psychedelic therapies. Insights from these studies have a direct relevance to the suffering abolitionist project, and pair well with the biotech-focused efforts.
Thanks, you're doing a wonderful job!
As someone who has used both (in a context of the multi agent theory of mind) to greatly reduce suffering, I'm both glad to hear it and skeptical that the benefits can be mainstreamed. But as you'll observe from my other comments I am skeptical in general (likely due to suffering as a child*).
*this is phrased as a joke
Are you aware of SEMA labs? They're onto something: https://cbs.arizona.edu/news/visit-sema-lab-shinzen-young
Have you spoken with the Jhanatech folks?
Interestingly, per a recent article in the NYT, making children do "mindfulness training" seems to be useless or even slightly worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/health/mental-health-schools.html
My immediate guess is that it being compelled rather than chosen would be a factor.
Oh yeah
What about the Dark Night? or in general negative side effects of mediation (eprc or Willoughby Britton are doing research there).
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How qualified are those teachers?
Do the students want to do this/what are they taught?
School is trash in basically every area, would we expect it to be good in this area where the qualifications of the teachers are probably even worse.
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If this would just work it would be awesome but I don't think it tells us much about higher level practices. Very cool though to know that this doesn't just work at least in this way.
Jhanas are very different from mindfulness!
Over the years, I've heard many wonderful reports about the benefits of jhanas and other meditational disciplines. Sadly, what one rarely hears are stories of anhedonic or melancholic depressives who try meditation and find their mood lifts. Indeed, meditation can make some forms of depression worse. In short, if it works, do it. But alas meditation alone isn't going to fix the problem of suffering.
Until zero-suffering long-termists start talking about population collapse and dysgenics, I'm not going to take them seriously.
I'm also pretty sure I've read about children born without pain receptors who wind up doing crazy things like shoving pencils through their kneecaps because there's no negative feedback. Pain actually does exist for a reason.
EDIT: For the sake of completeness, no, I didn't read the full article before commenting. I'm annoyed by this entire topic so it was something of a hot take. I still think that generalising from weird outlier samples to a program of wholescale biosphere re-engineering is insane, that corrective feedback for people's behaviour in the broader sense is indistinguishable from negative hedonic utility, and that the whole idea is a pipe dream when your civilisation is currently in a state of slow-motion collapse.
Did you read the full article?
Why? Does it talk about population collapse and dysgenics?
No but it does talk about children born without the ability to feel pain and the fact that they often die from failing to avoid dangerous behaviours. Seemed odd to me that you brought them up as if it was some sort of counter to Scott's post when he already specifically raised and discussed that issue.
Alright, fair enough, but I still don't see how you get to zero suffering until the pain receptors are switched off. Even responding to social stigma could be viewed as 'painful.'
Please read the article before commenting. That was addressed too.
Which part? The generalisation from Jo, a sample size of one?
Woah, you are commenting without reading the whole article on a *Scott Alexander* essay? Do you also climb without a rope in mountains you visit the first time, eat weird mushrooms you picked without identifying, and cross twelve-lane roads without checking for traffic?
I don't think the article substantially rebuts the point I'm making. Any kind of corrective feedback for a person's behaviour can be regarded as 'painful' under a sufficiently tortured definition of the word. Like... what's the zero-suffering-activist's answer to law-enforcement? Are we going to incarcerate people who commit serious crimes without any reduction in their hedonic utils score?
Perhaps not, but you'd be more persuasive just crying mea culpa in this part of the comments, carefully reading the whole article and then starting a new, more carefully nuance top level comment. The earth over here has been scorched and if you double down you'll end up sounding like a troll or an undergrad.
What are you recommending I do, precisely? Edit the original comment?
"Do you also climb without a rope in mountains you visit the first time, eat weird mushrooms you picked without identifying, and cross twelve-lane roads without checking for traffic?"
Were I born without pain receptors or the usual experience of pain and thus as a result never developed anxiety, dread, or apprehension about my actions and activities, why wouldn't I do that?
You might still read about the high risks of these activities and decide that taking some precautions is worthwhile, based on a risk analysis? I'm not convinced that being anxious is necessary for rational action.
> Cameron seems to be somewhere between pain insensitivity and asymbolia; she’s had some very mild stove-related accidents, but always seems to figure out the situation in time. She hasn’t lost the ability to sweat. She hasn’t lost the ability to smell. The only Special Bonus Side Effect the London team was able to find is that apparently her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars.
That does not seem to affect Cameron in particular, though I don't know if everyone could "figure out the situation in time".
If your ultimate goal is zero suffering, you're going to have to knock out pain receptors eventually. Also, suffering evolved in a more general sense as part of homeostatic feedback mechanisms intended to keep you alive.
How about a goal of much less suffering?
All the roads that lead to that outcome are going to involve raising birthrates and preserving human talent. (Unless the plan here is to abolish the ageing process, which would eventually create its own problems.)
A goal of *less* suffering in the broader sense might be achievable, but this isn't what David Pierce is arguing for. He wants *zero* suffering of any description.
I think you are hung up on semantics here. Pierce may not mean zero suffering quite as literally or extremely. To be clear - I don't claim to know what his actual position is, but there seem to be more reasonable interpretations to what you are suggesting.
Before creating a no-pain biosphere, it makes sense genetically to aim for a low-pain biosphere for human and nonhuman animals (https://www.gene-drives.com) alike. Compare high-functioning genetic outliers (not quite as unusual as Jo Cameron) who, if asked, say things like "oh, pain, it's just a useful signalling mechanism".
Your premise is false. You don't have to knock out pain receptors. You have to recalibrate them, so they send information without also sending suffering, e.g. "Take your hand off the hot stove," instead of "AAIIEEEE!!"
Don't pain receptors work by providing sufficient motivation? I currently have an agonising shoulder condition, so I don't move my shoulder. If it was just information relaying that I had a shoulder problem, I'd likely ignore it or forget it and move my shoulder, injuring myself anew.
Evolution has done a pretty uneven and sometimes bad job in calibrating our pain system, no doubt, but I'd be surprised, at least, if lots of these circuits aren't doing useful work.
Is it a rotator cuff tear? I think I've got one of those right now -- have had one before and I recognize the feeling. Yesterday tossed a small practically weightless toy for the cat to chase, and it sort of clicked and slid inside and hurt so bad I felt sick for about a minute.
Ah, hope it gets better soon. No, mine is calcific tendonitis, which is basically small deposits of bone forming inside the supraspinatus. It is like I've been stabbed by a calcium dagger and the blade broke off inside the shoulder head.
Replacing intelligence, you mean? Well, maybe; if the agony was half would you move your shoulder? A quarter?
Maybe a very self-controlled person could unfailingly keep a limb the right degree of still, without requiring pain, based on their long term goal of having healthy limbs, but even then we'd need some additional feedback system to replace pain so we knew there was a problem in the first place. I'm all for someone devising such a system.
In my case, if the pain was a quarter its current level, I think I would move my shoulder a little bit more, but then again that'd probably be good for my recovery. The pain does seem to be way over the top. But I'd be wary of the unforeseen possibilities of just quartering all pain. I think we'd want to be more strategic about which pains to reduce and when.
It would be nice to be able to "turn the knob" on suffering. Turn 8/10 pain into 4/10 pain, 4/10 pain into 2/10 pain, etc. Then the signaling would always be there, but would never be strong enough to cause more than brief suffering.
This is why it makes sense to study the outliers that seem to have the best "reduction in total suffering" to "adaptive functioning" ratio, and the case of Jo Cameron is certainly among them.
"Jo Cameron dislikes Boris Johnson, what a radical political fireband", written without a trace of irony.
I hope that the diversity of sociopolitical views of the team members, coupled with approximating what's generally considered a high cause neutrality (think: anaesthesia, crisis relief) is at least somewhat reassuring. We do not interfere with the personal views of the low-suffering genome owners, and do not encode any specific views on UK politics. :)
This is clearly a point of her having political opinions at all, instead of just a total laizzes-faire attitude to any and all things in her life.
Less of this sort of uncharitableness on ACX please? Especially in response to a good-faith response by the team itself.
That is not what Scott wrote. What he actually said was " lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement, but in fact she has strong political opinions (she doesn’t like Boris Johnson)." His point was not that she was radical and vehement, it was that she was able to feel angry disapproval of a government figure. How radical or correct or original her politics are is completely irrelevant to the question he's addressing, which is whether she is sort of emotionally numb and can't feel indignation about things she sees as bad government.
I'm sure you're not too dumb to remember what Scott said, so you're just lying here to try to make him look bad. Listen, there's no way you can make him look anywhere near as bad as you look so far here. You don't read the article, you run your mouth anyhow, when people ask you to read it you ask them instead to summarize it, and now you're putting up things Scott didn't say, and didn't even mean inside of *quotation marks* and them jeering at them. You're being a major asshole.
Agreed. My knee-jerk reaction is that Jo Cameron is a counterexample to the idea that the hedonic treadmill is universal and inescapable, and that a consistent set of experiences for a period of time always settled down to "meh" for everyone, with only _changes_ making us happier or unhappier. And counterexamples are _very_ important!
The negative feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill can operate even in paradise. Jo Cameron experiences hedonic adaption like the rest of us; but Jo's unusually high hedonic set-point means she's always enjoyed a much higher default quality of life. What's tantalizing is the possibility that just a handful of genetic tweaks might do the same for future life.
Many Thanks! Excellent point. I was thinking of the default model being that more or less the same set-point was linked to the hedonic treadmill for everyone. Yes, Jo Cameron proves that "same set-point" is false, but as you pointed out, this is indeed separable from _dynamics_, from
>The negative feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill can operate even in paradise.
Thanks. Twenty years ago I wrote https://www.gradients.com/ ("An information-theoretic perspective on Heaven") about a world where the ancient pleasure-pain axis has been superseded by a pleasure-superpleasure axis. It's still my tentative prediction for the future of sentience.
Re: the first point, as an intentional initiative with a narrowed focus, we heavily prioritize the neutral robustness while conducting the exploratory research - we want to ensure that the outcomes, including potential interventions, will be net positive under numerous reasonable ethical assumptions and game-theoretic arrangements. This should not interfere with adaptive functioning or giving a consideration to challenges in other domains.
Re: the second point, it has been addressed both in the article and in the FAQ section on our website. Happy to answer any further questions you may have!
"This should not interfere with adaptive functioning or giving a consideration to challenges in other domains."
This seems to be an elaborate way of saying that "preventing civilisational collapse is someone else's job." I just... I don't get how people with supposedly long-term goals and priorities don't treat these topics more seriously. It's like your house is burning down and you're talking about the most comfortable way to arrange the furnishings.
I think he's saying "we're intentionally targeting treatments that don't interfere with adaptive functioning". "This should" in the sense of "we are working to", not "we expect to".
I'm already sufficiently annoyed with effective altruists in general, especially after the SBF debacle, so extending that principle out to the biosphere in general looks like the textbook definition of telescopic philanthropy.
I'm not sure how much the SBF fiasco was intrinsic to effective altruism, but this points at an interesting question.
A lot of the problem, as I understand it, isn't so much that effective altruism was a scammy environment as that it was a gullible environment. A focus on rationalism didn't lead to enough willingness to be skeptical in face of attractive claims. People may well be working on getting better at being less vulnerable. I wouldn't necessarily have heard about it.
To tie it back to the topic, does feeling pain have anything to do with not falling for scammers? Jo Cameron seems to have enough good sense to not be looted, but has she run into capable scammers?
The problem with Jo Cameron isn't Jo Cameron. It's the accelerationist progressive left doing what they always do and fishing out cherry-picked counterexamples to normative standards which they will then use to dismantle traditional constraints on human action- or, in this case, the constraints imposed by millions of years of biology- before any comprehensive and rigorous long-term study of the wider social side-effects could possibly be mounted. And when the bill comes due, it will always be someone else's fault.
Based on the existing datapoints (e.g. activism of Jo Cameron, engagement of deeply realized meditators in social issues), it seems that removing a large portion of involuntary suffering while maintaining adaptive behavior should a) increase people's capacity to support other important causes, b) increase people's confidence in the net positivity of existence, or at least further support pro-existence stances.
I just want to add that, based on personal experience with changed happiness set points in my life (mine used to be extremely high!), this statement seems trivially true to me. I've maintained a lot of my high-happiness-setpoint stances even after it crashed (partially due to biological issues, partially because my mother died and it made my brain start obsessively pattern-matching absences, which it hadn't done before), since they all still make perfect sense, but it takes remarkable work to maintain them emotionally, and I don't think I would have started with them if I had not had the high-happiness-setpoint around the times I was establishing my attitudes toward life and people.
Which is to say, I would definitely take something that could give me my old happiness set point back, and I have reason to believe it would make me a better person.
Or, "Long-range prediction of non-linear phenomena is... untenable." AGI - possibly LLMs - might be our post-biological descendants. Mass drivers on equatorial mountains throwing us into orbit might let us colonize the Earth-Mars asteroid belt, giving us several orders of magnitude more lebensraum and consequently provoking population increase. Open borders might raise reproductive rates significantly... There are a lot of current approaches to preventing civilizational collapse; closing your eyes and covering your ears and shouting at the top of your voice that no one is doing anything is, among other things, untrue.
A more modest proposal might be uterine replicators; if women didn't have to be pregnant for nine months per child people might have more kids.
People seem to shift it to "but I can't afford a kid" so I doubt it. Even if one of you doesn't have to be pregnant for nine months, you might well decide "two is as much as we want because any more is too expensive".
Wealth's increasing pretty rapidly. It's unevenly distributed, I know, but some people can definitely afford several kids.
Could you repeat the question?
This makes me deliriously happy (no joke intended). Finally some material progress on The Hedonist Imperative! May all the fans-of-suffering, the too-invested-in-sour-grapes, and every one holding the transparently evil position that suffering is good, meritorious, something to protect and strive for... Well. May they all update and adopt the Obviously Correct position that Superhappiness is Optimal.
Thank you. When our project attracted substantial attention, we obtained some constructive and greatly appreciated feedback that we quickly incorporated into our roadmap. Simultaneously, the most frequent talking points of the critics seemed to be grounded in the inability/unwillingness to imagine adaptive functioning devoid of negative valence, and/or in assigning value to the suffering even if it was both maladaptive and involuntary. We, obviously, challenge this position, and are glad that this discussion if finally taking place on a larger scale.
I suspect that for many of us skeptics it's not inability or unwillingness per se, just bayes unfortunately filtered through SDB. Most are too squeamish to say out loud that e.g. reducing child mortality likely does make a society less fit in other ways we value. Where we need to be convinced is that the next intervention will be the one that finally reduces suffering without corresponding cost.
I'm happy to admit the possibility of being trapped in a local optima, here, but the philosophical point isn't 'is suffering good?' but 'will this next attempt at alleviating it be overly blithe again as usual?'.
We mostly think suffering useful given the rest of how a human is organized. It's at least 'lindy'. This question more concerns one's priors on interventionism than one's sour grapes.
it's not that suffering is good. It's that suffering exists, so how can we mitigate it, and make use of it, given that we are very likely to suffer at some time in some way?
See Christina's story above. Painkillers did nothing for her, so she coped with the pain by pacing around the room. Finding ways to use suffering is like that: pacing, rather than lie crying curled up in a ball, because either way we're going to feel the pain.
removing the pain is still very obviously better.
Oh, definitely. But if you're in a situation where there's no way of removing it and you have to undergo it anyway, then finding coping strategies work better for you.
Imagine Jo *had* to go to work the day after her husband killed himself because the job wouldn't give her time off, she needed the money, etc. Then "well better pull myself together and get on with it, anyway he's better off now" is an attitude that enables survival. Being so upset you're non-functional, even for a short while, is harmful. We all think that her attitude is unusual because we generally have the social support that says "okay, you are grieving and this is natural so you can have some time for that", hence we find her lack of grief unusual or even unsettling.
But if it was literally "work or die", then we'd understand Stoicism in that situation. Same way with "okay, suffering happens, how do we make use of it?" in theology and so forth.
We who live to Suffer thank you. All we're asking for is Validation.
of course we have to figure out a way that sadomasochism could still work; I mean, it's Fun
Switch it to be about power rather than pain? Being able to compel someone to do something humiliating (but not physically painful) is still exerting power over them, and you get the bonus of forcing them to do something they don't want to do, because it emotionally/mentally distresses them?
"You WILL file your taxes on time before the deadline, heh-heh-heh1"
"NOOOOO, Master, anything but that! And you've even withheld my dose of Adderall so I can't focus!"
Good grief! I've been in so, so many debates - in pubs, in professional or academic settings, even on military operations - where I've argued for _exactly_ this (honestly, uncannily so!) to entirely universal derision ‒ and until this post I genuinely supposed I was the only person in the world who had such beliefs. Very, very glad to read this ‒ thanks most awfully, Scott!
(But still a tiiiny bit disappointed to get through the whole post without seeing the phrase "Immanetise the Eschaton"...)
Same, although I was lucky enough to find this stuff many years ago when I was around 18 or so; I was pretty elated to find that I was not, in fact, the only one to see that suffering is bad (so to speak, heh).
*pulls you aside at a Bay Area House Party*
See the big new thing is Biblical Transhumanism. We know that the Bible is the literal word of God and infallible in every way, right? And we know that early Genesis people could live to over 900 years old. So that gives us a divinely-revealed research direction - long lifespans are clearly possible, we just need to undo whatever went wrong genetically after Noah, probably some kind of inbreeding problem caused by the population bottleneck there. And pain is probably preventable or at least highly mitigatable too! When god curses Adam and Eve he tells Eve "I will terribly sharpen your birth pangs, in pain shall you bear children." We're not sure yet whether this means childbirth specifically can be made less painful or if all pain can and - hey wait, where are you going? I was just about to invite you to my new Church of Transhumanism, we take up offerings for medical research every sunday!
The lion eating straw image is literally just Isaiah 11:7
It's honestly a bit sad how many people don't pick up on that...
Biblical literacy as part of the cultural background is declining, and you can't expect kids to pick up on it in school because that would be The Government Privileging One Religion Over Another and Establishing Christianity.
But mostly because they're reading 'modern, relevant' texts that no longer use such imagery. If the family doesn't go to church (or even if it does), they're not hearing such texts read and they don't know where these references come from, then, when they encounter them.
Even more so for those from a non-Christian (culturally or not) background who reasonably can't be expected to recognise such themes.
EDIT: Or non-Jewish background, because Judaism would also be familiar with the Old Testament (duh).
I hear you. It's a bit sad to see how thoroughly misunderstood the Establishment Clause has become over the past couple centuries. Far too many people these days don't understand that by definition, you cannot "establish Christianity" for the simple reason that there is no such thing as "The Church of Christianity," various individual religions laying claim to that honor notwithstanding.
The original Congress that adopted the First Amendment, containing several of the people who helped debate on and draft the Bill of Rights, might open Monday's session with a prayer by a Methodist chaplain, then Tuesday's with a Presbyterian chaplain, Wednesday's with a Lutheran chaplain, and so on. That's a far cry from the mess we find ourselves in today, where we have a de facto Established Church of Atheism.
Anyone know of a good Christian/Biblical mythology book I can read to my kids? There's plenty of them for Greek/Norse/Roman/etc., but I haven't seen a good Biblical one written from an outsider perspective but serious enough that my kids would recognize references such as the lion laying with the lamb.
Take them to Sunday school!
That's an intriguing concept. Would you be interested in presenting on it at an upcoming Innovation Forum?
Post-biological descendants e.g. AGI - maybe LLMs - brain uploads et cetera. More modestly, uterine replicators; no more biological births.
The bit about
> her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars.
...definitely gave me that "loophole in an otherwise ubiquitous ancient curse" vibe.
Scarless wound healing seems to me to be something much more interesting and beneficial to explore than "can we all become pain-free, carefree, super-happies?"
May I push back at such a description? Other things being equal, the more one loves life, the more zealously one wants to protect and preserve it. Consider the transhumanist polymath Anders Sandberg, for example ("I do have a ridiculously high hedonic set-point"). It's no coincidence that all people I know involved in x-risks studies and prevention are themselves blessed with unusually high hedonic set-points. Sure, their lives aren't blighted by anxiety, but they _do_ care - probably more so than folk whose feelings about Life are at best ambivalent.
Agreed. I'm in the position of probably having a somewhat lower hedonic set-point than most people (though, objectively, luckier than most people). As a somewhat grouchy 65 year old, I tend to look at x-risks rather fatalistically.
Indeed. I have a friend in the AI safety community who half-seriously likes to suggest I know ASI will probably kill us but hide this recognition because of my negative utilitarianism. Not so (I think digital zombies are cognitively crippled https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/full-spectrum-superintelligence.pdf). Yet anyone who understands the nature of the severe mental and physical pain endemic to Darwinian life can be forgiven for wondering if an insentient world tiled with paperclips (etc) would really be worse.
In practice, I think fixing the problem of suffering is up to us.
Many Thanks!
There's a theory that the human visual cortex has special processing to pick out ripe fruit, naked humans, and snakes. The snake processing is clearly a later addition, after the Fall. Tracing that back might lead to the fear and suffering areas, although possibly also to free will.
tangentially related Scott "More than 50% of EAs probably believe Enlightenment is real. This is a big deal right?" https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/poZ3p2Zum4im2LSGb/more-than-50-of-eas-probably-believe-enlightenment-is-real
We do (assuming a precise operational definition).
After receiving a pointing out instruction from Loch Kelly a year ago my life hasn't been the same. I used to say I was an 8/10 happy, but now I'm like a 10/10. The problem is that i wouldn't trade 1 day of my current life for 5 days of my previous (i.e. 1 day now is worth more than 5 days then). This leads me to think that experiencing nonduality doesnt interact with traditional wellbeing. Anyway, I basically can't believe how well I am. Its very strange talking about it (I rarely do, online)
What is a pointing out instruction?
It's an instruction intended to give insight at a lower level than traditional knowledge (like koans). Instead of learning a fact, you might change your schemas. I've heard this phase only in the context of non-duality, in which case it would be intended to erode the perception of being a self.
A common pointing out instruction that leaps to mind would be something along the lines of "look for the looker".
Or recursive questions; for example: What do you want? gets you pretty basic answers along the lines of fame, success, wealth, happiness et cetera. What do you want to want? gets you abruptly much closer to your best self. What do you want to want to want? is hard to parse; you could rephrase it as What would your best self want to want? and you start get more interesting answers. This approach can be applied to a range of questions.
Are you Mr. Morden?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing-out_instruction
Very interesting. What was pointed out to you?
Hi Marcel :) Good question! A few things actually. Firstly, my true nature (the context in which all conscious content appears), then, the nondual nature between context and content (i.e. they're actually made of the same thing anyway), and then the ground of being from which all this arises (love).
> The problem is that i wouldn't trade 1 day of my current life for 5 days of my previous (i.e. 1 day now is worth more than 5 days then).
Isn't that good? I'm confused why you call this a "problem". Did you reverse the numbers or something?
Sorry I was unclear. It is great that I’ve had this perceived improvement in wellbeing. But the problem is either the 10 point scale isn’t sensitive enough or I’m lying to myself about something to do with my experience.
Are you assuming that the scale should be linear or something?
I'm extremely unsure. But it seems from my experience there is at least a 5x difference between 8/10 and 10/10. Some things I feel now for hours a day, that may not be captured by 10 point scales: deeply well, completely safe, boundless, timeless (in one sense, impermanent in another), interconnected, loving.
EA is a quasi-buddhist new religious movement? Wow. I didn't know that. You're telling me now for the first time.
It is not. Different EAs believe different things, and there is nothing like a unified push towards any given world model or cause area. But I do think that EAs are vastly more likely than genpop to believe in the utility/attainability of enlightenment.
Yes, fair. EA is a broad umbrella. But, like you said, there are trends. And whether "Enlightenment" exists at all is a theological claim on par with "the resurrection of Jesus actually happened". Even whether things like Jhanas *exist* is tricky to answer (and I've had meditative experiences that seem to fit the "Jhana" description - doesn't mean I was actually in a "Jhana" state or that such a state exists.)
If there was an ostensibly secular group where nonetheless over half of the members think the Resurrection probably happened, I'd be comfortable calling that "quasi-christian".
This seems much closer to "did Jesus exist as a historical figure" than "did Jesus rise three days later". We have actual modern day accounts of enlightenment as well as people who have apparently reproduced it in conditions we can independently verify. Surely, this counts as being more likely than something that violates the second law of thermodynamics?
The existence of nirodha-samapatti seems like pretty strong evidence
https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/the-science-behind-the-worlds-most
"If there was an ostensibly secular group where nonetheless over half of the members think the Resurrection probably happened, I'd be comfortable calling that "quasi-christian"."
May I refer you to the cryonics movement, which thinks it can deliver the resurrection of the body, no religion required? 😀
Though if you read through comments on this site, I think the emphasis is now shifting to brain preservation so it can be digitally 'sliced' and imaged and an upload created (someone on here did have a recent comment about that).
Secular re-creation of religious promises, via technology!
>May I refer you to the cryonics movement, which thinks it can deliver the resurrection of the body, no religion required? 😀
But with _much_ lower claimed odds of it actually working. _Many_ things would have to go just right. E.g. see this brief discussion I and John Wittle had: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/desperately-trying-to-fathom-the/comment/54893721
One other thing about Pearce: he describes himself as a "negative utilitarian" and has said things to the effect that, if all life on Earth were about to be instaneously and painlessly destroyed, he'd be "overjoyed" about the impending end of all suffering. (I also think he claims that he advocates "paradise engineering" as the solution to suffering instead of ecocide on strictly practical rather than ethical grounds - destroying the world would be harder to accomplish for the simple reason that just about everyone would be trying to stop you from doing it.)
Far Out team members are united by the shared priority of minimizing the maladaptive and involuntary suffering, but have diverse views and perspectives on religious, cultural, and philosophical manners, including the axiological asymmetry of pain and pleasure, as well as the net positivity of the world's existence. That being said, we are pro-existence, at least (but very often not only) due to unknown unknowns, irreversibility, and/or pragmatic reasons.
Some forms of suffering are so bad you would end the whole world to make it stop. I would indeed be overjoyed if such suffering were to end - even if the price were to be no sentience at all. However, (1) on consequentialist NU grounds, I urge enshrining in law the sanctity of human and sentient nonhuman life; (2) the abolitionist project is in no way inseparable from the NU ethic of a minority of its advocates; and (3) a strong case can be made that the biology of involuntary suffering is itself a serious x-risk - or will be an x-risk later this century and beyond. For example, how many of the c. 800,000 people who take their own lives each year would take the rest of the world down with them if they could? A suffering-free world of passionate life lovers will be safer in every sense. Let's act accordingly.
Good for him for being consistent with his views. Ecocide is the logical end point of utilitarianism. But why stop at sterilizing Earth? Send AI and robots to end all life in the Universe. The Utilitarian Jihad.
On the face of it, classical utilitarianism dictates launching an omnicidal utilltronium shockwave. As a negative utilitarian, I'm more bioconservative. Genome reform can create life based entirely on information-sensitive gradients of bliss. Maximising the cosmic abundance of bliss will be nice, but it's not an obligation in the same way as eradicating suffering.
Why would ecocide be the logical end point of utilitarianism? I understand why it would be the end point for (a very strong) negative utilitarianism, but classical utilitarianism also values positive emotions. Utilitarians are often criticised for the repugnant conclusion, the exact opposite of killing everyone.
I personally think creating new happy lives is extremely valuable and hope I can have four or more children to give them the gift of living a happy life. At least partly, I have these beliefs because I am a utilitarian.
Well, you could chemically alter factory animals to not feel pain, or you could raise them freely in natural environments. Proper rotational grazing with symbiotic cycles of cows, poultry, etc can be very efficient. We could feed the world without factory animal farms. Or factory animal farms could be improved: I have experimented with quail in outdoor cages, and they can be very healthy and quite happy together being social animals.
In my view, the majority of suffering comes from things we could fix. So let’s focus on that first. I am happy. Pretty much always, whether things are going good or not in my life. I’ve also been on a primal raw meat diet for years, and I feel radiantly healthy. Pain and suffering is not very common in healthy people compared to the wider population.
Finally, this philosophy is well and good, but pain is a warning system the body uses to tell us when we are approaching death (damage to body/psyche). Since death cannot be mitigated, I have little interest in making the path there more comfortable.
We tend to think about it in terms of synergistic multidirectional efforts. From our FAQ:
"Given the complexity of the topic, limited tractability and impact of specific sets of interventions, diversity of moral views, and high uncertainty levels, we are in favor of a multi-directional approach to improve the fate of farmed and wild nonhuman animals. Most (if not all) of our team members are vegans or reducetarians, supportive of the development of cultured meat and plant-based alternatives, and in favor of measures making farming/transport/slaughter less inhumane, hoping that these synergistic value streams will lead to a large-scale change in the global attitudes about this cause area. We are driven by the universal, non-speciesist concern about the suffering of sentient beings, though we also fully respect those who want to support us primarily or exclusively with regard to the first, human-centered project. The introduction of modified lines should not be used as a convenient moral justification for mistreating animals; simultaneously, from the consequentialist and pragmatic standpoint, we recognize the limited outcomes of narrower and more isolated approaches, often driven by very noble intentions. The global meat industry continues to have a significant compound annual growth rate, driven largely by the steadily improving economic status of developing countries with different cultural and legal contexts, so the introduction of modified lines through market forces may constitute a very important piece of the puzzle where other strategies, due to the existing roadblocks, fail to produce (yet) a significant impact."
There is a strong evidence base indicating the widespread presence of overlooked and often extreme suffering that cannot be effectively mitigated, related to physical and mental health issues, aging, social and military conflicts, substance abuse, relationship problems, financial struggles, and existential matters, often entrapping people in vicious cycles (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/).
I agree with your argument that we could prevent most suffering by treatment of animals (and people). I'd go further and argue that the extreme solutions like banning meat-eating and ending pain distract from achieving the simpler goals.
If people were to treat meat as a rare luxury, we would dramatically reduce meat consumption and animal suffering and factory farming would become unnecessary. Most importantly, we could win political support from people who might support eating less meat but would oppose a total ban.
"Well, you could chemically alter factory animals to not feel pain, or you could raise them freely in natural environments. Proper rotational grazing with symbiotic cycles of cows, poultry, etc can be very efficient. We could feed the world without factory animal farms. Or factory animal farms could be improved: I have experimented with quail in outdoor cages, and they can be very healthy and quite happy together being social animals. "
There are already free-range farms (see eg https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SnGqab3noXLmJzQCs/lower-suffering-egg-brands-available-in-the-sf-bay-area ). But they cost more, so very few people buy from them. It's politically impossible to mandate them, because it would increase the price of all animal goods by quite a lot.
I just bought gree range eggs from local farmer at the farmers market for $5. Is that too expensive? Very yellow orange yolks, not watery.
That's 84g protein and around half of daily calories. Eggs are cheap food. This is high quality cheap food.
Free range is a meaningless descriptor that can apply to a warehouse with a small outdoor corridor. Yes, it is indeed cheap to grow chickens in a warehouse, exceedingly so.
>But they cost more, so very few people buy from them. It's politically impossible to mandate them, because it would increase the price of all animal goods by quite a lot.
We regularly mandate things that increase costs of entire industries (relative to the absence of the mandate), such as airplane safety. The trick is, of course, to force every market participant to adhere to the rules. With airplanes, that is relatively simple because it is much easier to enforce the rules because there are far fewer airports, operators, and airplanes than there are animal farmers and e.g. cows. In the end, it comes down to enforcability of the rules. A higher price of meat for everyone would just result in a new equilibrium, but unequally enforced rules would be inherently unjust and unacceptable.
Washington State has mandated free-range for at least eggs
Signaling without suffering?
One approach is less likely to succeed than many... It's a false dilemma; you could do rotational grazing AND pain research.
This reminds me of Brandon Sanderson, the well-known Fantasy author (my favorite author as well).
He often says about himself that he is very steady emotionally, unlike other people, and that he is almost always an emotional 7 out of 10 with almost no outside events impacting this.
And no kidding - he once did the whole "hot wings" challenge with his fellow podcast host, and he said ahead of time that spicy food barely affects him, and indeed he got to the spiciest things with seemingly not feeling them at all.
FWIW, as far as I can tell, he's a wonderful human being.
If the hope is for no loss if we go for zero suffering, then it may not be achievable. There are types of pleasure which are entangled with suffering. For me, it's hot spices.
I had covid, and my taste of taste was weird for a few years. Some foods I'd normally like tasted nasty, and my enjoyment of particular food might vary strongly over 12 hours or so. And I couldn't enjoy hot spices.
It's finally all back to normal with hot spices being the last thing to sort itself out and I'm pleased, but part of hot spice pleasure is something about pain.
Of course, it's not just hot spices. For some people, it's various sorts of physical endurance, and there's also S&M.
I'd trade my enjoyment of hot spices for enjoying life in general more, but I don't know that everyone would make that sort of trade.
It seems fair to say that we'd benefit from having tools that allow individuals to explore different tradeoffs in this space. I don't think we're anywhere close to the Pareto frontier.
Are you sure you're not enjoying the positive valence endorphin rush rather than the pain itself?
As somebody who loves spicy food:
The endorphin rush is pretty hard to achieve; I've hit it two or three times, and only by hitting levels of heat/pain comparable to the time I poured boiling water on myself. This is just barely shy of the level of heat where I just stop feeling anything at all - the nerves get exhausted or run out of some chemical and just stop transmitting.
Really? I got an endorphin rush from 2x spicy buldak ramen (with no milk available)
It's hard to disentangle them.
It's probably not a full-on endorphin rush, just rather moderate pleasure.
Would any marathoners care to weigh in on the question?
Has he had his genome sequenced?
I think I remember Tyler Cowen describing his emotional disposition similarly. I believe in one of his blog posts he describes feeling very few extreme emotions, positive or negative, but had a very steadily content baseline that rarely deviates regardless of circumstances.
Two clicks in and yep, *he's a super-villain*;
"An adequate theory of value should be as true in the gas chambers of Auschwitz as in the philosopher’s study. In my view, Darwinian life is an abomination: life on Earth is virulent, self-replicating biological malware churning out suffering without end. Any sensitive soul should be appalled."
"One candidate solution to the problem of suffering is to engineer human extinction via radical anti-natalism."
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#antinatal
Homie only turned onto making suffering extinct when he realised people would try to stop him if he made *life* extinct.
To paraphrase the other comment, out goal is to positively contribute to the minimization of the maladaptive and involuntary suffering, with different team members having different philosophical views, including the axiological asymmetry of pain and pleasure. That being said, we are pro-existence and anti-extinction, at least (but very often not only) due to unknown unknowns, irreversibility, and/or pragmatic reasons. We will heavily emphasize it in our public communication.
It might be worth adding that we are, well, happy to be incapable of ending the world. On a purely personal note, chatting with David, one of the gentlest and kindest souls I know, give me a sense of meaningful life worth living.
Holy shit what a fucking cop out answer.
"Our members have diverse views as to whether omnicide is the best course of action." Really now? That you remind us you're incapable of ending the world doesn't give much reassurance (most don't *need* to remind people of this).
What kind of answer would you then consider as satisfactory? Not a single team member is advocating for the omnicide, we focus on specific types of research and interventions intended to make lives of sentient beings better (just like pain research labs or animal welfare projects), and we are explicitly pro-existence.
It's natural for philosophers to openly reflect on the nature of hedonic tone and utility in the cosmic context, and the aforementioned quote from the 2015 high-decoupling-style musings of David does not include what he said later in the same answer, for example:
"(...) Creating a hyperthymic civilisation sounds almost as impractical as global anti-natalism. But CRISPR genome-editing, synthetic gene drives, and the new technologies of reproductive medicine will shortly turn the level of suffering in the biosphere into an adjustable parameter. Bioethicists need to acquaint themselves with what's technically feasible (cf. Genetically designing a happy biosphere). (...)"
It is important to account for the entire context and the writing convention.
Given a stated goal that would necessarily impact the whole world and overturn many longstanding assumptions, I for one am far more inclined to trust a group who'd admit to carefully considering the "everyone dies" option and rejecting it for specific, principled reasons, over one which failed to address it or did so with the slightest hint of dishonesty. http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff2400/fc02318.htm
Your use of quotation marks implies that you found this passage somewhere. I certainly don’t see it in the comment you are replying to. Citation needed?
I took the line "with different team members having different philosophical views" and rephrased it to make clear which particular "different philosophical views" team members had.
It was not a quote, but a "restatement in my own words" - also not a quote, even though I used quotation marks.
Then you shouldnta used quotation marks. Jesus.
I was trying to find a half-rembered quote which I think *should* be Flannery O'Connor, something to the effect that an excess of sentimentality leads to cruelty, but I haven't been able to find it.
What Google did lead me to was this Wikipedia article, and the more the Far Outs peddle their stock answers, the more I'm going "Okay, the writers were correct":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentimentality
""A sentimentalist", Oscar Wilde wrote, "is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." In James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sends Buck Mulligan a telegram that reads "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done."
...In the mid-18th century, a querulous lady had complained to Richardson: "What, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party". What she was observing was the way the term was becoming a European obsession—part of the Enlightenment drive to foster the individual's capacity to recognise virtue at a visceral level. Everywhere in the sentimental novel or the sentimental comedy, "lively and effusive emotion is celebrated as evidence of a good heart". Moral philosophers saw sentimentality as a cure for social isolation; and Adam Smith indeed considered that "the poets and romance writers, who best paint...domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno" and the Stoics.
By the close of the century, however, a reaction had occurred against what had come to be considered sentimental excess, by then seen as false and self-indulgent especially after Schiller's 1795 division of poets into two classes, the "naive" and the "sentimental"—regarded respectively as natural and as artificial."
See me in the shoes of the querulous lady!
I've often had the thought that it would be much better if nothing existed. But since most people don't seem to think that way, I wonder if maybe I'm secretly a biologically abnormal supersufferer (someone who experiences suffering way more intensely than average in many situations, opposite people like Jo Cameron), and so my basic empathic assumption about how awful most lives are is just wrong?
It would certainly explain why so many people disagree with antinatalism and are averse to legalizing assisted suicide, meanwhile I've felt that both positions were obviously morally justified and net-positive from the moment I heard about them. Maybe the level of suffering that makes those views "obvious" is just so far outside the realm of the average person's experience that they can't imagine any reasonably-likely-to-happen situation that would make it obvious to them.
Yes the band of people who believe life should not exist AND who haven't removed themselves from it, is probably very narrow. Your analysis of suffering vs will to exist is likely far, far towards the end of whatever curve that is on.
If you had actually done yourself in then your actions would match your world view and while it might be upsetting, it wouldn't be unheimlich or uncanny in the same way.
Living things, if they have wants, are designed in the main part, to want to be alive. To be the member of a vast crowd of sentient beings who want to be alive and to be actively arguing; "I probably shouldn't exist, and neither should any of you", will strike them as disturbing, sinister, frightening and strange. It is deeply against what the vast majority intuitively feel to be so and even stranger in that it is seemingly unacted upon (the strange one has not killed themselves, yet).
In popular fiction its the ideology of Kaecillius in the film 'Dr Strange', who leagues with the ruler of the Dark Dimension to end time and thence all existence and suffering. In DC comics the hypervillian ruler of the dark planet Apokalips seeks endlessly the Anti-Life equation. Its Supervillain vibes. Its the guy that Superman punches.
Well, I'm still alive because attempting to die doesn't guarantee success, and things can always get much worse if you fail. Also dying by itself seems like it would hurt a lot without access to sedatives and painkillers. Basically aversion to suffering is why I think life isn't worth living but also aversion to suffering is why I'm still alive. And the fact that this dilemma can happen is behind my perspective that both antinatalism and legalizing assisted suicide are obviously good and right.
Superficially I'm not too abnormal, so I imagine there *could* be tons of people like me who try to improve their lives and act like they don't want to die, but it's just because they're afraid of suffering more than they already are, not because they actually enjoy life. Maybe the only evidence that a person is living a serious net-negative life of this sort would be that, if you ask them, they seem to be absolutely convinced that they would rather have not been born and they say they would take painless suicide if it were an option.
I’m of the same mind. To me, dying, or not living, seem like reasonable alternatives to suffering. I eventually landed on rejecting anti-natalism for similar reasons to those you touched on earlier: that based on the popular resistance to life-ending alternatives to suffering, I concluded I must have an atypical reaction to suffering and could not in good conscience support such irreversible measures, though I strongly believe that providing more end-of-life options to those who report chronic misery is a moral good.
Personally I find this world view strange. For me to want to end my life I imagine I would have to suffer quite a lot. I think my instinctive will to live is quite strong, and I could handle quite a bit of suffering before tipping over to net negative. I also assume that this applies to most people (as well as animals), which makes me very skeptical of anyone who wants to end the world to stop suffering. Similarity or consensus bias applies I suppose.
On a scale from 1-10 where 10 is the most happy, how happy would you say you are on an average day?
1? I wouldn't characterize most of my days as happy at all. For about a decade I've a near-constant headache that feels like a sort of contained seizure, lots of sensory sensitivities that cause a constant background fight/flight reaction that has to be continually suppressed to avoid screaming, and I tend to be in pain with no obvious cause much of time. If there's a variety of discomfort, I'm probably experiencing some form of it at any given moment.
I didn't have all of that going on at a noticeable level when I was a kid though, and even then I had a negative appraisal of life and a favourable attitude toward ending it, so it's possible that I experience good things as less good than most people regardless of added discomfort.
I'd like to think there's something detectably medically wrong with me that could be treated, and I spent a lot of time trying to get tests done to figure it out, but they've all come back as perfectly fine and I evidently don't *look* like there could be anything wrong with me since in person everyone has always tended to treat me like I'm exaggerating or malingering. Most of the medical-ish labels that best describe me are things like "multiple chemical sensitivity" that are commonly regarded by professionals as somewhere between psychosomatic and made-up.
Sorry to hear that you are in such a condition. That sounds pretty bad, and I can certainly understand your other sentiments based on this. I have my problems as well, though not anywhere near the scale of yours. Over 4-5 years I had frequent episodes that felt like they could be heart-attacks and other diffuse and strange symtoms. Same as you, I got tested a lot, but the doctors find nothing. Luckely those have mostly stopped, but I still get very tired and have periods of brain fog. Starting excersising a lot is what have helped me the most.
Its always been evident that these types always turn into supervillains.
Personally I tend to think of the division between existence and non-existence as cutting across the solution-space of possible entities, sort of like a political border divides physical territories. Some beings die, or fail to be born, who would have preferred to live; others live who would prefer to not; many more seem content enough to stay on whichever side they currently are, or even try to move further away from the border (to the extent that they can) so as to avoid being caught by its frequent and unpredictable shifting.
Perhaps existence and non are at war, in some esoteric sense. Perhaps if the border could be deliberately rearranged so that people were more consistently on the side they prefer, and surrounded by those happiest to have them as neighbors, that war would end, or at least de-escalate.
I feel like this too. Although my drive towards NU and antinatalism is more from being horrified by the suffering of others I perceive, rather than my own. Although I do wonder if I generally felt happier more of the time, I wouldn't see the world this way I suppose
Would you call Gautama Buddha a super-villain? (“I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering") Either way, I argue _against_ efilism / hard antinatalism:
https://www.antinatalism.com/hard/antinatalism-selectionpressure.pdf
Most people who favour phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering via genome reform aren't NU. (Indeed, I co-founded the World Transhumanist Association back in 1998 with a pioneer of existential risk as a serious academic discipline!)
He's trolling all of us, you especially. He took one quote out of context and posted a very inflammatory and negative comment based on that.
But yes, you do have to reply to him seriously, since others are watching. Thanks!
Thanks. Wise words. More generally, phasing out the biology of involuntary mental and physical pain is potentially consistent with a wide range of secular and religious traditions - including the most life-affirming. So it would be a shame if the wider abolitionist project gets sidetracked by discussion of NU.
I don't think it's trolling. Someone who would destroy all life on earth can be described as a supervillain with the sole caveat that they lack the capability. It is useful to point this out under an article trying to raise funds and awareness: do I want to raise funds and awareness to someone who might decide to violate my wish to go on living?
I am absolutely not trolling and I am saying what I believe to be true.
It seems pretty central to me that we are dealing with someone who's basic premise is that life itself should not exist, and then they stepped back from that idea due to practicalities. My quote wasn't out of context, its what he actually believes. I respect him for owning it. He talks around it and tries to contextualise it but doesn't deny that its what he actually thinks.
You are dealing with someone who thinks that life should not exist. That should be a big deal when considering the entirety of their philosophy. To me its seems like a lot of you are being mildly crazy by refusing to notice a giant and simple truth.
If we're willing to rewrite our genetic source code and reprogram the biosphere, then life on Earth could be sublime. What's morally objectionable isn't life per se, but the horrors of pain-ridden Darwinian life. Maybe we differ here. But critically, you can believe that on balance life on Earth is on balance a priceless gift and wholeheartedly support the abolitionist project to make it better.
The number of people who consider "pain-ridden Darwinian life" to be morally objectionable is so tiny that it should give you pause. When your preferences are so out of whack with the rest of humanity, I doubt your ideas of how to make the life "better" align with theirs.
How much weight do you give the perspectives of the c. 800,000 people who take their own lives each year? The estimated 10 times that number who try and fail? The hundreds of millions of people world-wide who suffer from chronic depression or pain disorders? Critically, however, the case for using biotech to phase out the biology of involuntary suffering no more depends on whether its proponents are e.g. NU or CU than the case for pain-free surgery.
I don't think it is that rare, I know at least 3 people thinking it that I know from an unrelated way.
Why do you think it is that rare ?
I really feel like you are falling victim of some cognitive bias here; 'wanting life to not exist' is obviously deeply enmeshed with a whole range of negative thoughts and feelings, because it usually comes with anger, wanting to inflict violence, wanting to hurt; it seems like this means you are unable to perceive of the concept of 'wanting life to not exist' entirely because of wanting to end suffering, in a way that is entirely disengaged from all the usual attachments.
I broadly feel quite similar to David Pearce here; right now there will be thousands of people (at least) in unimaginable, terrible pain - I feel utterly horrified by this, and I really feel that endorsing others living and being pretty happy, so that these people continue suffering intensely (ie choosing that vs 'pressing the red button') is at best short sighted and thoughtless, and at worst pretty sadistic.
I am not deeply read enough in Buddhism to answer with wisdom but key differences would be;
- Does this person think that life should not exist, and begin with that premise.
- Buddha did believe in something like an immortal soul I think? And varied layers of afterlife depending on what kind of Buddhism you believe in, with a peasants afterlife where you get to meet your family and then later a kind of philosophers afterlife where you abandon selfhood and are freed from the wheel and become one with the eternal but *something* continues on.
It's quite a stretch to construe the Buddha's teachings on ending suffering as suggesting efilism in any way. The Buddha taught the Noble Eightfold Path as the way to end suffering.
I think the route to fixing the problem of suffering lies in genome reform, not efilism. The precise views of the historical Gautama Buddha are inevitably speculative. But Buddha seems to have been a pragmatist: if it works, do it. Biotech and genome reform are transformative technologies that promise to fix the problem of suffering for ever.
Efilism has made it much easier to get your tax returns in on time. I don’t know why you guys are disparaging it. Do you work for H&R Block?
Suffering is the first noble truth of the Buddha. Proposing the elimination of suffering from the human genome will result in an organism that is not human. Expect resistance from those of us trained in the humanities. What you are proposing has allure and attractiveness, but it is fundamentally inhuman.
To suffer, to struggle against suffering, perhaps to transcend suffering, these are fundamental not only to humanity, but I would argue that such struggle is inherent in some degree in all forms of life on our planet. I'm not saying suffering is the sum total of existence and meaning, just that it is a fundamental part.
I believe that suffering is part of what drives the behaviors, selections, and evolutions on this planet. Part of me honors and thanks you for helping us imagine what life could be without it, and parts of me recoil at the unnaturalness of it.
I imagine that the beings you propose creating via genome reform will not suffer as they decide that humans like me are an existential liability.
"inhuman"? I guess you're speaking figuratively. But are rare people who essentially never suffer really any less human than the rest of us? What about people who essentially _always_ suffer? And if the outliers were indeed somehow less human, would it matter?
"unnaturalness"? Look around. Compared to naked apes on the African savannah, our whole civilization is "unnatural." Wearing clothes is "unnatural". Pain-free surgery is "unnatural". Why should this matter?
Or let's try another tack. Imagine if we were to encounter an advanced civilisation whose lives are underpinned entirely by genetically programmed gradients of bliss. Would you urge them to revert to ancestral horrors? I'm guessing not. But why? To what extent are apologists for suffering victims of status quo bias?
Motivation? Yes, suffering and the promise of happiness alike can motivate. But all too often, suffering crushes the spirit. Information-sensitive gradients of bliss can motivate at least as powerfully as misery and despair.
Alas critics frequently approach this debate by asking whether they would want to get rid of the biological capacity to suffer in themselves. But as the technology matures, and the biology of suffering increasingly becomes optional, I think the real question to ask is whether we are entitled to inflict a genetic vulnerability to coercive misery on _others_.
"Existential liability"? Or tragic victim of late Darwinian life?
> Would you call Gautama Buddha a super-villain?
A similar idea crossed my mind a few years ago. The idea in other comments that there are "super sufferers" is also tickling and would fit Gautama as his sheltered upbringing led to overreaction.
In early childhood I thought that this was entirely self-evident, and lack of public prominence of it was due to the same sort of taboo that prevents open discussion of sex. I still think that it's self-evident, but nowadays it seems more likely to me that the majority of people have some kind of lower-level kludge in their mind preventing them from acknowledging it, because lack of such kludge would obviously have a negative effect on reproductive success.
Another possibility you should consider is that you are an extreme outlier and most people just straight up strongly disagree with you.
This doesn't seem to contradict what I said. I described what I considered the most likely source of that disagreement.
It seems mostly self-evident to me too, I think there is at least some taboo (probably more than for open discussion of sex), even if there are probably other reasons too.
Wow. Yes, if you want people to support you, maybe don’t sound like Mr. Smith from the Matrix?
I've meditated before on the preponderance of suffering over pleasure within the domain of life, but instead of deriving from this an imperative to destroy life, I derive from it an imperative to swamp that suffering with as much engineered happiness as possible. Here's a post I previously made on the matter:
Because pain is a more direct and simple motivating principle than pleasure, we should expect net suffering to predominate within the domain of life, with this suffering increasing for every moment life continues to exist. Even if we were able to eliminate all life on earth this moment, the past net suffering would still have occurred, and there is likely life with the same negative utilitarian calculus countless other places in the universe. The only way to take this preponderance of suffering and make it so that it has been worthwhile is to use our opportunity of conscious and intelligent existence and take the dumb matter of the universe and construct as many new minds designed specifically to feel constant pleasure as possible out of it. Given how much more non-conscious matter there is in the universe than the relatively tiny amount currently engaged in conscious awareness, this would be able to swamp and overcome the net suffering of life and turn the universe from a place of net suffering into a place of net pleasure. So, it should be the moral imperative of all who love pleasure and loathe suffering to direct the technological progress of civilization towards the end of constructing as many minds experiencing constant pleasure as possible out of the matter of the universe. Unlike human minds, these artificial minds could be constructed specifically so they never tire or bore of pleasure, and every moment until the heat death of the universe is as joyous as the first. This may seem like a simple idea, but its importance cannot be overstated, as this program of converting the universe into minds experiencing pleasure is the only way to undo and reverse the natural tendency of the universe towards being a place of net suffering, and instead turn it into a realm of joy and contentment. The technological and philosophical abilities of humankind and any superintelligences we create should be directed towards this end of figuring out how to construct and propagate such minds, as no cause that we could engage in is more worthy.
Note that I am not a negative utilitarian. I believe that what matters is net pleasure: pleasure minus suffering. I believe this because I think that we can derive from conscious experience that pleasure can be directly and immediately felt as a good unto itself, and suffering as an evil unto itself. I don't take the negative utilitarian position of prioritizing minimizing pain before maximizing pleasure because I believe that when we experience "mixed states" where we're experiencing pleasure and pain simultaneously, it's whether the net pleasure is positive or negative that determines whether we regard this as a good or bad experience as a whole, and if the net pleasure is positive we don't regard this as a bad experience merely from the fact that some pain is present along with the greater quantity of pleasure. So, taken to a universal level, we can see that a universe with simultaneous pleasure and suffering is in a similar mixed state, and we can improve that state by increasing pleasure, not just by minimizing pain. So, the moral imperative in a world where life entails suffering is not to eliminate that suffering by eliminating life, but to overwhelm it with pleasure on a scale far beyond what life could ever naturally achieve itself.
I disagree because, based on my conscious experience, there is a level of pain/discomfort/suffering that mostly cancels out the capacity for genuine enjoyment of anything no matter how much enjoyable stuff you add. The unpleasantness just poisons everything. So naturally I'm a negative utilitarian, focused mainly on minimizing the far end of unhappiness. But more generally in my experience pain and pleasure don't add very nicely at any level. If a person gets a splinter (-1) while eating a really good slice of cake (+1), the experience doesn't end up being the same as if nothing happened. It's good in some ways and bad in other ways and that's all that can be said about it. Or that's how it goes for me.
It makes more sense to me to think of utility as a scale that reflects how happy one is with life and how much one wants to live. Then one could say that there is a point on that scale where life value becomes negative, and one would prefer to not exist - maybe similar to what you call net suffering. However I disagree that net negative utility can have been predominating in the state of life. If that was the case, I would have expected most people to prefer suicide over life - perhaps adjusted for the difficulty and stigma of committing suicide. This is not supported by the evidence. I would say that biological life are infused with a strong will to live, and are willing to suffer quite a bit before utility becomes net negative. I'm not really sure how it makes sense to just look at suffering and pleasure, as if that is somehow numerical values, state that the net is the only thing that matters, and conclude that life is not worth living. If I have a preference for living, I have net positive utility - It doesn't matter how much I'm suffering!
Investigation into mutant healing factor: checks out.
CW: suicide, animal suffering (maybe even a bit infohazardous, probably skip if you are suicidal)
So, I've expressed efilist views before on Zvi's blog. They often come from a place of depression and anger about the world, combined with a very pessimistic interpretation of Meditations on Moloch. I'm trying to stop believing these views, mostly because of Eliezer's "The Lens that Sees Its Own Flaws", but I do have some thoughts that might help clarify my view of efilism as well as answer a few comments in this thread.
First, if your goal really is to kill all life on Earth, killing yourself first is obviously a bad way of accomplishing this. Thus, efilism and suicidal intent don't necessarily imply each other.
Second, if we can say that evolution is selecting for anything at all, it's selecting for ongoing survival of the species of the world, and both suicidal and efilist (and anti-natalist, now that I think of it) views would be selected out over time.
I think we observe this in practice; even with the tragic 700,000 suicides per year globally (actually tragic, I'm not being sarcastic or snide here, I promise), suicide is actually pretty hard to do. People can have suicidal thoughts for years before doing it, some quick Wiki searching shows only about a 50% success rate even for attempts, and even the most blackpilled suicide advocates on the Internet, when asked why they haven't committed suicide yet, will often say how hard it is and how likely it is to fail in a life-altering way. It's actually really hard to kill yourself, and I do genuinely believe that is a very good thing.
Suffering is also kind of weird in a Darwinian sense. Pain evolved as a protection mechanism and suffering probably followed. But we know there's no group selection, every living thing is mostly out for itself and maybe its offspring, and we humans are one of a very few species that organize and help each other on this scale. Suffering is inflicted, en masse, onto other living things. Bacteria and parasites consume animals from the inside, carnivores eat their prey alive at times, and humans factory farm and, per Eliezer, have that little off-switch for their empathy named "outgroup" that makes awful, unconceivable atrocities when they're done against yours into rightful, just actions when done against someone who isn't yours.
Meditations on Moloch was depressing, to say the least. Multipolar traps, incentive gradients, short-term wins that become coordination traps that force everyone to sacrifice values to keep competitive. To me, there was no aspect of existence that Moloch would not leave alone, no joy or value or sacred duty that wouldn't be optimized away, and even if you stand up for your principles, you'd just lose to someone who didn't. More natural selection, culminating in, as Scott has written, the Disneyland with no children.
Efilism just seemed like the natural response. if Moloch guarantees infinite optimized suffering in enough time, if every good thing about life and nature would be optimized away, then there is no reason to keep anything around, knowing that joy will hit 0 and suffering would be unbounded.
But I was too pessimistic. Rereading "The Lens that Sees Its Own Flaws" made me realize that humans are the only things - ever - that have been able to reflect on their own minds and notice mistakes. We still run on instinct a lot of the time, but we can override it. Our minds quietly make all sorts of rational errors, but we can try to notice those moments and train against them. And even the coordination problems seem like they won't always hold forever.
Also, P.S. to any true efilists: false vacuum decay is cooler, faster, and more total than any anti-natalism could hope to achieve. And for anti-efilists, it also has the convenient property of being probably impossible to engineer, making it a perfect wild goose chase for the efilists.
Why focus on a very probably physically impossible project, when this post is about a much more plausible, and better, project.
Well, yeah, the impossibility is kinda the point. Use it to distract the efilists with something that would accomplish exactly what they want while also being impossible. It's easier than trying to convince them they're wrong.
I assume it is sort of a joke, but my point was to remind the efilists there is actually something possible that would accomplish exactly what they want, and it is the subject of this article.
And they don't really need to believe it has a great chance to work, it just needs to have a greater chance than any other plans they have, and they mostly not have any plan with any chance to work.
True, every efilist I've heard of objects to suffering, not life itself, they just view the two as inseparable. I don't think I'm onboard with removing suffering - we wouldn't want an animal to be happy as its being gored and eaten alive - but reducing the causes of suffering is something I can get behind. And, no, not via vacuum decay.
Maybe you wouldn't, but I absolutely would, and I think you would too, if you were the one being gored, eaten alive, and agonizing.
Edit: I think I misunderstood what you mean, do you mean you would want them to be happy if they are eaten, but not want them to be eaten even if they are happy (if this is it, I think it is much more reasonable than my first read) ?
But could it be that these folks are just deferring suffering to older age, where a lifetime of avoiding suffering thus leaves one with zero coping skills just when it becomes hardest? It's hard to not view this as another form of the peculiar American aversion to talking about death?
If we were to extrapolate from the example of Jo Cameron (which is a single but meaningful datapoint), she discovered her condition in 60s, and seems to have a decent health status and satisfying life outcomes for a 76-years old person. The emphasis on suffering minimization and adaptiveness is to be maintained throughout the entire lifespan.
Studying and skilfully relating to the issues of personal identity, including the termination of the closed individualist identity, is certainly within our scope of interest, just not the central focus of The Far Out project.
That seems pretty dry, doesn't it? How much experience do you have with the travails of the elderly in general and in specific? In other words, if you're just shoving all the suffering into the last years of life, is that, then, not a question of "eliminating suffering" but rather increasing the "brisance" of old age?
What do you mean by "she discovered her condition in 60s"?
Was she previously unaware of her inability to feel pain /did she assume everyone's subjective experience of mental stability was the same as hers?
Or do you mean that she was in her 60s when the gene link was identified?
Surprisingly hard to find an isolated Far Side cartoon, so I guess you get a whole article alongside it. https://formerpastor.substack.com/p/a-cumulative-attack-of-the-willies
An argument that painlessness is deferring suffering to old age is like arguing that making people rich is deferring poverty to old age. That's not how it works. There's not a quota of suffering you have to get through in life. In fact suffering gains interest like debt; the more you have, the more you'll have in future.
I'm not buying that somehow the mechanisms used to induce the inability to suffer continue to work in the presence of natural breakdown of the body by age. It's just as likely that it works up to a point, the gradually or different, it doesn't.
At which point you're at normal levels, not "everything you would have otherwise suffered the last 50 years" levels.
The point is not that you're experiencing "everything otherwise suffered". Instead you're experiencing "normal" without 50 years of experience with dealing with it. That's what I mean by brisance. Same state, but with the decline experienced rapidly and all the more vividly.
And that's just one scenario. One can imagine others. Such as if you were able to sell inhibition of suffering, what if it's a drug you have to take every X days or it wears off, and you feel "normal" all the more vividly since you know what it's like without suffering. Nobody will exploit that for gain...
That starts to sound like heroin 2.0?
I don't see why it would be a problem to first experience it at 70 instead of 20, or whichever years we're using. The adjustment period would be the same.
The second paragraph is the current state of things; the older you get the more pills you take to feel normal, many of them more than once a day. But if you could replace every side effect medication with a dose of Heroin 2.0, that sounds like a deal.
It sounds like your imagining that "suffering" is a natural, basic feature of existence, and "not suffering" can only happen because of some special extra structure on top of that. But suffering is, like any experience, produced by a complex mechanism that is itself subject to external forces and decay. Why not instead not buy that the mechanisms used to induce suffering continue to work etc.? You know they must break down at some point, since the dead don't suffer, and if those mechanisms can survive up to almost the very end why shouldn't others?
>There's not a quota of suffering you have to get through in life.
Very much agreed!
I am curious to know the source for the claim that Jo Cameron lacks dangerous pain insensitivity. According to this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain she did not notice having broken a bone (a very dangerous sympton of pain insensitivity!)
I would also like to know where the claim that her wounds heal without scars comes from. No article I read mentions this, and this one: https://nypost.com/2023/05/24/i-dont-feel-pain-scientists-say-my-rare-gene-could-change-medicine/ specifically shows the scars on her hands from the many injuries sustained as a result of pain insensitivity.
The Wikipedia article on FAAH says of Cameron that "The frequent burns and cuts suffered due to her hypoalgesia healed quicker than average with little or no scarring" with three references.
One is an article from the British Journal of Anaesthesia https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6676009/ which says "She reported numerous burns and cuts without pain, often smelling her burning flesh before noticing any injury, and that these wounds healed quickly with little or no residual scar" but also "On clinical examination, she had multiple scars around the arms and on the back of her hands". It also mentions that IN MICE FAAH deletion produces "accelerated skin wound healing" along with various other things similar to what Jo Cameron reports.
The next is an article in the NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/health/woman-pain-anxiety.html of which I can only read the opening section which mentions in passing that "her body heals quickly".
The third is an article in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/28/scientists-find-genetic-mutation-that-makes-woman-feel-no-pain says "They found two notable mutations. Together, they suppress pain and anxiety, while boosting happiness and, apparently, forgetfulness and wound healing." which may or may not be claiming that Jo Cameron specifically heals quickly.
I'm not sure whether after all this I believe that Jo Cameron actually heals unusually quickly or not.
Another thing that at least two of these articles mention is that FAAH is involved in _memory_. BJA article: Jo Cameron "reported long-standing memory lapses (e.g. frequently forgetting words mid-sentence and placement of keys)". FAAH deletion IN MICE produces "short-term memory deficits". Guardian article, as quoted above, lists "forgetfulness" as something produced by Cameron's mutations.
I am not sure that I would trade worse memory for immunity to pain, anxiety and depression, even if there weren't a risk of e.g. breaking bones and not noticing. (Of course someone who suffers more pain, anxiety and depression than I do might make a different tradeoff.)
Regarding the enhanced wound healing capacity, this paper might be of interest: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27412859/
As for Jo's adaptive and risk-averse functioning, it is certainly way better than in typical, dangerous cases of the congenital insensitivity to pain, and worse when compared to the average. Still, the ratio of "cumulative hedonic tone benefits" to the "trade-off in adaptive responses and potentially in memory" is unusually high - certainly high enough to consider cases like Jo a great starting point for the exploratory research.
It is worth noting that we do not currently consider Jo to be the ultimate and optimal model to exactly replicate, but her genome and phenomenology continues to warrant particular attention in the research and intervention design.
I wasn't intending to suggest that you're wrong to look at her case! I was commenting more on Scott's (obviously tongue-in-cheek, but still...) "The best neurotype belongs to a 76 year old Scottish woman named Jo Cameron".
The memory-emotion connection reminds me of ADHD, they tend to have poorer memories and subsequently forget grudges or emotionally taxing events more frequently than the norm too. Given that the brain preferentially memorises negative emotional experiences over neutral or positive ones, I wonder if there's a deeper link between memory and negative emotions.
Maybe Cameron does experience psychological suffering, but her memories don't contain an emotional component or context so she always remembers herself as being emotionally steady when recalling past events.
I find the description of her case a bit baffling too. If she cries at sad movies, is she not empathically sharing the pain of the characters?
And feeling that a husband's suicide is maybe "for the best", given his bipolar suffering - this doesn't seem too cold, it's maybe reasonable. But what if he had been murdered, and was leading a happy life with many unfulfilled projects? Would she still be back at work the next day? Not sure this behavior is consistent with love as I understand it.
Given that other FAAH-mutated people don't have Cameron's pain insensitivity, and given that a lot of people with pain insensitivity lead short dysfunctional lives, perhaps we should be very careful about generalizing from her case?
We also found the mention of crying at sad movies to be particularly intriguing; when studied, Jo scored 0 on scales measuring depression and anxiety (PHQ-9 and GAD-7), so one of the possible explanations is the presence of extremely low negative valence levels that remain barely detected/unreported at the declarative macro level, with a behavioral manifestation of crying largely retained. Another explanation refers to the complexity of mixed valence states, where things that are generally considered as sources of negative valence (very spicy food, touching scenes in movies) are enjoyable at the macro level.
One can cry at beauty. One can cry out of deep positive valence empathy. One can cry out of love. One can cry at something moving. Not all tears flow from negative valence states.
True, but I'm not sure we can pry apart all those cases of crying from our historic capacity for suffering. I might cry with joy watching my kid valiantly swim his first lap in the pool, but isn't that "joy" a complex emotion, tinged with awareness of his fragile finitude, the sadness that he'll someday succumb to something?
I wonder if that is a combination of having learned social cues ("this is what you are supposed to do in this situation") with the conditioned responses movies use to evoke reactions - setting up the situation with the lighting, music, all the rest of it to prime us that "now you cry"? In that case, crying at the sad movies is a reflex like sneezing when dust gets in your nose, and has nothing to do with feeling conscious emotion or identification with the characters in the scene?
See this skit about FPS games: "Oh right, you're supposed to be my best friend, I'm supposed to be emotionally invested in you. And there it is - trying to cram years of backstory into a few sentences":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSxufUoCaG8
In my experience, empathetically sharing the suffering of fictional characters (or of real people I merely read about and don't know personally) doesn't feel exactly the same as suffering oneself. It's hard to describe, but it's like there's no "edge" to it. There are some of the emotional qualities of suffering, but not the ones that make it really, really bad.
But isn't there also motivational empathy, motivational because it's painful to the empathizer? Yes, the empathic suffering is milder/different from the primary suffering, but it's bad enough to get the empathizer to do something about the bad thing happening.
Re: scars - I didn't check the pictures, but it's mentioned in eg https://bigthink.com/health/pain-mutation/
Are they looking for volunteers? It'd be a shame for this to fizzle out if it really is a viable project.
We welcome various expressions of interest sent via the contact form, the response time might be somewhat longer these days: https://faroutinitiative.com/
We have a multi-layered plan, so regardless of the yet unknown technical viability of specific interventions tested within specific subprojects, in the long run, we optimize for delivering the most net positive value to the suffering abolitionism as a big-picture cause.
Typo: "Now we’re getting Now we’re getting"
Fuck Brave New World...that book is a perfect counterexample to the idea that we should assume we learn things or are informed by reading. The message of the book depends on inducing a subtle fallacy in the reader. And particularly fuck all the educators and defenders of literature as a way of learning about the world and challenging our preconceptions who expose students to Brave New World but don't even mention his later pro-drug novel Island.
The book insists that Soma really actually makes the people who take it happy [1]. But then the book relies on the fact that as readers who aren't on soma we will think of his situation as unpleasant and undesirable. Indeed, the actions of the protagonist don't even make sense unless you assume Soma really doesn't make him happy and merely distracts him.
--
1: If Huxley just wanted to suggest that drugs like alcohol don't actually make people happy (as defenders suggest) he could have simply described Soma as making people docile or just distracting them. But he heavy handedly insists that Soma really does make people happy and eliminate these bad emotions.
I never got why people consider Brave New World dsytopic. My final written exam in highschool was on that book, and afterwards my teacher told me that she found it a bad idea to argue in such an exam that neither the book itself nor the questions asked in the exam make any sense at all.
It's because people seem to mostly engage empathy and other simulations of other people by imagining ourselves in their shoes.
If you've had a good experience on MDMA then you can probably do that with Soma but if you haven't -- as is true of most people when they first read Brave New World -- then imagine it sucking to be in that situation. These effect is amplified because the protagonist behaves in ways that accord with how you would imagine feeling in a situation where you weren't physically uncomfortable but felt unsatisfied and we're denied anything like rapturous joy.
Yes, and this approach is completely alien to me. It is written in the book that they are happy, and made very clear that this is a correct statement. For me there is nothing else to say.
But everyone is conditioned to be happy in the station they enjoy in life, and not to want more; they don't envy the classes above or below them, and they are conditioned out of wanting experiences not deemed appropriate to where they are:
"Mr. Foster was left in the Decanting Room. The D.H.C. and his students stepped into the nearest lift and were carried up to the fifth floor.
INFANT NURSERIES. NEO-PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONING ROOMS, announced the notice board.
The Director opened a door. They were in a large bare room, very bright and sunny; for the whole of the southern wall was a single window. Half a dozen nurses, trousered and jacketed in the regulation white viscose-linen uniform, their hair aseptically hidden under white caps, were engaged in setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor. Big bowls, packed tight with blossom. Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble.
The nurses stiffened to attention as the D.H.C. came in.
'Set out the books,' he said curtly.
In silence the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out--a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.
'Now bring in the children.'
They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its four wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their caste was Delta) dressed in khaki.
'Put them down on the floor.'
The infants were unloaded.
'Now turn them so that they can see the flowers and books.'
Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on the white pages. As they approached, the sun came out of a momentary eclipse behind a cloud. The roses flamed up as though with a sudden passion from within; a new and profound significance seemed to suffuse the shining pages of the books. From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure.
The Director rubbed his hands. 'Excellent!' he said. 'It might almost have been done on purpose.'
The swiftest crawlers were already at their goal. Small hands reached out uncertainly, touched, grasped, unpetaling the transfigured roses, crumpling the illuminated pages of the books. The Director waited until all were happily busy. Then, 'Watch carefully,' he said. And, lifting his hand, he gave the signal.
The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever.
There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.
The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.
'And now,' the Director shouted (for the noise was deafening), 'now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock.'
He waved his hand again, and the Head Nurse pressed a second lever. The screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.
'We can electrify that whole strip of floor,' bawled the Director in explanation. 'But that's enough,' he signalled to the nurse.
The explosions ceased, the bells stopped ringing, the shriek of the siren died down from tone to tone into silence. The stiffly twitching bodies relaxed, and what had become the sob and yelp of infant maniacs broadened out once more into a normal howl of ordinary terror.
'Offer them the flowers and the books again.'
The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of the roses, at the mere sight of those gaily-coloured images of pussy and cock-a-doodle-doo and baa-baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror; the volume of their howling suddenly increased.
'Observe,' said the Director triumphantly, 'observe.'"
"'Consider the horse.'
They considered it.
Mature at six; the elephant at ten. While at thirteen a man is not yet sexually mature; and is only full grown at twenty. Hence, of course, that fruit of delayed development, the human intelligence.
'But in Epsilons,' said Mr. Foster very justly, 'we don't need human intelligence.'
Didn't need and didn't get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow's, what an enormous saving to the Community!
'Enormous!' murmured the students. Mr. Foster's enthusiasm was infectious.
He became rather technical; spoke of the abnormal endocrine co-ordination which made men grow so slowly; postulated a germinal mutation to account for it. Could the effects of this germinal mutation be undone? Could the individual Epsilon embryo be made to revert, by a suitable technique, to the normality of dogs and cows? That was the problem. And it was all but solved.
Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head."
I think the view "but it's not a dystopia" comes in if you're imagining being an Alpha and extrapolating from our current world: if I were the same person I am but in that world where there's perfect happy drug like soma, it'd be great!
Only you wouldn't be the same as you are in this world, and that world is not our world. You might not even be an Alpha, you could be a perfectly happy Epsilon just sapient enough to do the hard physical labour needed for society to function. It's the worst of HBD taken to extremes: some (races) classes of humans *are* inferior in every respect and moreover they are *made* to be that way, to be natural slaves.
"On Rack 10 rows of next generation's chemical workers were being trained in the toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar, chlorine. The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundredth metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. 'To improve their sense of balance,' Mr. Foster explained. 'Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid air is a ticklish job. We slacken off the circulation when they're right way up, so that they're half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they're upside down. They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing on their heads.'"
"'Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let's have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet.'
At the end of the room a loud-speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.
'...all wear green,' said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, 'and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.'
There was a pause; then the voice began again.
'Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able...'
The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.
'They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson.'
Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafoetida--wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia."
"It is written in the book that they are happy, and made very clear that this is a correct statement. For me there is nothing else to say."
Yes. Humans worked upon from literal conception to be happy in the station assigned to them, as happy as a fern in a pot. Worse than the historical states of serfs or slaves, where someone from a lower rank might have a chance of breaking out of it by talent or brains or finding a patron; these are the future of humanity all eternally sorted into one life forever.
Would you be happier if your parents controlled every moment of your life so you only liked what they wanted you to like, had interests and hobbies they approved of, worked a job they wanted you to work, married the spouse they wanted you to have, had the children in the number and ratio of sexes they wanted? Every minute planned out by others with no choice for you? But you're happy, because your controllers give you doses of the happy drug at regular intervals.
Brave New World is that world but not even someone as close by blood to you as your parents are your controllers. Maybe it's a utopia if everyone is an Alpha and it is the Culture where the controllers give their pets all the treats their little meat brains crave, but BNW is not the Culture.
The utopia where they give electric shocks to eight month old infants.
I completely understand everything what you say, and it seems totally desirable to me to grow up and live a life as an Epsilon in Brave New World. I acknowledge that you feel different, but I can not even start to comprehend why.
To answer your question "Would you be happier if your parents controlled ..."
As a matter of fact, the answer is probably yes. From what I know about arranged marriages, people in them tend to be happier than people who could choose their partner. I am not super-sure about this, but it *doesn't matter*. The question in the book is not whether being controlled makes you happy. In the book, the Epsilon's are happy. All the time. Really, I would very much like to be an Epsilon in Brave New World, and I don't understand why others don't share this sentiment. It's a bit like discussing whether 1+1=2, and other keep coming up with clever arguments like "Ah, but did you know that there are numbers that don't give two if you increase them by one?"
I was thinking that if you enjoy being intelligent, it's hard to imagine wanting to be an epsilon.
I don't think it's that hard if you really take seriously the idea they are gloriously crazily happy all the time. I think lots of people would trade even very valuable things like intelligence for more happiness and they do all the time.
It's just hard if you don't imagine them as really being happy.
Happiness isn't a single thing. It comes in a vast variety of very different flavours. Losing intelligence closes lots of options for these. I'd rather an icecream than go hungry, but I really don't want your free infinite ice-cream forever if that means I can't have stuffed cabbage leaves ever again, and I think it would be wrong of me to make that trade for people who've never tried them and don't even know what they're missing.
"I don't think it's that hard if you really take seriously the idea they are gloriously crazily happy all the time."
But even in BNW they're not all gloriously crazily happy all the time; they're just happy enough for society not to crash down, and it's a level of happiness decided upon by the controllers. The animal appetites, as it were, are glutted and they get the doses of soma appropriate to their caste and to enable them to work as society needs them to work (in fact, in some ways it reminds me of the nice people on here talking about how they need Adderall or the analogue because it's impossible to be as focussed and productive at their jobs as required without it):
"The Main Day-Shift was just going off duty. Crowds of lower-caste workers were queued-up in front of the monorail station--seven or eight hundred Gamma, Delta and Epsilon men and women, with not more than a dozen faces and statures between them. To each of them, with his or her ticket, the booking clerk pushed over a little cardboard pillbox. The long caterpillar of men and women moved slowly forward.
'What's in those' (remembering The Merchant of Venice), 'those caskets?' the Savage enquired when Bernard had rejoined him.
'The day's soma ration,' Bernard answered, rather indistinctly; for he was masticating a piece of Benito Hoover's chewing-gum. 'They get it after their work's over. Four half-gramme tablets. Six on Saturdays.'
The World Controller is perfectly aware of the situation and says that this is the society humanity has wanted, so it's the one it gets, and all the talk of overcoming adversity and so on is nonsense:
'I was wondering,' said the Savage, 'why you had them at all--seeing that you can get whatever you want out of those bottles. Why don't you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus while you're about it?'
Mustapha Mond laughed. 'Because we have no wish to have our throats cut,' he answered. 'We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn't fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas--that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!' he repeated.
The Savage tried to imagine it, not very successfully.
'It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work--go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized--but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle--an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course,' the Controller meditatively continued, 'goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It's obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing.'
'What was that?' asked the Savage.
Mustapha Mond smiled. 'Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen.'
The Savage sighed, profoundly.
'The optimum population,' said Mustapha Mond, 'is modelled on the iceberg--eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.'
'And they're happy below the water line?'
'Happier than above it. Happier than your friends here, for example.' He pointed.
'In spite of that awful work?'
'Awful? They don't find it so. On the contrary, they like it. It's light, it's childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True,' he added, 'they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.' Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. 'And why don't we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure. It's the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes--because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science.'
'Do you remember that bit in King Lear?' said the Savage at last: '"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us; the dark and vicious place where thee he got cost him his eyes," and Edmund answers--you remember, he's wounded, he's dying--"Thou hast spoken right; 'tis true. The wheel is come full circle; I am here." What about that, now? Doesn't there seem to be a God managing things, punishing, rewarding?'
'Well, does there?' questioned the Controller in his turn. 'You can indulge in any number of pleasant vices with a freemartin and run no risks of having your eyes put out by your son's mistress. "The wheel is come full circle; I am here." But where would Edmund be nowadays? Sitting in a pneumatic chair, with his arm round a girl's waist, sucking away at his sex-hormone chewing-gum and looking at the feelies. The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.'
'Are you sure?' asked the Savage. 'Are you quite sure that the Edmund in that pneumatic chair hasn't been just as heavily punished as the Edmund who's wounded and bleeding to death? The gods are just. Haven't they used his pleasant vices as an instrument to degrade him?'
'Degrade him from what position? As a happy, hard-working, goods-consuming citizen he's perfect. Of course, if you choose some other standard than ours, then perhaps you might say he was degraded. But you've got to stick to one set of postulates. You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.'
'But value dwells not in particular will,' said the Savage. 'It holds his estimate and dignity as well wherein 'tis precious of itself as in the prizer.'
'Come, come,' protested Mustapha Mond, 'that's going rather far, isn't it?'
'If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices. You'd have a reason for bearing things patiently, for doing things with courage. I've seen it with the Indians.'
'I'm sure you have,' said Mustapha Mond. 'But then we aren't Indians. There isn't any need for a civilized man to bear anything that's seriously unpleasant. And as for doing things--Ford forbid that he should get the idea into his head. It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own.'
'What about self-denial, then? If you had a God, you'd have a reason for self-denial.'
'But industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.'
'You'd have a reason for chastity!' said the Savage, blushing a little as he spoke the words.
'But chastity means passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the end of civilization. You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.'
'But God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a God...'
'My dear young friend,' said Mustapha Mond, 'civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended--there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears--that's what soma is.'"
Who the hell actually *enjoys* being intelligent? Sure, there's a sense of superiority that comes with it, but it doesn't actually make you happy on its own.
People generally enjoy having high status.
To some extent. But what people really hate is the gap between their social status and the social status they think they deserve.
And having high intelligence can fill your head with a feeling from an early age that you deserve high status. If you fail to feel as high-status in adulthood as you did in third grade, you'll probably be pretty miserable about it.
There's something to be said for going into your adult life without a whole bunch of beliefs about how amazing you're going to be.
Yes, but there are specific deprivations associated with low status (e.g. in the USA) that I don't think are present even for the epsilons in BNW. Yeah, they take orders, but I don't see them being humiliated or terrified, or deprived of food or sex.
I enjoy it. There's probably some element of smugness, but also looking for good logical associations is like flying over a landscape and finding the pretty parts. I would miss it if I couldn't do it. If I were (without changing) in the bottom 10% for intelligence, I would still like it. I would opt for being more intelligent if it were available to me.
A lot of people like walking. They don't need to be superior walkers.
>also looking for good logical associations is like flying over a landscape and finding the pretty parts.
Nice! Reminds me of Newton's:
>I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
I enjoy it in a sense that it allows me to solve problems. A few weeks ago I was literally jumping with joy because I found a solution to a stubborn problem plaguing the project I was working on. The sense of elation is way disproportional to any possible tangible benefit (it's not like my job was threatened or anything).
But maybe I'm mistaking the pleasure of an accomplishment with that of being intelligent.... hard to separate the two in this case.
I suffered a few types of injury, and am less intelligent than I used to be. I miss it.
Intelligence enables a great many joys and pleasures that are otherwise inaccessible. For those with learning difficulties, there are fewer options and their world is a smaller one.
It's hard to imagine wanting to deliberately shrink your world. Brave New World is being heavily discussed, but the relevant work here is Flowers for Algernon.
Compare also: "who the hell actually enjoys money? Sure, there's a sense of superiority that comes with it, but it doesn't actually make you happy on its own."
I enjoy being able to pursue intellectual interests that I otherwise couldn't, including my job. COVID brain fog was very frustrating for me because so many of the things I normally enjoy weren't accessible.
When I read it all the weird child sexuality stuff seemed clumsily and unnecessarily forced exactly in order to elicit reflexive disgust reaction.
Yeah, I think Huxley pulls a couple of things like that. He likens the deltas to maggots for no good reason. He has a dance in, IIRC, Westminster cathedral, which I suspect for UK audiences is intended to trigger a "sacrilege!" reaction. _My_ reaction to all of these is "different times, different mores, WTF is the big deal?".
I loved Brave New World as a kid specifically because it makes you ask questions like whether it's better to be smart or accurately informed or better to be happy. I decided that I'd rather be the savage than happy, but if you come out in a different place, I don't have a strong basis to argue.
>I never got why people consider Brave New World dsytopic.
Generally agreed, albeit with some caveats. See my comment at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative/comment/56490956
David Pearce has an excellent video on the knee-jerk "Brave New World" objection that proposals to technologically optimize valence often face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpKTPgg8I68
If I remember the novel correctly, even people who were following the soma regimen exactly still had to get treatments to experience the rush of serious emotion or of pregnancy occasionally. But yes, part of the point of the novel, not contradicted by Huxley later favoring psychedelics, is that a drug that just induces happiness doesn't create a meaningful life. We already know that opiates induce overwhelming feelings of love and happiness in users and no one thinks of an opium den as an ideal society.
Sounds like we just need a drug that stimulate the feeling of 'meaning' in addition to 'happiness'. But this would be a horrible piece of sci-fi so such a book would never get published or at least would never be popular. It's impossible to write a story in a world where there's no suffering and no downsides to the lack of suffering.
Yes, I agree that Huxley pulls a bait-and-switch in Brave New World. If soma _actually_ made people happy, then, as you say, a lot of the characters' actions make no sense.
In the context of the current post: soma _almost_ works, but it is portrayed as interfering a bit too much with adaptive functioning. The case of Jo Cameron indeed strongly suggests that some sort of "mood brightening" that _doesn't_ interfere with adaptive functioning is possible.
I think that, as _described_, Brave New World, with some fairly minor changes (replacing the deltas and epsilons with microprocessors), looks like quite a livable place. Consider the things that _aren't_ in BNW: paupers, incels, bible/koran-thumpers, wars (though the formation process was enormously bloody), and population growth. Yes, BNW loses scientific progress and high art. I agree with Mustafa Mond that the trade-off is worth it.
Unlike 1984, BNW is not "a boot stamping on a human face, forever". Peace, promiscuity, full employment, everyone engineered to fit the job they are designed for, soma, and a stable population, are nothing to sneer at. Remember that our economy (I'm writing from the USA) has pushed something like half of the workforce into the precariat.
I think the main problem with BNW is that it looks too much like a command economy - and those tend to become, not stable and prosperous, but murderous failures (Maoist China, USSR, North Korea, Cambodia). BNW's hatcheries count on being able to crank out the right mix of alphas through epsilons, and even the right mix of specialists, _decades_ before their labor is needed. I doubt that that is workable. The predestinators' task looks impossible to me.
BNW also portrays its upper management as _actually_ acting in the service of their society and ideology. "Happiness is a hard master--particularly _other_ people's happiness." I doubt that this is stable. Commissars are often corrupt.
Overall, BNW looks to me less like a dystopia (except for the deltas and epsilons) than like an unreachable utopia.
I think giving up scientific progress at any foreseeable point is way too much. Eventually we may discover all there is to now, but until then exchanging a positive rate for a level seems like a fool's bargain.
Many Thanks! I do indeed see giving up scientific progress as one of the largest downsides to BNW.
It is a trickier question than just a binary choice. Even in BNW, _some_ scientific progress is allowed, albeit heavily constrained. Even in our world, some fields are considered "solved problems" (or sometimes "past the point of diminishing returns") and funding for work on them essentially stops. And occasionally this choice turns out to be a mistake, and there is some important information that would have been found by further work in a "solved" field, which gets missed because the work isn't done. Science is, of course, always probing for information that we don't know yet.
Maybe one way to think about this is that in our world we choose which fields of science to pursue by balancing anticipated gains (unavoidably unknown) and funding costs. BNW could be thought of as looking at social disruption costs as well as funding costs.
Adam Cadre similarly thought it wasn't a dystopia, although he also believed Huxley intended it to be one: https://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html
Many Thanks! I concur with Cadre that "The problem for Huxley is that Mond is right. " And not just about sexuality. To my mind, perhaps the most damning exchange is:
> "In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
> "All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
> "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.
> "I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
In my view, John Savage comes off as a prize idiot in this exchange.
( I have more detailed comments re BNW earlier in this thread, in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative/comment/56490956 )
I think there are Darwinian reasons to believe John Savage is correct (about unhappiness, specifically).
Many Thanks! If Jo Cameron didn't exist, or, more generally, examples of people who are happier than usual, yet equally adaptive and functional, then I would agree with you. To my mind, the crucial question is whether, or to what degree, unhappiness is necessary as a _signal_ as part of adaptive behavior.
It isn't very surprising that some people are born unable to sense pain. Any subsystem in our bodies has critical components, and it isn't surprising to see a failure mode. And it isn't surprising that people who completely lack pain sensors tend to do themselves severe damage and die early (presumably with Darwinian selection removing their genes from the pool, as you noted).
It _is_ surprising that the mechanisms of pain and unhappiness can be partially disabled _without_ damaging adaptation, as in Jo Cameron's case. To the extent that this is feasible it makes perfectly good sense to do so.
And John Savage goes _way_ overboard in seeking unhappiness _even by mechanisms that we successfully thwart today_. Claiming syphilis, starvation, lice, and typhoid is idiocy.
The fact that Jo Cameron is so unusual indicates to me that it probably isn't adaptive.
> Claiming syphilis, starvation, lice, and typhoid is idiocy.
True if he's rejecting modern health measures. Not necessarily if that's part of a larger package he can't pick & choose from. After all, the past had those things and was able to overcome them because it had scientific progress (one of the things being given up).
Many Thanks!
>The fact that Jo Cameron is so unusual indicates to me that it probably isn't adaptive.
Oops! I think the general discussion of her case has been using "adaptive" in an either nonstandard or ambiguous way. I agree that in the _Darwinian_ sense of "adaptive", the fact that her condition is so rare implies that it isn't adaptive. In the broader sense of more or less the opposite of damaging or counterproductive, I think Cameron's condition is at least not damaging adaptation in the way that people born with zero pain sensitivity are damaged.
>True if he's rejecting modern health measures.
Many Thanks!
>Not necessarily if that's part of a larger package he can't pick & choose from.
Ok. It depends on what all the components of BNW's package are. They are portrayed as having a much more capable biomedical technology than ours. Mond's list goes well beyond what we can prevent, treat, or cure. Also, while science is _controlled_ in BNW, it isn't described as having being brought to a dead stop. Even if it was a package deal, I still think Savage is a fool for rejecting it.
Well we know that he intended it to be one. He has said so.
And whether it is a dystopia or not is a bit ill-defined because Huxley has described the world in an inconsistent fashion so whether it's a dystopia or not depends a bit on which descriptions you go with -- but it's certainly not a good argument against drugs that produce happiness.
>Huxley has described the world in an inconsistent fashion so whether it's a dystopia or not depends a bit on which descriptions you go with
Agreed. There is also a lot that isn't described. We don't get e.g. a good picture of what the standard of living of e.g. the gammas is. Yeah, they are lower in the hierarchy than alphas or betas - but are they deprived in any sense that would pain them? They aren't short of food or sex (or presumably not sleep?). Any comment on my comment of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative/comment/56490956 ?
Where did Huxley say this?
Regarding livestock suffering, I suspect we could get a decent fraction of the way there just by feeding them powerful opiates. Sure, as a person being a heroin addict isn't great it's not unpleasant even in awful conditions when you are actually on the drug and even though respiratory depression does seem to cap maximal doses some opiates show that affect to smaller degrees and a cow raised for meat only needs to get through a couple years.
Yes, there might be concerns about it affecting the people who consume the meat, but I don't think this is beyond the ability of us to solve, e.g., just ensuring it breaks down relatively quickly or is somehow unable to cross human BBB. And since there are crazy powerful mu agonists I think it could even be done relatively cheaply.
You might need to add an appetite stimulant but why not.
My guess is that the main barrier other than cost is that you can't let farmers have opiates because there's too much risk they'd steal or sell them.
I mean yes that exists but
1) It begs the question of how bad that outcome really would be. It's not like you can't buy illicit opiates on the street in any metropolis at rates even poor people can afford *initially*. Given that methadone/buprenorphine maintenance are how we treat addicts its not clear to me that shifting the profit from cartels to us farmers and lowering prices isn't a net win.
2) If you don't agree, I suspect that if they were infused into some kind of unappetizing feed that was also spiked with some kind of drug humans found unpleasant that wouldn't be all that appealing to buy (yes you could extract but is that really that much easier than just meth synthesis)?
You don't need Scott to agree though, but politicians, to whom the optics of turning farmers into cartels is an obvious non-starter.
But it would give us Iowa whitebread farmer gangster rap! Weird Al was just the start...
But I should have said that yes, I agree there are reasons people don't do this but I just wanted to point out that I think it is largely a matter of how much we care about animal suffering,
So I'm still 100% behind this idea and think it's a great thing but I just wanted to note that if we cared enough we might be able to do it now.
Don't we usually get around this with other drugs (including with controlled substances) by creating a vet version of the drug? Maybe it doesn't have the same GMP requirements, so it's not technically ingestible for humans?
I suspect the other major problem with feeding opiates to livestock is that they'd all have huge amounts of constipation. Then to fix that, you'd have to give them the opiate-specific anti-constipation drugs (which work really well!) and at that point you're adding a lot of vet-related expenses that farmers can't afford.
There might be multiple overlapping barriers to using this approach: aforementioned concern about large quantities of opiates being sold/stolen, total cost, negative effects of opiates on the nutritional value, safety, and/or taste of meat/animal products, as well as the public/consumer opposition to consuming meat from animals on heavy doses of strong drugs. Given the scale of intense suffering associated with factory farming, we obviously keep our fingers crossed for the emergence of novel and complementary technical interventions that may help minimize it.
Yes, I didn't mean to raise it as a reason not to pursue your approach. Exactly why it hasn't been pursued isn't that important -- people just seem to find the idea of drugging cows unappealing/objectionable even if they shouldn't.
Though I do suspect that there will be some resistance from the anti-GMO people to your solution and this example here suggests it may take some effort to convince them -- but still sounds like the most promising approach.
Thanks! The edits we have been researching should not require us to introduce species-foreign genes. In consequence, the produced lines of livestock animals should not be classified as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) according to the new regulatory paradigms.
Ohh really? So even in Europe that won't be so labelled? How does that work?
Surely you can't just get around the GMO label by insisting you started with a gene from that species and made modifications...after all every gene can be turned into any other with enough modifications. Does that mean you first have to find a member of the species with that exact gene sequence?
Also, where can we donate to this project?
Check out the UK's recently passed precision breeding bill:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9557/
Thank you, but doesn't that suggest the opposite for the EU, yes it loosens the rules in the UK but it seems to imply that the EU rules would require such changes to be regulated/labeled as GMO.
The very cynical way to overcome this is to do away with cattle and pigs and livestock as food animals, and instead have clones of Jo Cameron or the genetically-engineered human embryos as food sources instead. They'll be just fine in factory farm conditions as they'll heal fast from any injuries, won't feel pain, and won't be distressed by the conditions they live in. We can even intervene to make them stupider than average intelligence in case any bleeding-heart types have qualms about keeping pain-free human animals as livestock.
Ha, excellent point...but can't Cameron feel emotional pain?
Does she, though? That's the question raised by her stoic attitude to her husband's suicide. She might only feel rudimentary emotional pain compared to baseline humans. Anyway, that's what making the clones dumber is all about, to keep soft-hearted types like you happy! 🤣 "Too stupid to feel sad" our motto!
Ha, well if you aren't soft hearted why bother at all?
But re: emotional pain she could also just be British.
We're not getting clear information about her actual physical and emotional states. Obviously it's in the interests of the aims of the Far Out Initiative to claim that Mrs. Cameron is a totally normal person *except* she feels no pain and heals without scars, so isolating the magic genes and incorporating them into future humans would have no downside at all.
But from other accounts, she does have scars because of lack of pain perception, and her account of her reaction to her husband's suicide can be read in different ways. Maybe she's a good special needs teacher because she's kind and patient - and maybe she's kind and patient because of emotional blunting, so she can listen to a kid having a screaming meltdown and react with apathy instead of the impatience or concern another person might feel. "Jimmy's been yelling and crying for a solid hour and now he's blue in the face!" "Yeah, so? I care about that why?" "Well, you're just so... patient?"
Maybe she really does experience sadness and the rest of it the way we do, and in that case she doesn't have the claimed lack of anxiety and distress so the effects would not be present if we managed to copy her genome. There's too much on the positive side claimed by the Far Outs and not enough hard data from other sources to be able to make an informed decision on all the "we can totes do away with all suffering of all sorts!" aspirations.
Since I've been recommended to start the topic over: Until zero-suffering long-termists start talking about population collapse and dysgenics, I'm not going to take them seriously.
Why are these more important for zero-suffering long-termists than anyone else?
I think it might help if you go into a bit more detail about how these things relate?
I wouldn't put it nearly as strongly as MA_browsing, but while reading the post I started thinking about population collapse too (perhaps for different reasons). Population collapse, which seems imminent, likely means economic collapse because the modern economy relies on an enormous amount of specialization which in turn requires enormous numbers of smart people. Figuring out and implementing a zero-suffering solution will likely require an advanced economy, so population collapse would probably undermine the whole scheme.
Of course, many EAers have strong beliefs that AI is going to do many/most jobs in the near future, so population collapse is understandably less of a concern for them.
"there’s also more to life than having money."
...Statements like this makes me think of an old Woody Allen quote, I have forgotten from which movie:
"The rich do not have money problems. But they have all the other problems."
Meaning that they, like everybody else, struggle with their own or their relatives mental problems; from impossible beauty standards; from not feeling loved; from jealousy; from cancer or other somatic diseases; from the inevitability of death; from family members that hate each other; from children who have problems in school; and on and on and on.
...it seems to me that so will the superhappy.
The idea behind the superhappiness is that, using a wide range of interventions, we strive to shift the ordinary pain-pleasure axis (from -10 to +10) maximally close to the maximally adaptive gradients of bliss (for example, with -5 to +10/+15 as an intermediate milestone, and then all the way above the hedonic zero). The object-level problems you have listed can, and naturally should, be solved in synergistic and parallel ways.
Well...many, perhaps most, problems of the type I mentioned cannot be solved. Our task is to live with them. Which requires something else than both ability to solve problems and the emotion called happiness.
Food and warfare seemed like problems that couldn't possibly be solved in a lasting way for most of human history, and they still haven't been completely, but the past century or two have seen remarkable progress. Maybe those others will similarly become tractable once the right technical foundations are in place.
Well in a sense, that can-do attitude is an attitude I like/admire/respect/love looking across the Atlantic to the US: How about trying to fix things instead of learning to accept them! To ((mis)quote Bertold Brecht: " To forget, rather than to fulfil, your wishes counts as [European] wisdom." That said, if you read my list of problems, I think you will agree that even for a US American, not all of them are fixable:-). ....
>Our task is to live with them.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "task" here? When I think of a task, I think of taking some action. But you are talking about problems which can't be solved (at least at any given point in time, level of technology etc.). So at least the action of fixing the problem is not available.
>Which requires something else than both ability to solve problems and the emotion called happiness.
Is the "something else" part of what you mean by "task"? Could you elaborate on what you have in mind?
You could say it is about cultivating a certain approach to life. “Acceptance” is its core tenet.
What is sometimes referred to as Frans of Assisi’s prayer captures some of it: “God, give me strength to change what can be changed, patience to accept what cannot be changed, and wisdom enough to always be able to differentiate between them.”
“Keep calm and carry on”, the slogan introduced by the British during the London Blitz in 1940/41 when family members were killed left, right and center captures another aspect of it. (I notice that Jo Cameron is 76 years old so this slogan was probably part of her childhood, and it fits with how she dealt with her husband’s mental illness and death.)
From a psychological perspective, it is about developing resilience faced with the trials and tribulations in life that necessarily will catch up with all of us in the end. To learn to go gently into that good night, and accept the dying of the light. Despite Dylan Thomas encouraging his father to do the opposite.
Many Thanks! That sounds like it is sometimes sensible, and sometimes the opposite is sensible, and sometimes there is a third alternative:
>Know when to walk away.
>Know when to run.
and sometimes that is sensible. And, if we had Huxley's Soma, sometimes that would be the sensible thing to use.
Well. "don't go there" as well as "just walk away" can both often be sensible life advice.
But not always.
As for Huxley's Soma, I am more on the side of The Savage.
...come to think of it, gratefulness is adjacent to acceptance.
tldr; Adding a positive constant to one's utility function does no damage to one's decisions, but it feels better! :-)
I mean, that seems good to me. I'm one of those people who thinks life without challenges and overcoming adversity is meaningless, but it also seems to me that the current amount of challenges and adversity that most people face is greater than neccessary in order to obtain meaning. Superhappy people who still have other problems seems like a good thing, if they aren't horribly suffering they can focus on more meaningful challenges.
Jo Cameron had "major problems", like a husband who suffered from severe depression and then committed suicide. Yet reportedly, this did not impair her happiness in the least.
I think "happiness" is a misplaced word in this context. Perhaps due to the poverty of language to differentiate emotional nuances. The way she dealt with her husband's problems and her own grief is ordinary expected adult behavior. "It is what it is" . That is the socially expected way to react. I am not Scottish, but this is the way adults are expected to react also in Scandinavia where I live, and the rest of Europe is not much different. Nor is US mainstream culture, if the emotional tone of 10.000 western movies is any guide. (An empirical question, admittedly.)
But she said that her response was atypical, and seemed "cold" to everyone else, despite them sharing the same Scottish culture.
(Yes many cultures value "sucking it up", but this obviously depends on the level of suffering. People will tell you to suck it up rather than whine about the toe you just stubbed, but they won't tell you to suck it up if your child just died.)
Yeah well, but can we trust how she is referred..Perhaps, perhaps not. When she is quoted, she expresses herself in a way that is a socially "mainstream" way to express yourself where I live. Also, to "such it up" is not quite the right emotional tone, either, where I am from... emotionally It is more akin to a type of fatalism, although that is a bit too strong again..What I am driving at, is that instead of going "down" to her genetic level to find the cause of her attitude, perhaps it is more fruitful to go "up" to the (Scottish) culture she is raised and live in. If so, hunting for genes and the like is less promising. But by all means, have a go at it.
Another way to end the horrors of factory farms - and of our animal labs - is to increase average human compassion by 70% or something.
Awful things are done to animals because a critical mass of people don't care enough about animal suffering.
I think some people are thinking about ways to raise average human compassion 70%, but it's much harder to force humans to get an intervention than to put it into animals, and it's unclear if it would have other negative effects (eg children would be spoiled because nobody could bear to discipline them, or whatever)
True, excessive compassion can be debilitating. Yet I know many compassionate vegan folk who raise great kids, who seem quite functional.
I agree, I just think changing a trait in the population is more dangerous than having a few people with the trait. I know many great religious people, but a world where everyone was 70% more religious would be pretty crazy.
Maybe everyone 70% religious "in the right way" would be great, but perhaps that's a tautology on my part.
Everyone 70% more Buddhist might be just what we want here - detached from suffering, yet full of compassion for beings not yet on the Great Raft. I admit there's a paradox in this Buddhist ideal I've never understood, but why should I? I'm far from Enlightened.
You want to decrease animal suffering by increasing human suffering by making people more aware of animal suffering?
Once we stop doing terrible things to them, our own [compassionate] suffering would reduce too.
It's just the standard pain response, extended across bodies, extended inter-specially. I feel their pain, so stop the source of that pain. The result is no pain.
That's two different solutions, though:
(1) The animal is suffering physically, I feel their pain, stop the physical suffering by improving the bad conditions so the environment does not stimulate pain, now they are not in pain so I am not in pain
(2) The animal is suffering physically, I feel their pain, stop the physical suffering by engineering the animal not to experience any pain despite environmental stimuli, now they are not in pain so I am not in pain
I think people would still experience empathetic pain in the second case, because we do not think it right that a creature be treated badly and simply 'saved' from pain due to the ability to feel it being removed. I think animal rights activists and vegans would still want to shut down factory farms even if the chickens were proven not to experience pain (see the group on here recommended for funding who take lawsuits about factory farm plants in breach of regulations, with the ultimate aim being to make it so tedious, expensive, and nuisance-causing that people will stop farming animals).
https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/
When I think about my own response to cages filled with pain-insensitive birds, I empathize not with their pain [there is none], but with their reduced form of life, all the ways a bird can thrive that are denied them. A meat machine is a pretty degraded form of existence. But if our choice is simply between meat machines who can feel pain, and those who can't, I gotta choose the latter, and bet most people would, vegan or not. . .
I'm curious though, do most of those people prefer no birds at all instead of degraded birds that can't feel pain? What about degraded people?
If they were blissful meat machines, I guess you could make the Utility case for their existence. But I don't like the total picture, personally, where we've reduced billions of a once free bird into a static means to our appetitive end.
Many of us thought about this, but even if technologically feasible, it would be extremely difficult for the game-theoretic reasons: 70-99.99% of population with the kind-spirited and compassionate attitudes resembling these exhibited by the Williams syndrome patients could be exploited by the remaining 0.01-30% in ways that would make society largely dysfunctional and prone to large scales of suffering.
Indeed I wonder if some version of that dysfunction is what's been going on a long long time.
I don't think it follows, what disadvantage will the kind-spirited have that would allow the others to exploit them ?
If the general population is more compassionate, I expect more compassionate leaders (or at least leader with more compassionate political program), to be elected.
I also expect more cooperations between more compassionate groups.
Which I think will be two important advantages.
One disadvantage is that the more compassionate will spend more resources on others than on themselves, but most of it will also go to the more compassionate if they are the majority.
So we can expect the less compassionate to get richer than the more ones but I think we can also expect a better general distribution of resources, and a harder time to use this for political powers.
On a game-theoretic perspective, the more compassionate has some disadvantages, but they have it now, if more people are more compassionate, this disadvantages doesn't increase, quite the opposite I think.
Easier to lower the fringe's compassion by 50% or so. Arguments keep cropping up on the subject because a minority of people care way too much about animal suffering.
Perhaps this minority are a Correction for society's vast functional indifference to animal suffering. Someone's gotta make up for that . .
Perhaps they're an anomaly caused by society's over-tolerance of selfish behavior.
People love to set morality as "whatever I think by default".
I would say the most relevant selfish behaviour here is society's treatment of non-humans.
Unfortunately I don't think it would work well, because you have a lot of other ways to avoid changing anything even if you are compassionate :
- You can just not think of it, if you don't think of it, the compassion will not help.
- You can start to believe the situation isn't what it really is, like thinking animal don't feel pain, or if it is too much of a stretch, think they feel pain, but it isn't really suffering, or it is suffering, but not really like our suffering because they are not self-conscious or something. Or in fact they are ok, how can we know what they like or not ? etc…
- You can also be more compassionate on average, but not for some groups.
- You can dislike the situation, but feel completely powerless and unable to change anything.
I think we would have a better chance with more intellectual honesty and more courage, even if more compassion would still help.
I'm not sure I buy that Cameron's condition is better and still within a desirable range of human condition. She doesn't cry at her husband's death but does for sad movies? Something does not compute. Perhaps she doesn't really feel sadness as genuinely as most humans do but just responds to cues like swelling music that tells her she's supposed to feel sad.
Maybe it's possible that it can be a more logical position to take to not be sad at someone's death who was so close to you, but to me, that doesn't sound better, and it doesn't sound human. It sounds too cold to be human. She might have surface features of being a kind person, but if she really does not feel suffering to that extent, then I don't think that long term, her interests really do align with humanity's. It sounds like she's a character right out of The Giver.
Edit: Put another way, if Scott is saying that she is well adjusted and moral, how do we know that she is well-adjusted and moral to the degree that we think people really should be? Would her morality hold up under all edge cases and pressure tests that we would want a normal well-adjusted human's morality to hold up under?
The character of media reports makes them, obviously, less useful than the detailed microphenomenological interviews. One plausible (though not necessarily true) explanation could concern the difference between the painful grief in response to a tragic life event vs. intentionally watching sad scenes to enjoy the moving experience.
We are aware of at least one person who, through other means, achieved a very high degree of resilience towards suffering - and when they lost their close family members, classical grief was replaced by the feelings of tenderness, compassion, and care.
> She doesn't cry at her husband's death but does for sad movies? Something does not compute. Perhaps she doesn't really feel sadness as genuinely as most humans do but just responds to cues like swelling music that tells her she's supposed to feel sad.
This is also something that comes out in the infamous profile of Sanderson: https://www.wired.com/story/brandon-sanderson-is-your-god/ towards the end. He too seems to be pain-insensitive to at least some degree, but also oddly emotionally inert and seems almost to be writing to try to understand emotions.
> Would her morality hold up under all edge cases and pressure tests that we would want a normal well-adjusted human's morality to hold up under?
The morality of the vast majority of humans doesn't hold up under edge cases and pressure tests I would want a normal well-adjusted human's to hold up under.
And feeling very sad when you lost somebody is quite orthogonal to morality I think, violent criminals can feel it, while some perfectly moral people not.
I am not convinced about this narrative of Jo Cameron. Ok, she doesn't feel pain due to some genetic quirk. So what? Apparently she still senses touch and it helps her to avoid most serious injuries.
No pain during childbirth is not that surprising. My mom says that she didn't experienced any pain during childbirth. She had 8 children and they all popped out quickly and painlessly. Otherwise she has completely normal pain sensitivity.
Being able to go to work next day after the death of the husband? Many autistic people are like that. It doesn't mean they don't feel sadness or don't suffer from depression. They just haven't learned socially accepted reactions to life events. Often they are criticized as being too cold and emotionless during tragic events. It doesn't mean they are not affected by them. They just process these moments differently.
Also no pain after various surgeries, and was investigated by UCL researchers who did various painful things to her and confirmed she didn't feel pain at them.
Also, I think your mom might be unusual in some way, I'm not sure what.
I believe Jo Cameron experienced no pain. Maybe never been depressed too but hard to categorically say that she has never experienced suffering. Suffering can be of different types. Maybe she just categorized it differently from other people.
Maybe unusual, but not unheard of. Kaspars' description of his mom sounds a lot like my wife's description of her mom: many kids all delivered painlessly. (And his avatar image doesn't look like any of my brothers-in-law.)
I've wondered why there isn't more evolutionary pressure for women to give birth easily.
Maybe because that pain is not significant in the grand scheme of things, i.e., compared to all the trouble needed for taking care of children. It may be severe but giving birth to children with bigger brains and more mental capacity is what ensured better survivability.
I've seen it explained as bigger human brains means bigger heads so longer development in the womb and harder to move through the birth canal:
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/why-is-human-childbirth-so-painful
"This strange mélange of two basic adaptive strategies—an active brain with an inept body—is widely thought to have evolved because our unusually large brains and our peculiar, bipedal mode of getting around produce conflicting demands. This explanation is called the obstetrical dilemma. In humans, the size of the head of term fetuses is a tight fit for the mother’s bony birth canal. According to the obstetrical hypothesis, we need a wide pelvis to bear big-brained babies but a narrow one to walk or run efficiently. The compromise between these opposing needs is to carry babies as long as possible so that the brain can grow in utero and then—just before the baby’s head gets too big to fit through the birth canal—deliver the infant earlier relative to when other mammals deliver theirs.
...The obstetrical hypothesis is neat and readily comprehended, which helps explain its widespread acceptance, but new evidence casts doubt on it. A recent paper by Holly Dunsworth of the University of Rhode Island and colleagues reexamines the predictions and evidence supporting the obstetrical hypothesis and suggests an alternative explanation. For instance, human gestation is often said to be short relative to that of other primates, based on how much more growth is needed in neonates to achieve adult brain size. The shorter duration of gestation on first glance supports a prediction of the obstetrical hypothesis—that birth has evolved to occur earlier in hominids so that the baby is born before its head is too large to pass through the birth canal. Actually, the duration of human pregnancy (38–40 weeks) is absolutely longer than that of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans (32 weeks for chimps and 37–38 weeks for the latter two). When Dunsworth and her colleagues took maternal body size into account, which in primates is positively correlated with gestation length, they showed that human pregnancy is also relatively longer compared to that in great apes. No wonder that the third trimester seems so long to many pregnant women."
https://bigthink.com/health/childbirth-painful/
"Human childbirth is a relatively painful and complicated process in the animal kingdom.
Unlike other primates that are able to give birth unassisted, human mothers usually need help from their family or community to deliver a baby.
...A study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposes that human childbirth is difficult because of evolutionary trade-offs that ultimately help protect organs in the body.
The main trade-off for women centers on the pelvic floor, which is a group of muscles that stretches from the pubic bone to the tailbone. These muscles help stabilize the spine, support the womb, and control bladder and bowel functions. The pelvic floor also stretches during childbirth, allowing the baby to pass more easily through the birth canal."
The Guinea Pig has a similar problem and solves it by temporarily dissolving the pubic symphysis. (If the first pregnancy occurs too late, this process does not work properly, which is fatal. This is only a problem for domesticated guinea pigs, as wild guinea pigs are not sex segregated). I wonder why we did not evolve this - perhaps it's incompatible with bipedalism.
Cutting the pubic symphysis - symphysiostomy - is an outdated procedure which was used before caesarian section became more safe. Unfortunately it causes long term problems. There was a scandal in Ireland, where it continued to be used for religious reasons (it allows more births) without complete consent.
If "easily" means "painlessly," what would be the survival advantage? The physical risks of human childbirth seem to be just the cost of our big brains, as Deiseach notes below; but the subjective pain,, while unpleasant, but doesn't kill the woman, may encourage her to assume a more favorable position for delivery, and doesn't seem to be memorably unpleasant enough to motivate most people to avoid sex thereafter. It's not clear how selection pressures would operate there.
I think you're overthinking it? If giving birth is painless, you're more likely to want to do it multiple times and thus have more descendants? The effect would be reduced nowadays with epidurals etc, but I probably not to 0.
I think that only applies nowadays, when we have contraceptives and things to do that are more fun than sex.
There are women who give birth easily. This demonstrates that there is variation available for evolution to select from.
While childbirth is something that is generally recovered from, it can be debilitating or deadly. As I understand it, even small advantages can be evolutionarily stable.
But does it give them more children and grandchildren?
I can see evolutionary pressure to not die during childbirth. But for the majority of human history, I think that pain during childbirth would not affect the birth rate at all. And people who avoid giving birth due to pain would tend to remove themselves from the gene pool.
And even if there were pressure, evolution might have selected human females for a greater capacity to recover from this particular type of suffering, rather than simply removing the suffering. It's not always clean and efficient.
It could be explained if there is one selection pressure to have the brain larger and the pelvis smaller, and another one, to not cause too much damage at birth.
Then with random variations, some childbirths are without problems, and others are deadly, because you were near the limit.
Apparently evolution instead chose the easier path of overwhelming women's brains with all sorts of drugs during childbirth which among other things make them forget how bad it hurts so that they generally don't seek to avoid it in the future.
My two cents: Humans seem incredibly under-developed evolutionary in a variety of ways, ranging from schizophrenia (a mental condition unheard of in non-human animals), our absolutely terrible skeletons, and yes our horribly painful & often fatal (in the natural environment) pregnancies. I think many parts of the human condition are just very new on evolutionary time-scales, and evolution just hasn't had enough time to smooth out the sharp edges. See also evolutionary psychology. Mostly bunk! Humans are new, we shouldn't expect evolutionary optimality to be all that predictive.
How would we detect schizophrenia in other species?
There are other genetic conditions that lead to painless childbirth:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/21/health/childbirth-pain-threshold-study-scli-scn-intl/index.html
I don't know much about this. I remember this because about 2 weeks ago I had a discussion with my mother how people are different and during the conversation she mentioned as an example how she cannot understand childbirth pain because she never experienced it. And then she proceeded with graphical description how it happened with her first child. As it was the practice in the old Soviet maternity hospitals, women given birth were put on high tables and while the midwife was washing her hands, the child just popped out and luckily was caught by the midwife in time before it fell down from that high table.
Otherwise my mother is an average woman with normal pain sensitivity, her ups and downs, all range of human emotions and so on, with the exception that she had enormous energy of bringing up 8 children during Soviet times when getting basic things was much more difficult than today.
Then she told me a story about another case with another women giving birth to twins and the first child fell down from that high table and died because the midwife didn't caught him in time. So, apparently there are more women for whom giving birth is less painful but not too many, otherwise midwives would be better prepared for such cases. But maybe I shouldn't entirely trust this story because it is a hearsay. I trust my mother's story however, because it was her own experience. And having 8 children, she had previously detailed her experience in the maternity hospitals.
I think there's a lot of conflation here between "pain" and "suffering", largely because many people can't experience pain without also experiencing suffering, and so treat them as synonyms.
This remind me of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/
When I was small, my grandmother decided to give me a copy of Paradise Lost, but accidentally bought a Jehovah's Witness book of the same name. The picture above of 'Reprogramming Predators' reminds me strongly of the illustrations in it, showing Adam, Eve and all sorts of animals living peacefully together. Almost makes me wonder if there is a religious reprogramming route towards the same end?
It's from Isaiah 6:
"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
and a little child shall lead them.
7 The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,
and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den.
9 They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea."
As Scott mentioned in another comment, the imagery of the vegetarian lion was drawn directly from Isaiah.
"My other disagreement with neurodiversity advocates is that they insist no neurotype is better than any other."
This feels like a generalisation. Maybe some people say this but I think there are more reasonable positions within the neurodiversity movement. I see myself as a neurodiversity advocate. I think that some differences are positives that can be celebrated, some differences are only harmful because the world is geared to neurotypicals, some differences are advantages in some contexts and disadvantages in others, and some differences would be bad in most contexts most of the time.
To me neurodiversity is mainly about opposing an overly reductive medical understanding of difference.
It seems to be a miscommunication around "better". All but the most extreme neurodiversity advocates readily agree that having anxiety disorder (for example) sucks and it would be more pleasant not to have them (i.e. better meaning leading to improved life outcomes). But they also believe that having anxiety disorder does not make it OK to treat them worse, or to deny them rights (i.e. better meaning morally worth more).
These two meanings of better make conversation hard sometimes. It's just a problem with language
One concern I have, which is somewhat related to the hedonic treadmill, is that we calibrate our reactions (and downstream, laws) based around how people feel about what they experience.
If no one felt pain or anxiety, would we criminalize behavior that causes (used to cause) pain and anxiety? Will we care about an emotionally, or even physically, abused spouse or child? Would the 8th Amendment become meaningless?
Right now if I see someone punching a small child I know society will react and will support me reacting to prevent that. In this future world, even if we nominally agree that people shouldn't punch anyone and definitely not a child, our desire and willingness to intervene is going to be significantly curtailed.
My feeling is that the overall cruelty in the world will grow, slowly at first and then a lot in the first generations to grow up feeling no pain, to the point that we end up roughly where we think we are now between -50 and +50, but with actual daily experiences far far worse.
Some things would become impossible; if you feel pleasure from torturing a cat, and the pleasure depends on the pain, then if the cat feels no pain you derive no pleasure. Hence it would be pointless to be cruel.
I think you have a point about neglect and casual cruelty (being cruel not because you get a kick out of it but because you don't want to spend the time or money doing the non-cruel thing) will be tolerated and maybe even increase. If my donkey/employee/child is not suffering, then I can continue on doing the thing. The argument will then have to switch to health or something, and again we can argue "yeah but he's not feeling any pain or suffering because of that bloody wound caused by galling, so why do you care?"
[joke] Omelas works via the tiny bit of sadism in us all.
Empathic concern - a warm, positive, goal-directed feeling - is distinct from empathic personal distress, and makes us feel good about helping others. You may find the following paper interesting: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-01016-017
Extrapolating from a single case, Jo is a vegan retired special needs school teacher with a highly compassionate and warm disposition. It is possible that the diminution of empathic personal distress associated with her mutations enhanced her willingness to engage in various social causes.
Or it's possible that it didn't. Working from a test case of one is extremely fraught, because we have no way to tell how much of the outcome is dependent on her or things specific to her.
While some people clearly gain enjoyment from helping others, it's uncontroversial to say that some people don't seem to feel the same and quite often seem to feel pleasure from harming others.
Yeah, but she wasn't brought up in a bubble or raised by wolves. We live in a society, as they say. She learned her values from those around her, and these are people who experienced pain, and sets of moral strictures derived over centuries from people who experienced pain.
Raise the child who feels no pain, no anxiety, and not much distress on the loss of an intimate partner in a Mafia household, and will we end up with a vegan special needs teacher?
My main worry is that she happens to be a rare combination of a) the genetic mutation, b) a genuinely nice personality, and c) a brain that didn't rewire itself to perceive pain in other ways. And that a person with only the mutation might be at least as likely to be unpleasant as anyone else, or that most other people with the mutation would still feel something close enough to pain that we couldn't distinguish it.
But that just means that more investigation is needed. I'm glad you're looking int it. :-)
> Right now if I see someone punching a small child I know society will react and will support me reacting to prevent that.
This sounds a little like arguing we should preserve a child’s capacity to suffer to curtail our impulse to mistreat them.
Maybe we could eventually find a better way than misery to regulate our behaviors that adversely affect other people.
Maybe, but there's a reason that we feel bad about people getting hurt. Empathy helps us determine what we should or should not do. If someone doesn't feel bad about what's happening to them (because they never feel bad) then someone else has less reason not to cause them harm. This seems especially obvious when the person causing harm *also doesn't feel bad* in general, so they aren't going to feel bad about the harm they're causing. They're not capable of feeling bad about doing evil.
We can hope that society suddenly becomes super rational and everyone makes the right decisions without emotional impulses and negative feelings. I sincerely doubt any of that would happen. Go read the arrest reports from where you live if you need a reality check on people doing stupid irrational things, even with a negative feedback loop that you want to remove.
When you say we need to safeguard suffering to keep people from doing “harm” to other people, what kind of harm do you mean that isn't in some way predicated on the suffering it causes? And is that harm actually greater than the problem of suffering itself?
Even if you put aside the current evils that people perpetrate on each other, the amount of suffering you have left is astounding in the form of disease, injury, sorrow., etc.
And empathy doesn’t disappear without suffering. You can share in other people’s positive feelings too. Suffering, on the other hand, is the definitive source of cruelty. It’s the leverage bad people in power use to control the less powerful. The leverage the slave owner holds over the slave is the threat of even greater misery should they disobey. The threat of greater suffering is what keeps the world’s most terrible rulers in power.
In addition to positive empathy, compassion (feeling for others without taking on their feelings) and simple preference don’t just vanish with the disappearance of human misery.
This whole argument suffers from an elision between “suffering” and “adversity.”
I think a degree of adversity is necessary to human flourishing. I think leading a life of padded comfort with no need to strive or struggle allows no chance to develop character, which as a virtue ethicist I think is central to living a full and fully human life. (And also essential to the creation and maintenance of healthy society — a strong polis depends on good moral reasoning, which in turn depends on character.)
While adversity is a necessary part of the normal human experience, I don’t think suffering per se actually is (suffering is a usual but not necessary side effect of learning to deal with adversity) but I have noticed that a lot of arguments against suffering, including here, tend to elide the difference.
The Scottish lady who doesn’t suffer certainly has experienced hardship and has learned moral character from it. She’s just given the struggle-bus the rest of us are on a skip. In another century she might be revered as a naturally spiritually gifted saint.
I think the causality as discussed here is likely swapped around — I suspect that it’s not so much that she was genetically gifted with an inability to suffer emotional pain (although obviously she seems to have a degree of that when it specifically comes to physical pain) and somehow (contra the many other folks with similarly limited ability to feel emotional pain, who end up with ASPD or similar) became a good person in spite of it.
It seems more likely to me that she was genetically gifted with profound moral insight and *that’s why* she doesn’t emotionally suffer.
In the cases of us plebes, however, it seems functionally impossible to pull apart the adversity required to learn empathy, grit, and moral character generally with the suffering that comes along with the adversity (before we’ve learned). Sort of like how it’s functionally almost impossible to pull apart bumps, scrapes, and bruises from learning to ride a bicycle.
None of this means that I or anyone else with my moral intuitions is happy to allow the hideous suffering of injured soldiers howling in pain as they lay dying on the field of battle. Please now. Adversity is necessary; hideous unremitting agony generally is not, and anyone who has developed moral character — which is usually (though not universally) developed, as mentioned above, through some degree of suffering themselves — the usual way we all learn empathy (as watching small children learn empathy tends to bear out).
Anyway. Back to work.
If the pain-free suffering-free drug or biological hack was invented, I'd happily engage in lotus-eating, and I want to see the moral argument that says I shouldn't. If suffering is not something to be approved of, why do you want me to engage in struggle for the sake of it?
Character building? Moral fibre? That's the 'suffering is good' argument by the back door. You're not supposed to just loll around on the sofa enjoying bliss, you should be out there working and being economically productive? That's the last-gasp remnants of our friend the Protestant Work Ethic, Calvinist-derived, kicking in. If I don't *have* to work for a living (in the post-miracle world), then why should I have to go out and earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, or engage in some other socially-approved activity, rather than lolling around enjoying super bliss?
Work is the curse of the Fall, if we do away with the bitter fruits of the experience, why insist on the curse remaining?
Genesis 3:
"17 And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
If everyone engages in lotus eating, who is going to be ready to help when the inevitable earthquake or plague strikes? Or does this world abolish earthquakes and plagues, too?
But that is the point: with our No-Painz Brain Implant gently pumping out a steady stream of natural heroin, we'll all sit around happily and starve to death, as we experience neither physical nor emotional pain. Earthquakes and plagues? Well that's too bad, but nobody was *hurt* by the earthquake that killed them, so that's the good part!
I grant you perfect logical consistency!
That works will with antinatalism. "Just make sure suffering is eliminated - it doesn't matter if any meaning or pleasure is left behind". But most people would like to preserve meaning and/or pleasure. At the bare minimum, some level of human agency is required to prevent suffering from reevolving once we are gone.
Yeah, as I'd mentioned before, I cannot think of a good argument against wireheading. Sure, the thought of human civilization dying out in a puff of bliss makes me unhappy *now*, but if I were wireheaded, then it wouldn't.
Well, there's no good argument against it if you would provide informed agreement to wireheading if it was offered to you. But your argument seems to work just as well if wireheading was also forced on everybody, and there seems to be plenty of good arguments against that.
Can you elucidate one such argument ?
In the jargon of neuroscience, pleasure and motivation are "doubly dissociable". But it's striking that the happiest people today typically aren't lotus-eaters. Often the happiest folk have the broadest range of appetites and pleasures, sometimes enjoyed in states of "dopaminergic overdrive". Either way, the vision of genetically raising hedonic set-points world-wide _isn't_ the idea we should become "blissed out", but rather lifting default quality of life.
Yes! I very much agree with this. Thankyou
Adversity causes the desire to avoid it, and thus brings humanity to new heights. If at some point humanity is forever free from adversity then we will have achieved the pinnacle of success.
But this is likely impossible. Think first-world problems. The adversity through which we "suffer" some of humanity may indeed still strive to overcome, but the actual challenges are less and less likely to involve our survival.
No more do we fear being eaten by lions. We build buildings that are resistant to earthquakes. We bring forth food in such profusion that obesity is a pandemic. Yet we are still subject to extraterrestrial impacts from comets and asteroids, solar flares, pollution, and various diseases.
Note this applies to humanity as a whole. Some people still get eaten by wildlife, or die in natural disasters, and many don't have enough to eat. The struggle continues, and will probably continue forever.
*Adversity causes the desire to avoid it,*
For me, adversity causes a desire to overcome it, conquer it.
Good point. I wonder if we’re already facing a deficit of adversity in the developed world, resulting in some people suffering from (and being unable to deal with) minor things that would not have bothered previous generations too much. The analogy would be stress wood - trees need some wind as they’re growing to strengthen their root networks and trunks. In its absence, as in the biosphere experiment, they sometimes just topple over under their own weight. I doubt that completely removing the experience of discomfort would be very good for us.
One strong argument about this line of reasoning would be to invoke the countless cases of people with profound moral insight who happen to suffer tremendously due to physical and/or psychological causes. Of course, it would be great to identify the hypothetical mutations that would determine deep moral insight, radically reducing the total amount of experienced suffering as a secondary effect - it just seems that the hedonic tone plays a primary role.
i think I'd prefer adversity/challenge not because it builds character or anything but just because it seems more interesting? to me compared to wireheading
or i guess think of it like a video game where you have challenge but its contrived and for the sake of fun
genetically gifted with profound moral insight sounds like a weird way of wording it. maybe you could say she was genetically gifted with enlightenment in the buddhist sense?
I'd like to see a Calvinist response to Pearce's idea. If you believe in The Fall, that life is now imperfect, and that Man's goal is to glorify God, is it okay, or even mandatory, to use a satisfactory happiness drug if one is found? Pastors do generally approve of anti-depressants and of anaesthesia for childbirth,, without saying you *must* use them to be godly. What of the happiness drug ? Forbidden, or mandatory? (both, in the sense of godliness, not law)
I think it would be hard to ground this objection philosophically. It seems like God created Evil in order for humans to be able to voluntarily choose Good (or something like this). If humans are always afraid to voluntarily choose Good because what if it messes with God's reason for including Evil in His plan, then the whole plan falls apart. My proposed solution is to assume that God always gets what He wants somehow or other, that any challenge to the Divine Plan is itself part of that plan, and so we should just try to be maximally Good and let God figure out the rest.
That sounds right to me.
It is actually parallel to something else I was looking up yesterday: religision Jewish Zionism. As I understand it ome, Haredi are anti-Zionist because although they think it would be good for Israel to be restored, they think it impious to do it without God's miraculous power.
Is being blissed out on supertranshedonic drugs the Good, though? I feel Socrates might like a little chat about that.
If the super-drugs distract us from God, then they are not good. It has nothing to do with "but you *must* suffer or else you are not voluntarily choosing Good".
"Article 6. Whether pain has the nature of evil more than fault has?
Objection 1. It would seem that pain has more of evil than fault. For fault is to pain what merit is to reward. But reward has more good than merit, as its end. Therefore pain has more evil in it than fault has.
Objection 2. Further, that is the greater evil which is opposed to the greater good. But pain, as was said above (Article 5), is opposed to the good of the agent, while fault is opposed to the good of the action. Therefore, since the agent is better than the action, it seems that pain is worse than fault.
Objection 3. Further, the privation of the end is a pain consisting in forfeiting the vision of God; whereas the evil of fault is privation of the order to the end. Therefore pain is a greater evil than fault.
On the contrary, A wise workman chooses a less evil in order to prevent a greater, as the surgeon cuts off a limb to save the whole body. But divine wisdom inflicts pain to prevent fault. Therefore fault is a greater evil than pain.
I answer that, Fault has the nature of evil more than pain has; not only more than pain of sense, consisting in the privation of corporeal goods, which kind of pain appeals to most men; but also more than any kind of pain, thus taking pain in its most general meaning, so as to include privation of grace or glory.
There is a twofold reason for this. The first is that one becomes evil by the evil of fault, but not by the evil of pain, as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv): "To be punished is not an evil; but it is an evil to be made worthy of punishment." And this because, since good absolutely considered consists in act, and not in potentiality, and the ultimate act is operation, or the use of something possessed, it follows that the absolute good of man consists in good operation, or the good use of something possessed. Now we use all things by the act of the will. Hence from a good will, which makes a man use well what he has, man is called good, and from a bad will he is called bad. For a man who has a bad will can use ill even the good he has, as when a grammarian of his own will speaks incorrectly. Therefore, because the fault itself consists in the disordered act of the will, and the pain consists in the privation of something used by the will, fault has more of evil in it than pain has.
The second reason can be taken from the fact that God is the author of the evil of pain, but not of the evil of fault. And this is because the evil of pain takes away the creature's good, which may be either something created, as sight, destroyed by blindness, or something uncreated, as by being deprived of the vision of God, the creature forfeits its uncreated good. But the evil of fault is properly opposed to uncreated good; for it is opposed to the fulfilment of the divine will, and to divine love, whereby the divine good is loved for itself, and not only as shared by the creature. Therefore it is plain that fault has more evil in it than pain has.
Reply to Objection 1. Although fault results in pain, as merit in reward, yet fault is not intended on account of the pain, as merit is for the reward; but rather, on the contrary, pain is brought about so that the fault may be avoided, and thus fault is worse than pain.
Reply to Objection 2. The order of action which is destroyed by fault is the more perfect good of the agent, since it is the second perfection, than the good taken away by pain, which is the first perfection.
Reply to Objection 3. Pain and fault are not to be compared as end and order to the end; because one may be deprived of both of these in some way, both by fault and by pain; by pain, accordingly as a man is removed from the end and from the order to the end; by fault, inasmuch as this privation belongs to the action which is not ordered to its due end."
(I'd say this even if you didn't just have kids, but you did, so I'm adding this hedge up front.)
Would we deprive our children of all choice, of the ability to make any decisions, in order to prevent them from making mistakes and causing harm? Harm is bad, isn't it? Surely preventing our children from causing harm, even to each other, must be our highest goal in raising them? Or perhaps there are more important things than simply not causing harm? We hope, of course, that they will help the world more than they harm it, and we make efforts in that direction, but wouldn't it be better to be sure?
I'm not sure how this applies in the analogy.
I was trying to make a point about the primacy of Choice and Freedom, over Evil and the Harm principle. This is all just my bizarre homebrew theology, but...
Instead of God creating evil so humans can choose, it's God creating choice, as a good thing in itself, which in turn allows the possibility of evil. Or instead of evil, I suppose substitute non-alignment with our creator? So if we create babies or AIs, and slave them to our will, they have no freedom of choice, and never become independent moral agents. By giving them freedom, and allowing them to make choices, we allow the possibility for them to do things that we don't agree with, possibly bad things that cause harm to other people.
In classical Christian theology, God is considered omniscient and omnibenevolent, and unity with God's will is defined as good, and opposition is defined as evil. We humans aren't omniscient or omnibenevolent, and so that doesn't perfectly apply to us, except when we get excited about the possibility of successfully aligning AI, or of socially engineering our children to be what we think of as good. In some sense, all progress has depended on our children not being forced into our exact mold, and being given freedom to be better than we are, even if they also have freedom to be worse.
I agree with what you say about not trying to second guess God (presuming God exists), and instead trying to be maximally good. (Assuming it's done intelligently and carefully and so forth, of course.)
> My proposed solution is to assume that God always gets what He wants somehow or other
I tend to think of this like the classic shell game, where the trick is that the object isn't under any of the shells, except in reverse. But the sequence of events is less important than the people involved; the fundamental building block is the soul.
>it's God creating choice, as a good thing in itself, which in turn allows the possibility of evil
Is there choice in Heaven? If yes, then there is also evil there, which seems contradictory. If no, then choice is not that great after all and non-Heaven seems unnecessary.
I tend to go for a more Orthodox view (if I can use that word, given how "unorthodox" all this is). Heaven isn't a place, or a state. It's an experience, a process. All the distractions of life are no longer present, there nothing between us and God but distance, and there's only one big choice, and our reactions to that are largely overdetermined by what we've done beforehand, and who we've shaped ourselves into being. Think of a star, shining in an endless void, and we decide to go towards it, or away from it, or cautiously orbit in a slow spiral.
As for pointless, who knows? Most sources seem clear that our choices here matter, and that it's important to get them right. After death, maybe it's harder to change. It seems like the time spent incarnate is important, and matters, and carries over into the next stage, but what lies beyond that, I dunno. It's past a couple of nigh-singularities. Probably, for most of us, too much knowledge would be a distraction from dealing with the stage we're currently in. Like a 10-year-old playing Settlers of Catan who starts gloating about winning and proceeds to make a bunch of bad choices because their head isn't in the game anymore. There'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done.
What is the argument that supertranshedonic drugs glorify God?
What's the argument that anything (other than specific religious worship) glorifies God? I think you're just supposed to do good things and make the world better and more beautiful. Though if you need chapter and verse, I find Isaiah 65:17-25 suggestive.
Yeah! Live your life as if there was a God, regardless of your belief.
You’ll forgive me for saying that sounds like you’re injecting your own beliefs into a specific document.
The passage you cite is a poetic narrative saying what God is going to do, eschatologically: there is healing and redress available in the new heavens and new earth which are created after disposal of the ‘former things.’ Your vision of ‘just do good things’ is unclear in this context. I assume you think that we ought to be prefigure God’s apocalyptic priorities but that really isn’t contained in the passage.
On the other hand, rather than projecting ourselves into the Word, if we prefer seeking what is already there, we are directly told how to glorify God: fear God and keep his commandments, do all we do for His glory, love our neighbor—these priorities are written out over and over again. And yes, we’re told to do that in our daily lives and work, but we’re also told not to do many things in our daily lives: dishonor our parents, practice sexual immorality, lie, and steal.
The burden of proof is on you to prove that doing drugs glorifies God. I think you have a pretty steep and winding road to travel to come to that conclusion. So rather than play turn and turn about, I’d like to see someone answer the question: why do we think seeking pure pleasure glorifies God and what specific religion endorses it?
I am willing to bet that this argument is a straw man. Not a whole lot going on inside.
As an interesting fact, a befriended person who has a high degree of expertise in the Christian (particularly Catholic) teachings stated that our project, in principle, is generally OK from the doctrinal standpoint.
What is a "befriended person"? Is that like a friend?
Perhaps it's rhetoric similar to "enslaved person"? It seems to imply a one-way and conditional relationship, which tends to be correct. We don't know how other people feel about us, and there are often unspoken limits to our feelings toward other people, which could go away if they turned out to be not who we thought/hoped they were.
Okay, I really need to see more about that. In principle, yes, reducing pain and suffering is not incompatible with Christian doctrine. Your association's basic assumptions, foundations, philosophy and aims? May be *extremely* divergent from what Catholic teaching takes as human flourishing.
It seems they've made efforts to minimize the scope of their organization's assumptions, foundations, philosophy, and aims, precisely to secure compatibility and support from a wide range of perspectives. From reading the Far Out Initiative's website, it would seem they've succeeded?
As an ex-Catholic, I would point out that while suffering abolition may not directly conflict with Christian doctrine, it would be a revolution in practice. The salience and relatability of the suffering of Christ on the Cross is such a fundamental aspect of one's relationship with Christ and understanding the need for him. Without suffering, the need for salvation through Christ would seem to be a more intellectual exercise.
There is also the fact many in the rank-and-file would be resistant, for much the same reasons any ordinary person would be.
I hurt myself today To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain The only thing that's real
Indifference to pleasure is as bad as indifference to pain, right?
Who cares? ;) or in the original: My sweetest friend Everyone I know
Goes away in the end And you could have it all My empire of dirt
I heard the cover...
Only death is real.
Typo report:
> Cameron was a special education teacher known for her kindness and patient with extremely tough students.
I assume you mean "kindness and patience"?
Not necessarily. She could have been known for her kindness and she could also have been patient with tough students.
"The world is on fire, and although some of us live on nice little islands of bearability, it’s hard to enjoy them when you can look just off your island and see everyone else on fire. If the fires got put out, maybe we could enjoy the other stuff more whole-heartedly instead of always looking over our shoulder at a world full of endless misery."
Completely agree. This does not, however, sound like Pearce's thesis to me. Pearce's thesis sounds more like "We can't ever put all the fires out, but if we made the people who are on fire feel better about being on fire, maybe we could enjoy the other stuff more whole-heartedly..."
And /that/ is why I do not find him convincing.
"To me, you either start with a deep hatred for the suffering of your fellow beings, and all of this makes sense to you - or you start from some other moral foundation and it seems to miss the point. Are any of these intuitions communicable?"
My position does not seem to fit in this dichotomy. Does it make sense?
That dichotomy reminds me of various takes from ideological positions that use flowery and positive language to describe their own position and wonder why people don't support their ideas. Something like pro-choice/pro-life or "justice" to describe actions that are not so clearly good or that don't understand the opposing ideas. It's hard to say if choice or life is better, as Life seems like a pretty obvious point, but the US is founded somewhat on the idea of "give me liberty or give me death." I don't think those descriptions for the positions are all that bad or wrong, but there's still a conflict between ideas we can universally agree are good.
Specifically in this case, I can have a deep hatred for the suffering of my fellow human beings, but believe that actually removing pain receptors could make things far worse for those human beings.
I agree, Pearce seems to be the philosophical equivalent of the “this is fine” meme.
This stuff is all a lot more convincing as a therapy for people who are suffering rather than a preemptive thing we would want to apply to the general population. Throwing a few philosophical assertions out there that we could preserve our preference architecture and wouldn’t just be wireheading, if not with the first round then in subsequent rounds, is pretty unconvincing. I’m not opposed to someone doing research on this, but my priors are that it would be a bad idea to apply broadly even if it works as expected.
I remember Prozac being hailed as the new wonder drug that would make everyone super-happy, so there were joking-but-not-really suggestions it should be put in the water supply.
And then Prozac became just another pharmacological tool for mental health services and not the wonder drug of universal happiness, so I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the Far Out (Man) Institute to find the miracle cure.
Presumably there will always be selection pressure against any form of wireheading. Wireheads don't want to raise baby wireheads. By contrast, in a world where prospective parents can pre-select the approximate pain thresholds, hedonic range and hedonic set-points of their future children, I don't envisage any loss of information-sensitivity, but rather selection pressure in favour of benign genes and allelic combinations for default well-being. No depressive wants to have depressive children. What's more, information-sensitivity to "good" and "bad" stimuli typically functions _at least_ as well in extreme hyperthymics as depressives (cf. the "learned helplessness" and behavioral despair of chronic depression.) OK, I'm glossing over the pitfalls. They are legion. But if we're ethically serious about fixing the problem of suffering, I don't know of any alternative to genome reform.
There is selection pressure against low hedonic setpoints: depression is unattractive, depressives find it harder than the norm to function in a variety of ways, coping with suffering takes time and energy away from pursuits such as having and successfully raising children.
If adjusting the hedonic setpoint upwards provides a benefit here without negative side effects, why hasn't natural selection already taken care of it?
Whatever reasoning we retcon here, why wouldn't it apply to wireheading?
Non-social animals can suffer greatly; but they don't seem to get depressed. Depression seems to be adaptation to group living. Depressive behaviour is associated with subordination and defeat, keeping one's head down, the "internalized correlate of the losing subroutine" (cf. "Subordination and Defeat, An Evolutionary Approach To Mood Disorders and Their Therapy" https://books.google.com.vc/books?id=cbGPAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Understanding the nature of selection pressure in a future world where prospective parents can choose the approximate hedonic range and hedonic set-points of their future children is challenging. But contra Huxley's Brave New World, we've no reason to think that lifelong happiness will turn the population into passive dupes of the ruling elite; if anything, we might expect the opposite - crudely, a society of insubordinate active citizens with challenges to match.
I guess maybe the right metaphor is "they're on fire, but now it's a kind of fire which isn't hot and doesn't harm you".
It seems to me that this puts into relief questions about what's ultimately valuable. Avoiding pain is a "cheap" philosophical solution - you'll do it whether it's morally valuable or not. Avoiding tissue damage also seems pretty cheap - pain or no pain, most people are pretty horrified by the idea of learning that they're sick or injured. What about things like "working hard"? If you don't mind being poor, because poverty doesn't bother you anymore, do you still want to become rich? What about "helping others"?
I think these are good questions but probably screened off by the fact that Cameron and other people with low pain phenotypes seem pretty normal.
I have no problem at all with removing pain/suffering which is not a symptom of anything actually being wrong.
I don't even have a problem with managing pain/suffering when the actual thing that is wrong cannot instead be fixed.
Imagine a nuclear power station. It has a whole lot of alarms. Sometimes something breaks and the alarms go off. Sometimes what breaks is the alarm controller, and the alarms go off for reasons unrelated to anything being wrong with the actual reactor. Either way, the crew wants to acknowledge the alarms then silence them, because they need to work out what the problem is, how serious it is, and how to fix it, and it is hard to think straight when your world is filled with flashing red strobe lights and 120db sirens. I have no problem at all with there being an off switch for the alarm system, or with people pushing that off switch as the first step of their troubleshooting procedure.
Imagine a new recruit on the first day. "These sirens and strobes sure seem to go off a lot. Seems a bit unnecessary. Can't we replace them with something less noisy and intrusive? Maybe a discreet light on the control panel?"
This is where I come in: while silencing the alarms as the first step of troubleshooting is just fine, and we absolutely want to make that part convenient, fast and efficient, anything that risks a delay to starting the troubleshooting in the first place, or a situation where the troubleshooting doesn't happen at all because we fail to notice or take seriously the more discreet alert, seems dangerous. (I bet we all know at least one person who habitually drives their car around with the engine fault light lit up!)
IMO it's not so much about values as about consequences. We're not as good at removing the causes of suffering as we could or ought to be, but I guess I just find it hard to believe that if we deconstruct all the 120db sirens and replace them with discreet little lights, we'll get better at actually fixing the things they alert us to instead of worse.
If the thing being pushed for was a switch or dial one could change at will, I'd be all over it in a heartbeat. But that doesn't seem to be what's being argued for.
"Isn't hot and doesn't harm you."
I think the question of whether there really is an unseen harm is the heart of the concern about pharmaceutical alleviation of suffering. If you can't feel pain and you die, we immediately recognize that as a bad outcome. But who needs emotional suffering? Maybe it's a Chesterton fence that shouldn't be blithely abandoned?
In a recent book I read, a patient goes to her psychiatrist and says she needs to bump down her antidepressant dose. Confused, the doctor asks if it's working right, or producing intolerable side effects. "Oh it works just fine. But I'm still married to an alcoholic asshole, but I'm okay with that."
IDK, maybe if you've decided you want to stick it out "for the kids" and you don't want to fight for the next decade it seems like it'd be helpful to be able take a pill that lets you be okay with that decision day-to-day. But drugs don't usually work at the level of "this one thing I want it to affect". You take aspirin it gets rid of your headache, but also helps your shoulder pain whether you intended that or not. What if the complacency drug keeps your marriage intact, but also keeps you at the same shitty job instead of starting that business with your brother that's been your lifelong dream?
I think of those animals stuffed in cages with their beaks cut off, but they're cool with it and so are the farmers, and I wonder what the human analog of that situation might be. At what point does the goal of ending human suffering come at the expense of other goals of human flourishing?
This is coincidental for me - in a thread on the last open post, I discussed my horrible genetic mutation which prevents me from feeling the effects of opioids:
*****
Guess how fun it is to be someone whose *genetics* have decided to withhold the efficacy of opioid painkillers!
I initiated and paid out of pocket for pharmacogenomic lab testing which confirmed I have a mutation of CYP2D6, a gene involved in metabolizing a number of medications, but most notably opioids, after a wisdom tooth surgery and two separate abdominal surgeries left me wondering, "why do people claim opioids feel like anything?"
It's really that bad. For example, the day after my third surgery (a weight loss procedure: I had the "sleeve," which removes about two-thirds of the stomach, aka stomach stapling), the non-opioid surgical anesthesia drugs had fully worn off and I was in so much pain that I was *sincerely* contemplating building a time machine out of medical equipment to go back in time two days and tell myself to cancel the surgery.
At one point, a nurse came into my hospital room and injected dilaudid into my IV. "Don't worry, honey, you're going to feel just fine in about ten minutes," she promised.
When she returned fifteen minutes later, I said, "I'm sorry this is a dumb question, but what is this supposed to feel like? I mean, I definitely felt the injection go into my arm, it felt like a weird cold pressure, but what *exactly* should the medication itself feel like? Should I be feeling tingly or warm or something?"
"How are you even *talking* right now?" The nurse asked, round-eyed.
I ended up pacing and pacing and *pacing* to cope with the pain, pacing so much in my hospital socks on hard linoleum that I actually cramped up my calves, and so a few years I later paid $700 to get a piece of paper certifying that, NO REALLY, opioids don't work, use something else!
Then my primary care doctor consulted with the company's chief pharmacist who said there isn't really anything else, sorry!
****
Since there is pretty much *nothing* which can be substituted for opioids to treat acute pain, any development in pain relief / management is exciting for me, even if it's in the relatively distant future.
We are very sorry to hear about the complexities you have been facing. Would you like to email (https://faroutinitiative.com/) and get in touch with us, so we can explore this topic together?
Sure, will do!
"Then, when you’re rolling on the floor screaming and cursing your past self for making this decision, think of the people who live with chronic pain conditions and feel this way every day. Think of the wounded soldiers who lie on the battlefield screaming for water until they finally expire, or the animals who get eaten from the inside by parasites, or the mentally ill people stuck in padded rooms so they don’t try to kill themselves to escape the pain, or the chickens in factory farms that have their beaks cut off and can never move and are starved for weeks at a time and sometimes drown in their own waste."
But the thing is, even those of us in crappy situations are not at that level. The vast majority of people are not suffering anything like that. So it's a poor comparison because you're jumping from "wouldn't it be good to abolish this kind of horrible suffering?" which most people would agree "Yes, let's find a way to relieve chronic pain" to the point "How about we make *everybody* go around feeling 100 on the 100-150 bliss scale?" which seems improbable to achieve and does evoke "how are you going to avoid lotus-eating?"
I think most people today *are* living at the "100 on the 100-150 bliss scale" due to the massive progress over time when it comes to health, effective medicine, and the rest of civilisation. The thing is, that has now become the new normal, and we've found exciting new ways to be unhappy and miserable. See the explosion in mental health problems.
So if you do achieve a way to "let's get the brain to make natural heroin", that's going to be great - for the first six months. Then people will get used to feeling naturally high, and the new level of "but I'm not experiencing 150 level super-bliss" will kick in and we'll be miserable again.
That's part of the problem: pain versus misery. I support working on getting rid of pain. I don't know if you'll ever manage to get rid of misery.
And I think we could easily end up with the worst of both worlds: don't worry, our pain-free and suffering-free chickens are happy, they *enjoy* drowning in their own waste!
Doing away with horrible pain for the people suffering unbearable pain? Go right to it, good luck to you all!
Get ordinary people in an eternal state of bliss which won't degrade into lotus-eating on the one hand, nor on the other hand become a default state that everyone now demands as a right and indeed wants to turn the dial up because they're not happy because it's only bliss, it's not super-bliss? I don't think that will work as hoped.
As for the pain-free lady, I wonder: she's both not feeling the emotional grief of her husband's suicide so she can 'get on with things' and function as normal, but she also cries at sad movies? I don't see how that works. Unless it is that (1) she is following social cues about how you're "supposed" to react, so she cries at sad movies because that's what you're supposed to do, regardless of how you really feel or/and (2) movies are evoking responses on a different level than emotions and empathy, which is a clever trick and I hope somebody is researching it. It's catharsis, but not because we identify with the character and feel their pain, we're doing something like the knee-jerk reflex instead? Reflex tears not emotional tears?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears#Types
So maybe if we do away with the pain, we'll also do away with empathy, Jo Cameron notwithstanding?
"I think most people today *are* living at the "100 on the 100-150 bliss scale"
On the other hand...
(From GPT4)
1. *Increased Prevalence of Mental Illness:* Epidemiological studies have shown a significant increase in mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety, in modern societies. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports rising rates of these conditions globally, suggesting a potential mismatch between our evolutionary adaptations and modern environments.
2. *Lifestyle Changes and Stress:* Research indicates that modern stressors, which are chronic and pervasive, differ significantly from the acute, short-term stressors faced by our ancestors. Studies have linked chronic stress to mental health issues like depression and anxiety. For instance, a survey by McEwen (2000) highlights how chronic stress impacts brain function and structure, contributing to mental illness.
3. *Social Isolation:* Modern lifestyles often lead to social isolation, a factor linked to various mental health problems. Research has shown that individuals with limited social interactions and support networks are at higher risk for depression and anxiety. For example, studies by Cacioppo et al. (2006) demonstrate the adverse effects of social isolation on mental health.
4. *Disrupted Sleep Patterns:* The advent of artificial lighting and technology has disrupted natural sleep patterns, contributing to sleep disorders. Poor sleep quality and insufficient sleep are strongly associated with mental health issues. A study by Walker (2017) discusses the relationship between sleep deprivation and increased risk of depression and anxiety.
5. *Diet and Nutrition:* Modern diets, often high in processed foods and low in essential nutrients, contrast with the more balanced diets of our ancestors. Nutritional deficiencies, particularly in omega-3 fatty acids, have been linked to mental health problems. For instance, research by Hibbeln (2002) found correlations between low omega-3 intake and higher rates of depression.
6. *Physical Activity:* Our ancestors were much more physically active, and reduced physical activity in modern life is associated with higher rates of mental illness. Studies have shown that regular physical activity can significantly reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. For example, a meta-analysis by Mammen and Faulkner (2013) supports the role of physical activity in preventing depression.
7. *Cross-Cultural Studies:* Research comparing mental health in different cultures provides insights into how modern lifestyles impact mental health. For instance, studies of indigenous populations, who live lifestyles more similar to those of our ancestors, often show lower rates of depression and anxiety compared to those in industrialized societies.
>I think most people today *are* living at the "100 on the 100-150 bliss scale" due to the massive progress over time when it comes to health, effective medicine, and the rest of civilisation. The thing is, that has now become the new normal, and we've found exciting new ways to be unhappy and miserable. See the explosion in mental health problems.
I don't think it's at all apparent that these things actually make people particularly happy. I mean, there are things which historically made a lot of people really sad which we've done a lot to mitigate, like child mortality. In a lot of ways, our lives are much more convenient than they used to be. But there are also things that produce massive amounts of "wealth," in the sense that large numbers of people pay money for them, but hardly anyone attests to actually liking them very much, and a lot of people attest to disliking, social media being the clearest example. Wanting and liking are separate psychological processes, and the division between them means that people can be induced to pay for things that they know don't actually make them happier.
I think people from hundreds of years ago would recognize our society as offering massive conveniences over our own, but I don't think they'd tend to experience it as blissful, or find it difficult to understand how people today wouldn't find it so, given much opportunity to observe it.
Scott used the example of unbearable physical pain as an emotional arm-twister. Turns out I'm one of the people who don't feel that kind of emotional pain response to "isn't this awful, why don't we stop it?" so either everyone should emulate my "I'm not concerned at all since I feel no distress, and you want everyone not to feel distress, right?" or maybe feeling distress and discomfort does have a role to play in human society.
Anyway, getting back to it: most of humanity right now is not experiencing the kind of physical suffering and pain of the past. We've just had an entire debate around Hanson and medicine and the claim that there is *too much* medical intervention. People can buy effective pain control over the counter. They're generally not freezing or boiling in houses that are not suitable to shelter them. They generally have enough food. The bottom rung of Maslow's hierarchy is achieved for them.
Are we all now super-happy? You tell me. Removing dire pain is a laudable goal. But achieving that does not mean achieving the removal of suffering, since we'll get used to "I am not in constant pain or need" and then we'll find something else that distresses us and causes us to feel pain, for example, "I can't get a girlfriend, this makes me so unhappy I want to die".
>Scott used the example of unbearable physical pain as an emotional arm-twister. Turns out I'm one of the people who don't feel that kind of emotional pain response to "isn't this awful, why don't we stop it?" so either everyone should emulate my "I'm not concerned at all since I feel no distress, and you want everyone not to feel distress, right?" or maybe feeling distress and discomfort does have a role to play in human society.
As a prior, I think the supposition that sympathy and emotional suffering would be inextricably related seems plausible. But it appears that Jo Cameron experiences sympathy, but not emotional suffering (or at least, not nearly to the degree that most people do.) So it appears that they're not.
Given the nature of the hedonic treadmill, people's lives can be changed in ways that appear to be improvements without their being happier in the long term. But some people seem to be much happier than others. I think if we're going to achieve dramatic advances in human happiness, that's going to demand internal changes to human nature, not just external changes in our environment. But as the whole post discusses, that doesn't mean it's fundamentally impossible.
>But some people seem to be much happier than others.
And seem to combine that with retaining adaptive function!
Yup, there indeed appears to be room for improvement.
I've been thinking about neurodiversity recently, in the broader sense you describe here, although not the case of Jo Cameron specifically. But I've been thinking about something which might relate to why other similar mutations haven't led to similar instances of Jo Cameron's condition.
The human genome doesn't contain enough information to specify all the workings of a human brain, not even to within a similar order of magnitude. Some aspects of human brain function are hard-coded; nearly all functional humans have pretty much the same brain structures, and uses them for similar things. But if a person suffers brain injuries, they can adapt to using different parts of the brain than normal for necessary tasks. The different parts of the brain aren't devices for accomplishing specific neurological tasks, they're structures adapted to being particularly suited to being trained for certain tasks. When necessary, they can be trained to do something else. And the training process every individual goes through is idiosyncratic. It seems highly probable that two genetically identical individuals could end up with pronounced differences on the scale of their neurological processes, not simply because they're learning from different experiences, but because the software-level working of any specific brain isn't biologically hard-coded.
I think that different people are probably less like instances of an AI with different weights given to different qualities, but like different AI with similar-but-not-identical starting architecture, trained up from scratch through entirely separate processes. You might see more variation between them due to differences developed over the course of their training processes than their starting conditions.
As confrontational as MA_browsing was being, there is absolutely a core problem highlighted by Scott and FOI themselves:
"If you could CRISPR something like FAAH-OUT into cows, chickens, etc, you could create breeds of animal that don’t suffer. They think farms would go for it - non-suffering livestock isn’t just good press, it’s also healthier and (potentially) produces tastier meat. Then vegans could continue fighting for factory farming abolition as usual. But it wouldn’t be quite as desperate, and there wouldn’t be as many casualties along the way."
Pearce recoils from Darwinian life, but the fact remains that those at the top of the food chain are in a damn good position. The highlighted initial use case of this suffering-abolition initiative is *to make our slave-food sources not mind that they are suffering as slave-food sources*. Scott explicitly highlights that it'd put the vegan (read: abolitionist) cause on the back burner a bit. And after all of that, they'd expect some (all??) people to also sign up to this?
I'm sure many here would find the RW critique that EAs/Rationalists are like quokkas (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hhq727/rationalists_as_quokkas/) unfair but sometimes I really do wonder about the naivety. You don't even need to posit cases where we're having to battle against another Darwinian sharpened space faring civilization, you can just look at human bad actors. Would the world be a better place with a remnant lumpen proletariat on Soma and the top dogs without it? Maybe. What if it wasn't mere slavery, but eradication, that was forced on the proles?
You can wave away the objection by saying "well you see, we're merely adjusting our hedonic baseline without having any impact on behaviour" but that patently isn't true. On the FOI end of the scale, you'd at the very least be reducing unease, anxiety and so on (which all have some great uses!) and at Pearce's extreme everybody would have permanent MDMA brain.
MDMA is brilliant, but I wouldn't send my troops out to fight on it. I wouldn't want my ASI taskforce unit with the nukes to be on it. And I wouldn't want my star command making first contact with the aliens to be on it. I know the whole "hard times breeds tough men, who breed good times, which breeds weak men" thing is a bit of a trope but that really is the cycle. AGI may break it, but this won't.
(This is why something like mass Jhana, or a no downside designer drug, would be a much easier sell- *optional* bliss is great. But you'd best believe that if a fight came about, which in a Darwinian universe is inevitable, I'd be asking people to switch theirs off.)
I admit, however, that a world full of Jo Cameron's might be better than today (although I'm still hesitant with what exactly her physical pain situation is). Her situation sounds a bit like a stoic or equanimous (dare I say enlightened) individual. I'd be curious to understand what her internal states are actually like- I suspect she may not be pointing at the same things as other people when she talks about "sad" and such.
But MA is correct that whilst it'd be cool, it'd be largely irrelevant if our entire civilization collapsed at the same time. The next cycle might have a great time around though, so there is that. If we could do a bit of CRISPR on more important genes whilst we're at it then I'd be tentatively on board (although Pearce takes it too far).
No war doesn't sound... terrible.
As Dogbert said, I could take over the world with a butter knife, woohoo! ;-)
If everyone would surrender instantly, we'd be there already.
To clarify, are you accounting for our stance on prioritizing the maintenance of adaptive responses and multidirectional approach to nonhuman animal suffering (https://faroutinitiative.com/FAQ)?
With all due respect, saying "we're aware of this objection and have a corporate stance that this should not be used to justify x" doesn't mean in practice it won't. The world is Darwinian, and just because some creatures decide to cooperate doesn't mean that others won't defect. I'm all for it, it seems like a straightforward better situation than the current one. But I'm not a factory farmed animal, I'm the one who eats the animal.
"The only Special Bonus Side Effect the London team was able to find is that apparently her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars."
Oh wow do I need to hear more about that. Is a link to more information available? Because that would be A) quite extraordinary and a feature we should absolutely be looking to spread throughout the human population, and B) a very strange thing to have in combination with insensitivity to pain. Granted, genetic interactions can produce some very strange phenotypes with changes in features that often seem to have nothing in common with each other. But I'd be very interested to know what the underlying molecular mechanism for that is.
Please see this thread with some relevant datapoints: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative/comment/56420315
We would be happy to further investigate this topic in case time and bandwidth permits.
It feels weird(†) to say this to you, but it seems like the obviously correct strategy would be to intensely investigate the healing topic *first*.
“Eliminate suffering” is kind of a weird/suspicious/risky goal from the point of view of people who are not already convinced about it, from the general public to philosophers and scientists. The mere existence of this ACT post is evidence for that.
But “we’ve got a lead on getting wounds to heal perfectly” is something to which mostly everyone will respond with something between “awesome” and “shut up and take my money”, without any need for extensive philosophical discussions.
That should matter even if you don’t give a damn about would healing and only care about chicken suffering. (Even if you _love_ the extensive philosophical discussions!) The fact that two unlikely conditions are coincident is pretty strong evidence that they are related, so studying one is likely to help with figuring out the other. You can probably get thousands of times more support for research on “clean healing” than “suffering abolition”, so even if there were just a 1% chance the two are related it would still be worth going for the popular one.
(†: I mean, you ’re presumably the expert here and thought about this old lady at least 10k times longer than I did. But in the spirit of the article’s “people are invisibly different inside” theme, maybe you’re much more sensitive to suffering than to “slow and ugly wound healing”, so maybe the above is less obvious to you?)
Somehow this ends with David Pearce ending up a multi-millionaire with a harem of biotech groupies in some compound, right? Did anyone else read that last paragraph and NOT have every "cult" warning sign flash in your head?
Jo Cameron is probably not the secret to the end of suffering. She's probably wrong and/or lying. The woman who claims to see 100x more colors is DEFINITELY lying (to sell her otherwise crap art, I suppose.) David Pearce while not lying, is probably the last person I'd trust on matters of this level of importance (what, you don't trust the perpetually unemployed domain-name flipping philosopher?)
I keep hearing "EA isn't a cult! We're more rational than everyone else". This kinda shit doesn't help your case.
I recently finished watching the Leftovers (brilliant, would recommend to anyone who hasn't watched) and have been thinking about cults a lot since. Cults or proto-cults often promise some solution or magical happiness, and spiral from there. The problem arises when the cult *could* be making real claims, or at least the possibility is there. In the Leftovers, a real supernatural event occurs, which leaves a space open for all sorts of cults to make claims.
Things like happiness on tap (neo-Buddhism) or genetic happiness editing (as claimed here) might be real. But they leave people vulnerable in the same way as described above. When someone claims that you need to join a commune because of the rapture it's easier to say "no that's a cult". But if someone says "hey trust me, I've got the answers" and it's maybe real, it's a lot harder.
"Jo Cameron is probably not the secret to the end of suffering. She's probably wrong and/or lying."
Your probablys are doing a lot of work here. Did you read the article? Jo was tested ("tortured" was the actual word used). Do you think she just pretended not to suffer?
"The woman who claims to see 100x more colors is DEFINITELY lying"
Tetrachromacy is a known condition and she's far from the only one.
Yes, I read the article. I think Jo Cameron is probably a sociopath with moderate analgesia. 100x color woman may have tetrachromacy but that doesn't mean she "sees 100x more colors" - that's the trouble with quaila, it's unverifiable from both sides.
" I think Jo Cameron is probably a sociopath" - you've never met her ("probably" - 50%? 10% - what's the range of your diagnostic confidence here?), but you think you know her better than the people who extensively evaluated her. Probably, I guess.
"may have tetrachromacy but that doesn't mean she "sees 100x more colors" " - how many more colors does an average tetrachromat see compared to an average human? Sounds like you think "100x" is too much. What is your estimate for an average increase in color perception for people with this condition? Why is it important to contradict her account and accuse her of lying? What difference does it make to the case made in the original article?
Look, when the first thing you do upon reading about two people you never met is to accuse them of lying, it doesn't tell us anything about these people. It does tell something about you. And what it tells is not quite.... flattering...
As for Jo Cameron - You've never met her either! We're working with the same information: Scott Alexander's reporting of the evaluator's reporting on Jo Cameron. Any or all of the folks in that chain could be lying, making mistakes, or be otherwise wrong in their evaluation. At the end of the day - I read this blog post, and my gut tells me: "she's prob a sociopathic analgesiac taking/being taken on a ride by the Far Out folks". I don't have a percentage - to have one would be incoherent; it's just personal judgement.
Regarding tetrachomacy, my understanding is that ALL colors are able to be created via red, green, and blue - so we're dealing with a philosophical problem - do they actually see "new colors" or do they see the same colors, but maybe with an increased ability to differentiate between edge cases? Does she live in a psychedelic dreamscape of colors never before seen by man? Or does she have slightly better color perception? We *can't* know. (But if you're trying to sell your crappy art, getting an article written about how you literally have superhuman abilities could help!)
"Look, when the first thing you do upon reading about two people you never met is to accuse them of lying" - do you accuse Matthew, Mark, Luke, or Paul of lying? You've never met them, after all ;)
But seriously, what *does* it say about me? - don't pussyfoot around saying it's "not quite.... flattering..." - just say it!
I've read about Jo Cameron before, her case isn't exactly breaking news. So now, I'm not working with only Scott's reporting. It is interesting that you assume everyone else is as ignorant of the underlying information as yourself is.
"Look, when the first thing you do upon reading about two people you never met is to accuse them of lying" - do you accuse Matthew, Mark, Luke, or Paul of lying? You've never met them, after all ;)" - thank you for making my point for me, no, of course I don't accuse these fine gentlemen of lying, I've never met them after all, what would make me think they are lying about anything? But you did accuse people you never met of lying.
What it says about you to me is this: a person whose first reaction to new information that disagrees with his/her priors is to accuse the sources of lying *may*:
- resort to lying easily (since it's the first thing that came to his/her mind - familiarity heuristic)
- lack critical information processing skills, e.g., upon encountering new information, instead of doing some basic digging just resort to "this sounds impossible therefore the source is lying" shortcut.
- have generally uncharitable view of other people: first reaction is not "this person may be sincerely mistaken" but "this person is a liar" - note also a classic attribution error here.
Any combination of the above, and that's just off the top of my head. Of course I haven't met you after all, maybe you're a great human who gets carried away by the anonymity and the disembodied nature of the internet comment boxes. But the words you put into these here boxes is all I have, so there.
"It is interesting that you assume everyone else is as ignorant of the underlying information as yourself is." Incredibly passive aggression! I didn't realize we had to have a dissertation in the topic before writing a comment on a blog post. When I comment, I assume that everyone has read the post, and is other generally knowledgable.
And why *don't* you think the Apostles are lying? They literally claim a guy came back to life! Maybe don't *assume* lying, but you can't rule it out, especially because people lie about claims like that *all the time*. L Ron Hubbard was def lying, as was Jim Jones, and probably Joseph Smith. I think I generally do have an uncharitable view of other people *in this context* - anonymous internet posting regarding claims and initiatives aimed at overturning fundamental aspects of reality. This isn't a "lack of critical information processing skills" but a damn good heuristic in an adversarial environment.
I don't jump to "this person is a liar" always - but if you don't think people on the internet are trying to lie to you, or at least sell you something, you may be a little naive. People lie. They do it all the time, even to themselves and those they love.
>Regarding tetrachomacy, my understanding is that ALL colors are able to be created via red, green, and blue
(tl;dr: wrong, but 100x is still bullshit)
Your understanding is wrong, at least in this context. All colors that *normal humans can see* can be created by mixing those three wavelengths, because of how normal human color vision works.
To elaborate, humans have three different types of cone (color-sensitive) cells in the eye, each with different sensitivity curves to different parts of the EM spectrum. These curves are generally called red, green, and blue, though there's significant overlap between the first two (see the image at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell). The brain takes note of how many times the receptors in these cells were fired, does some differential brain-math comparing the relative excitation between the three, and gives you a guess at the wavelength of the lights. This is what we experience as "color". (this is ignoring rods, which are sensitive to all visible light, and luminance, but those aren't relevant here)
That's why RGB works so well (for most humans): each wavelength is chosen so that it excites only (mostly) one type of cone, so we can generate that signal directly. Human color vision is 3-dimensional, and we can stimulate each dimension individually. Giving each dimension a value between 0 and 1 is a very good simulation of reality.
EDIT: I just happened upon a really good visualization of this in twitter, here: https://x.com/j_bertolotti/status/1795100295984271863
This doesn't work with tetrachromats - they have FOUR different cones (usually one closer to pure yellow), so their vision is 4D. For every color we see, sees an extra dimension of "yellowness" that doesn't map to the Red+Green yellow that the rest of us experience.
THAT SAID, "100x" is almost certainly pop-sci bullshit with no basis in fact. 3 continuous dimensions of color upped to 4 is not an increase of 100 - color vision doesn't work that way. The most honest way of representing it is that you're going from 3 bits to 4, which is an increase of (drumroll please) 2x.
Sure, you could do some sketchy social science and say "the average person can differentiate between colors with this minimum delta in hue/Cr/Cg/Cb/whatever", and extrapolate out, but that's still applying an arbitrary discretization to a continuous spectra.
I suspect that's exactly what they're doing, in fact - saying, "the average person can distinguish between 100¹ levels of red (¹well actually much less than that but we're rounding up) so her extra Yellowness dimension gives her an extra 100 colors for each color".
Thank you for a good explanation of the RGB vs. tetra.
To the general question of "how many colors can one see" - this is indeed a tough problem of discretizing a continuous spectrum. Experienced visual designers can differentiate much finer gradation of colors than layfolk - but it's still hard to quantify. Similar problem exists in musical tonal resolution: in the Western canon, an octave is split into 12 semitones, but most musicians can easily distinguish "quarter-tone" steps. I recall reading of people who could distinguish single cent steps (1/1200 of an octave), which is not that hard to verify with modern waveform generators and double-blind testing. Maybe similar color testing could be done with tetras to quantify their color resolution.
Nice explanation!
>so her extra Yellowness dimension gives her an extra 100 colors for each color
Yeah, that is how I'm interpreting what the "100x" meant too.
( Random musing - if we could easily interpret temporal changes in intensity as color, then illuminating a scene with a variable wavelength light source with the wavelength swept repetitively would effectively give us a _full_ _spectrum_ of the reflectance of every object in the scene. )
I thought a bit more about it, and realized that adding yellow adds more than just 1 bit (2x colors). If we just go by the simple 8-bit color representation, adding the yellow adds those 8 bits, or 256x colors.
So 100x more colors sounds plausible.
> my understanding is that ALL colors are able to be created via red, green, and blue
Let me just stop you right there.
No.
Go read up on colour theory. And if you need something terse in an internet comment box, CMYK.
All colour perception is electromagnetic radiation perception, which is a spectrum. There aren't just three points on that spectrum. There are roughly infinite points on that spectrum.
You might want to do that yourself. CMYK has nothing to do with the discussion, as the subtractive color model has very little to nothing to do with human visual perception.
>We _can't_ know.
That is just wrong. There is a very simple psychophysics experiment to look at this. You give someone a white screen with a patch of light with some arbitrary visible spectrum, and you ask them to match the color with another patch, where the other patch is a mix of monochromatic sources that they can adjust the intensities of. If they need three monochromatic sources to adjust, they are a trichromat. If they need four, they are a tetrachromat.
Basically, they are matching the stimulations of their types of cones. If they have three types, they have three equations for three unknowns, and similarly for four. Qualia be damned - this measures the ability to match and distinguish patches of colored light.
Well, in terms of purely observable behavior, I’d rather be surrounded by “sociopathic analgesics” that behave like Jo Cameron than “normal” people who spend their days lashing out at each other when they feel bad, so there’s that.
Honestly, I'd rather be around the normal people. Even if I take everything reported on Cameron at face value, she's just too out there. The husband stuff especially. (This is a perfect analogy for my attitude towards the rationalist movement and engineers in general. Keep up the good work but I'd still rather keep my distance. I do not want engineers in my home and I do not want them meeting my family).
Ah yes, a classic case of sociopaths dedicating their lives to difficult, low paid work helping others.
Not accusing Jo Cameron of anything here, but yes, there are many cases of sociopaths dedicating their lives to difficult, low paid work "helping others".
Not that they're representative of the entire org, but the Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal is a good example of this phenomenon - it *does* happen. Hell, most people who work in/around Capitol Hill probably qualify as "sociopaths dedicating their lives to difficult, low paid work helping others" - such work is good cover, after all!
This just beggars belief. Why should she subject herself to what is essentially torture at the hands of scientists, even if she was a sociopath? Why would she not request pain relief during childbirth? What point is she trying to make exactly? Simply not plausible.
So far, they don't seem to have bought a castle, or decorated it like the one from the documentary biopic "Young Frankenstein", so they're probably OK for now.
David definitely does not have any harem, he is a 100% celibate philosopher. Only a lot of friends of all genders around the world! And his good friend donated a million to the project, it's true. But David will spend it all on the project. Therefore, this is definitely not a cult!
Yeesh fanboy energy
>The woman who claims to see 100x more colors is DEFINITELY lying
Do you know what tetrachromacy _is_?
Have you considered another possibility? The idea of fixing the problem of suffering via genome reform deserves to be mainstream. But one of the reasons that the abolitionist project is still fairly marginal is precisely the _absence_ of any charismatic, larger-than-life personality (with or without a harem!) to take the project forward. Sooner or later such leadership will emerge - the abolitionist ecosystem is (slowly) growing - but celibate NU philosophers with a depressive streak are unsuited to any such role.
Domain name flippers aren't "unemployed." It's a weird job but it's definitely a job. It's also weird to say "you can't trust a philosopher without a real job." By that standard no one should trust Socrates, Diogenes, Aristotle or any other philosopher whose job is lecturing on philosophy. Seems like a Philistine-like distrust of thinkers. Let's not assume the worst in people.
Domain names were the crypto of my youth, with dot.coms as the Bitcoin and other extensions the equivalent of altcoins. OK, I briefly winced (thanks), but I enjoyed Scott's piece. I haven't read better.
> She's probably wrong and/or lying
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6676009/: 'After operation, her pain intensity score was 0/10 until the next day when she was discharged home. The only postoperative analgesic she received in hospital was paracetamol 1 g i.v. in the PACU on the day of her surgery. She also received cyclizine 50 mg i.v. twice. Extraordinarily, she required no postoperative analgesics other than paracetamol for this known painful surgery (trapeziectomy), even after the axillary nerve block had worn off. She showed no pain from pinching or from peripheral i.v. cannula manipulation ... The patient had been diagnosed with osteoarthritis of the hip, which she reported as painless, which was not consistent with the severe degree of joint degeneration. At 65 yr of age, she had undergone a hip replacement ... After operation, her pain intensity scores were 0/10 throughout except for one score of 1/10 on the first postoperative evening. Her past surgical history was notable for multiple varicose vein and dental procedures for which she has never required analgesia. She also reported a long history of painless injuries... for which she did not use analgesics. She reported numerous burns and cuts without pain, often smelling her burning flesh before noticing any injury, and that these wounds healed quickly with little or no residual scar. She reported eating Scotch bonnet chilli peppers without any discomfort, but a short-lasting ‘pleasant glow’ in her mouth.'
Cope harder.
If its possible to completely eliminate suffering, and the only observable difference is in how you talk about your experience and maybe some stuff visible on brainscans (and how do you know what to look for there?), then this has some insane implications outside this project.
If there is no practical reason for our "hedonic state" to be centered on 0 rather than 100, then its surprising that the range includes 0 at all. Absent any upper or lower bound, its likely that either all human experiences are positive, or all are negative. And even if we convice ourselves that humans really do thread the positive/negative boundary, the uncertainty would still apply to anyone who developed hedonic sensitivity independent of our evolutionary line, so cephalopod lives might be orders of magnitude more valuable than ours, or the worst thing to ever happen on earth.
This has all the marks of an XML-tag pathology.
The (evolutionary) relationship between the polygenic determination of hedonic baseline, phenomenology of pain, and adaptive response is very complicated. There are probably good reasons to expect the hedonic baseline of different species to be calibrated close to 0, and the uncoupling of suffering from adaptive actions is difficult, but important enough to warrant extensive research that may yield direct and secondary benefits. As for the average human experience, the vast majority of tiny life slices could be considered as cases of mixed valence; only the best psychedelic trips and some meditative absorptions could likely be close to pure positivity.
>There are probably good reasons to expect the hedonic baseline of different species to be calibrated close to 0, and the uncoupling of suffering from adaptive actions is difficult
Like what? What would be a reason for evolution to calibrate us close to 0, that isnt also a downside to us of calibrating higher?
If evolution is working out a psychology from scratch, and motivation by something other than suffering is possible at all, why would it be a smaller target to hit?
Furthermore, if such a state is reachable with a single mutation, that is strong evidence that its easy: We are only one mutation away from it even though we do have suffering-based motivation, and therefore arent even selected to have this other motivation.
>What would be a reason for evolution to calibrate us close to 0, that isnt also a downside to us of calibrating higher?
I suppose the idea is that there is a downside, but because we are all so Smart it can be overcome. Which may or may not be too naive, but on balance seems worth trying. Of course, I expect the whole robot apocalypse thing to resolve sooner than anything like this becomes practical, but it may as well be there just in case.
My search ability is failing me...
>There are probably good reasons to expect the hedonic baseline of different species to be calibrated close to 0
There was a neat little analysis someone did, which assumed that memory formation was expensive, so very good outcomes and very bad outcomes were remembered but baseline outcomes were _not_. So "0" had a real consequence in this model. They then concluded that whether life felt "worth living" or not corresponded to the _skewness_ of the distribution. I wish I could point to the web page, but I've just tried about a dozen searches with no luck.
Interested in how Pearce and the Far Out Initiative folks address what I would consider the most obvious use-case/systemic function for drugs that dramatically increase tolerance for pain and suffering in our current social/cultural/economic system: to allow existing Molochian power structures to push humans (and other animals) to previously unimaginable levels of indignity, violence, and squalor in pursuit of productivity. The "cruelty-free factory meat" is a fairly predictable example; we splice this gene successfully, agribusiness owners say "they're perfectly happy without beaks, light, or air now," then lobby to remove what flimsy regulation exists to protect animals currently and create perfectly efficient torture dungeons. This doesn't seem like a great outcome to me.
It's easy to imagine similar cycles with most human work as well. The natural appeal of a drug that claims to increase contentment and reduce pain will lead to some fairly substantial use initially, followed by competitive pressures effectively forcing total systemic uptake (happy workers = productive; workers who don't suffer = workers who do more that they previously wouldn't have; working conditions/expectations change, and even those who were skeptical take the drug to cope). I would guess there would be at least a few years of a lot of people genuinely feeling really really dope, but that the new suffering baselines would cause similar baseline shifts in labor law, business practice, military activity, and general ideology about what is OK and not OK to do to people (and likely other animals/the natural world), accelerating a huge swathe of the extremely destructive activity we already engage in as a species.
Of course there's also the possibility that workers who suffer less are more likely to refuse unpleasant work ("I don't actually need that extra money when I think about it; I'm content!"). That would be great! And it's what I imagine would lead to at least the initial period of people feeling fairly dope. Not everyone would, though, and eventually, those who were willing to use their new baseline for resource and social advantage would outcompete others and begin to control the rules.
Creating the type of utopia Pearce imagines through these technologies would require something that also curbs humanity's insatiable drive for *more* and somehow gets everyone in power to use it as well, despite it causing them to lose competitive edge for the current game.
Obviously this is all speculation, but it's important speculation to consider with any technology that aims to revolutionize human experience as we know it. I'm extremely sympathetic to the desire to biologically eliminate suffering, but the framing that Scott presents here seems to me a bit like hypothesizing about the explosive power of dynamite as a utopian construction tool without considering its use as a weapon.
Our stance on multidirectional approach to reducing the farmed animal suffering and maintaining the social capacity to challenge dystopian status quo is included in FAQ (https://faroutinitiative.com/FAQ). Primum non nocere; when investigating various interventions, we will strive to make sure that all these desired qualities - both at the individual and social level - are sustainably maintained, and perhaps we will learn how to failproof the emerging bliss-inducing technologies against the maladaptive failure modes. This constitutes a very general declaration, but it's probably good to emphasize it.
Respectfully, the answer to FAQ 7 is a statement of ideology/belief/prediction, not a safeguard, plan, or even particularly thoughtful analysis. The conformity induced by negative valence cuts both ways; it inhibits excessive cruelty and violence as well as exemplary compassion/morality. Initial techs will be blunt instruments even if successful, potentially able to reduce the negative experience associated with painful psychological states, but almost certainly unable to account for the infinitely varied ways that humans will respond to being released from those negative experiences. Jo Cameron for some; others, Charles Manson. And it only takes a small percentage of people willing to exploit things for competitive advantage to dramatically change the baseline for everyone else. That you're this confident/one-sided in your baseline assumptions about which way the scales will swing when negative valence inhibitions are lowered en masse increases my concerns substantially.
FAQ 9, tbh, I do not understand as a response to animal welfare concerns, though I do think it's wonderful that your team comprises mostly vegans. If successful suffering-blocking tech is provided to current agribusiness owners, in what way will they be prevented from using propaganda about the tech's efficacy to loosen cruelty controls and create more horrifying (from our current baseline) conditions to increase their productivity over the long term?
Re: FAQ 7, it is certainly not our intent to be overly confident or one-sided - when publishing the FAQ section, we wanted to provide quick answers under the heavy influx of recurring questions and with limited bandwidth. We are at the early stage, and there is certainly need to provide a nuanced strategy for a risk-averse rollout. Just as you note, the section primary contains predictions and statements of intent, not thorough safeguarding plans (sorry if that was miscommunicated). That being said, we listed some of the datapoints suggesting that anti-suffering interventions will be positive not only due to the directly resulting shift in hedonic tones. These include the case of Jo Cameron and the effects of elevated levels of endogenous opioids and BDNF, characteristics of the mesocorticolimbic circuit, negative correlation between the empathic concern and aggression, and the personal distress's potential in blocking empathic actions. We welcome further feedback on safeguarding this step, particularly in the context of game-theoretic arrangements, which is often the trickiest part.
Re: FAQ 9, the first line of argumentation is simple - as stated by one of our team members, "If I were forced to choose between being born as an animal in a factory farm with the capacity to experience extreme distress, horror, and pain, or as an animal in a factory farm without that capacity, the answer would be obvious - even if equally obviously I'd much rather just not be born to be murdered at all". The second line is largely about the diversification of efforts in the light of unknown unknowns (technological obstacles, growth rate of global meat industry, cultural shifts, etc.) - if the cultured meat sector were to eliminate the need for low-suffering livestock through legislative efforts and/or benefits concerning pricing/taste/nutritional value, everybody would be celebrating that as a win. Navigating the aspect of "ethical offset" will be, of course, tricky. Memeplex-wise, Far Out is connected to the ecosystem promoting more dignified treatment of nonhuman animals, spanning both welfarist and anti-speciesist stances, and that could carry some weight. On the other hand, there would have to be a way to make the business owners and customers feel contextually good (or less bad) about producing or buying "less inhumane meat", if the practical alternative is just more suffering with no capacity to coordinate meaningful anti-suffering action through other means.
Insightful points, Brian. Please see my recent post, which shares similar concerns regarding ethical implications and technology misuse.
To sum up my post, I argue that if Pearce's goal is to eliminate suffering, then using any technologies to further subjugate and exploit animals is a fundamental misuse. A dangerous precedent is set when genetic manipulation of animals for commercial gain is normalized in this way. This can undermine the public's trust and delay the use of such tech for human benefit.
Your point about "cruelty-free factory meat" is excellent. If The Far Out Initiative succeeds in their plans, animals could endure even more extreme conditions, resulting in environments that are highly efficient but morally abhorrent. Tools meant to reduce suffering will result in even greater exploitation.
The slippery slope extends to human applications as well. Competitive pressures could push workers into less humane conditions. New suffering baselines could shift societal norms and exacerbate already destructive behaviors.
The response from The Far Out Initiative leans heavily on ideological optimism without addressing safeguards necessary to prevent these dystopian outcomes. Their claims about "positive valence emotions" to drive non-conformity seem simplistic to me and overlook the complexities of the real world. The lack of safeguards is very troubling.
Yep. I recall that when antilock brakes were developed, people began driving faster in conditions that antilock brakes help with. What's more they (ok we) were found to drive just faster enough that roughly the same risk was present.
It's strange/weird/amazing that the basic idea "suffering is mostly bad, would be nice to have less" is controversial at all. I always hated the horrible "what does not kill me makes me stronger" quip. To paraphrase TLP, "pass me the hammer, I'll make you stronger". What does not kill often just maims for life.
Yes, I enjoy hard workouts and martial arts, and suffering is involved, but it's elective. I can stop if I want to. Unlike people suffering from chronic pains of unclear origin, or crippling anxiety.
Yeah. Sometimes pain is weakness leaving the body, sometimes pain is weakness entering the body, and it's important to be able to tell the difference.
FWIW I'm finding fewer and fewer cases where I can confidently say, yeah, this pain is weakness leaving the body...
Maybe you're in better shape than I am. :-)
That may be possible :-) but what I mean is that going into pain seems to be getting into a diminishing-returns territory. I don't go to failure in my strength training, tap out early in my grappling training, and max out cardio only occasionally as a test. It's, like, 90% of the benefit can be had with 80% of the effort, which conveniently avoids pain and injury.
But I loved the feeling of pushing myself past what I thought my limits were. Ah, well.
In which case, carry on! By no means my own prescription can be best for everyone.
"Then, when you’re rolling on the floor screaming and cursing your past self for making this decision, think of the people who live with chronic pain conditions and feel this way every day. Think of the wounded soldiers who lie on the battlefield screaming for water until they finally expire, or the animals who get eaten from the inside by parasites, or the mentally ill people stuck in padded rooms so they don’t try to kill themselves to escape the pain"
This all feels rather motte-and-bailey. I think the vast majority of people are supportive of research about pain and development of new treatments. But I think "pain" and "suffering" are two different things. You could develop a drug that instantly cures any physical pain without causing any side effects. But what would ending "suffering" look like? A lot of suffering isn't caused by physical pain. A loved one dies, a relationship falls apart, you lose your job, your favorite team loses the championship game, the store doesn't have your favorite flavor of ice cream--all of those things can cause "suffering" to some degree. Many religious and philosophical traditions offer suggestions for how to cope with suffering. Maybe I'm just not imaginative, but I don't know how science could stop us from feeling suffering without stopping us from feeling anything else. And even if it could, I think that seems like it would be a sort of cheap grace.
The conceptual confusion surrounding "pain" vs. "suffering" would likely require a separate article; in practice, many people use "suffering" to refer to the secondary, ruminating-reverberative aspect of negative experience that can be substantially reduced through a wide range of mental practices. We are interested in the minimization of maladaptive negative hedonic tone regardless of the source or its primary vs. secondary character, as long as we assign the highest priority to the most intense negative experiences, plus retain productive functioning in humans.
> cheap grace
"Cheap" has a connotation of substandard quality, but in many cases, once something started being manufactured at industrial scales, it ended up beating the artisanal version on quality as well as price. Nobody hand-knits RAM anymore, the way they had to for the Apollo program, or equips armies by working bronze or iron without power tools.
I hope that guy makes progress. Still, this comment of yours gets under my skin:
> One might worry that she might lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement
I notice the distancing words "one" and "might" and "worry". But in general, this feels like a fallacy that is destroying modern life. Righteous anger is not a guide to truth. It's a lot easier to feel righteous anger than it is to be correct (let alone righteous). But when feeling righteous anger, people stop caring about being correct. It's an addictive drug, and we're in the middle of a massive epidemic.
I'm a big fan of Pearce and the whole concept there; I've always been a weirdo in that I have *never* — since I was a little kid! — agreed with the bulk of humanity (apparently) about stuff like... catharsis, sad music, sad stories, the necessity or benefit in any sort of suffering, the necessity or benefit of death and aging, etc. My entire life has been built around, essentially, wireheading as much as possible, and arguing against people who (I feel) swallowed the Cope-Aid® re: "human stuff" (you know, all that trash about finding strength in adversity and catharsis in tragedy and beauty in tHe NaTuRaL CyCLe and etc.).
When I was a teenager and found Pearce's work around the same time I found LessWrong, I could've wept: at last, other people who noticed and weren't afraid to face how miserable our natural lot was! No more was I alone against the incomprehensible cope from normies!
Anyway. Re: capsaicin, my buddy lost his ability to perceive spicy food when he got COVID. It has lingered afterward; if there's any interest I could film him chugging some Atomic Fireball sauce or whatever it's called (the one where you're supposed to use one drop per thirty servings of chili, you know).
Interestingly, it still gets him on the way out, though. Meanwhile, I can still perceive it when I eat it, but I've never in my life suffered any "exit effects", so to speak. Together, we make one whole anti-capsaicin Superman!
Speculating, it might be the case that what you refer to as the Cope-Aid® social conditioning - including optimism bias, just world fallacy, growth mindset, and similar concepts - is quite pleasant and somewhat adaptive at the individual and even broader levels, at least in the absence of effective interventions targeting the core underpinnings of suffering. On the other hand, in order to at least attempt conducting any major anti-suffering change, one must accept a fair share of grim realizations about the nature of reality, and until the major anti-suffering intervention(s) are available, it feels worse than the previous state.
In conclusion, it would be best to find a clever way to feel like on the Cope-Aid®, but think, prioritize, and work like the suffering abolitionist.
Love how you put this.
What a disgustingly condescending comment. Cope-Aid and normies? Grow the fuck up.
Not saying you shouldn't own your idiosyncracies or not feel good when you finally meet like-minded people - just don't be such a dick about it.
I've never had such a strong response to things both expressly disclaimed as personal feelings *and* as obviously tongue-in-cheek as "Cope-Aid®"...
...but if I've hit a nerve, perhaps this is a sign you are close to enlightenment! Remember, anger is just normieness leaving the body!
-------------------------------------
[edit: edited to be a slightly — *slightly* — less snarky response.]
I genuinely enjoy sad music and tragic movies and books. Feel genuinely invigorated after watching Akira Kurosawa's "Ran" or a good "Romeo and Juliet." I assure you I'm not faking it. Maybe I've been somehow brainwashed into liking this stuff but I think the onus is on you to show sad stories objectively make human life worse. They have only been beneficial for me.
No, I believe you!
I believe that you and many people do indeed enjoy that sort of thing; and, contra my reply to "spooked" up there, I don't actually believe that this is an inferior or dumb way to be — I'm just messing with him because he's so mad about it, heh — rather, I just never *understood* it.
(If anything, it's probably an adaptive trait, since my resistance to any sort of negative feeling has driven me to some bad choices.)
What *else* I believe is that people who come up with reasons for why "actually, I wouldn't even *want* to be able to choose when and if I die, nor would I want that for those I love" — usually, stuff about "the beauty of nature's cycle" or "life would have no meaning if death wasn't omnipresent, sudden, and inescapable", things like that — are coming up with these reasons because it's too horrifying to face otherwise.
Or, put another way: I don't believe anyone would *really* choose these elements of world we now inhabit as an the ideal for how the world *should* be, were they to actually have the choice and/or to have grown up in a world without aging and sudden death and other tragedies. (Cf. Bostrom's or Eliezer's [IIRC] examples of the dragon and the "bonk on the head day".)
But I do believe that there *are* feelings that can be evoked and stories that can be told that both depend on this "sorry scheme of things", and are made more beautiful and deep and powerful for it. I just don't really *like* them myself, heh.
Thanks! I recall as a teen being disappointed at how few people seemed to share my enthusiasm for the prospect of wireheading. No more suffering. Perpetual bliss? What could be more awesome!? (last century the mesolimbic dopamine desire centres were still known as the "pleasure centres").Painfully, I learned the lesson that the only way to "sell" the abolitionist project and paradise engineering was to advocate ratcheting up hedonic range and hedonic set-points. Intelligent minds animated by "information-sensitive gradients of bliss" and a pleasure-superpleasure axis is a mouthful. But this scenario is still my best long-term bet for the future of life in the cosmos.
I wish we could get more of the LessWrong community on-board. I know in Serious Stories in The Fun Theory Sequence, Eliezer argues that phasing out all forms of suffering would make life boring, just as a story lacking any conflict is boring. So Eliezer instead proposes to abolish only the nastiest forms of suffering, while conserving its milder guises. However, this worry strikes me as misplaced. Future life could be underpinned by a biology of gradients of superhuman fascination. Boredom may become physiologically impossible - replaced instead by information-sensitive gradients of fascination.
Wonderfully put
Other people are sort of gesturing at this in the comments, but I feel like there's actually a lot of conceptual unpacking to do regarding Jo Cameron's condition, rather than just glossing over it so quickly. (I certainly don't automatically trust the scientists testing her to do that kind of work.)
She cries at sad movies (which is presented as meaningful and good), BUT she is in no psychological distress (so our theory about her condition holds up). Whoa! Hold on; that sentence doesn't quite make sense to me yet.
Ditto, as regards her passionate beliefs, and her dislike of certain politicians. Come on.
Couldn't we be looking at two different phenomena--one involving very atypical physical pain perception, and one involving her just being...very mentally healthy, in an ordinary kind of way?
Seems reasonable to hypothesize that those could be related somehow. Random / unavoidable pain can be pretty bad for "mental health in an ordinary kind of way." Learned helplessness and all that. Dose-response curve of such effects might very well continue straight on, without any weird inflection points conveniently close to the current population average, so that further reductions in suffering naturally lead to further improvements in the other good stuff. Worth a try, anyway, and, well... even if it did turn out to be two entirely separate phenomena, would you have any particular objection to researching and eventually duplicating them both?
There is indeed a lot of unpacking, and we are here to nitpick the details. Jo continues to constitute an important case, and we assign a high probability to the deep relation between her resistance to physical pain and psychological profile related e.g. to the levels of endogenous opioids, but we conduct broader investigations to acquire supplementary data and/or avoid the single point of failure scenario.
Yeah, it's not clear at all that she doesn't suffer tremendous psychic pain. She says her husband's death didn't bother her because he had been suffering for so long. Maybe she too had been suffering from his suffering and felt mostly relief upon his death. I don't see any reason to conclude her hedonic set-point is above zero. Agree with you that passionate political beliefs likely correlate with psychic pain of some sort. An enlightened Buddha supposedly goes around practicing simple acts of kindness not passionate acts of protest.
OTOH, we all know people whose hedonic set-points seem to be above or below zero, even though these people have the same capacity for physical pain as others. I find it strange to focus on Jo's case instead of looking at a set of people who seem and claim to be much happier than most other people and see what they might have in common which might be scalable. Of course, for all I know maybe that study is already being done as well.
I don't think LSD grants superspirituality or even spirituality (I have done it enough), and I'm generally pretty averse to radical techno-hacks, but I think the question of whether this is a good idea or not is ultimately empirical: if someone figures it out it just needs to be tried at some large scale that isn't total, then over the long-term we'll see if there are any adverse effects.
That woman really does seem to have the best neurotype though, but giving everyone the same neurotype seems a bit of a fool's errand. We can't even figure out non-depression and non-(pathological)anxiety, seems like dreaming about the Concorde without having a flying machine to begin with.
Gonna look into The Far Out Initiative though, thanks for highlighting this.
Maybe we should ask "What has she done with her life?" before granting her the "best neurotype" title. Notably, her accomplishments appear to be completely absent from the discussion.
I am perplexed by these philosophical arguments about pain. Pain is either useful or it's not. People already generally approve of alleviating pain that is not useful. What is left is, in modern developed societies, small bouts of pain that act as useful signals to take our hand off the stove, ease up on that type of exercise for a while to recover, etc. Surely I am not so uncommon in finding useful pain signals to be a beneficial sensory experience? After setting aside those two categories of pain, there is logically nothing left to argue about alleviating. If the idea is that some people's pain is so unbearable and untreatable that it's worth "cutting the cord" on their pain entirely, then those are pathological cases. Treating this like a philosophical argument towards humanity in general is illogical.
I think the argument is that, given existence proof of someone who seems to have a better useful / not-useful pain ratio than was previously thought possible, there must be an awful lot of non-useful pain still sloshing around untreated because it hasn't been properly diagnosed.
There must be a major misconception about pain that explains this obsession with Jo Cameron. My not-useful pain level is basically zero, and I'm not a special case. Many people are this way. If someone were to ask me how my life could be improved, I could list many material things, but it would not occur to me to mention physical pain. It just isn't a big deal for someone unless they have some pain-related pathology, and that isn't what this humanity-level philosophical argument is about. People are already trying to treat that. I do suspect your second point is true, and perhaps people experiencing chronic pain mistakenly think everyone around them experiences it and that it's our default physiology.
> My not-useful pain level is basically zero,
Kelvin, or Celsius? By which I mean, how did you set that specific zero point?
> and I'm not a special case.
I'm not sure this quite fits "typical mind fallacy" as most commonly used, but it does seem related somehow.
> it would not occur to me to mention physical pain
There are types which people don't usually think of as 'physical' which can still be chronic and entirely unnecessary.
Kelvin and Celsius are for temperature. Zero pain just means you aren't perceiving pain at that moment.
A loose definition of pain beyond physical could mean many different things outside the scope of my point.
If there are forms of unnecessary suffering which people care about but your metric doesn't cover, then that failure of scope IS the point.
"My not-useful pain level is basically zero, and I'm not a special case."
Man, I don't know... I sense a contradiction: if your not-useful pain level is 0 (meaning right now - then it's trivial - or always?) then you are a bit of a special case. Most people encounter useless pain during their lives, a classic example being Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness - a pain that seems to have no useful purpose whatsoever and whose origins and physiology are still poorly understood (no it's not lactic acid).
Useful reference for this one: https://www.painscience.com/articles/delayed-onset-muscle-soreness.php
Is this the 2 days after your heavy day weight training peak soreness or something more exotic?
Exactly that. It’s astonishingly useless: a day late, what am I supposed to do now, get into a time machine?
I’m not hitting it as hard as you I’m sure. I’m old, for me it’s just a rear guard action against entropy. I still feel it on day 2 though. It’s kind of weird. Walking down stairs 2 days after the heavy squats. Oh yeah there it is.
Modern world, despite the gift of medical advances, is plagued by the bottomless pits of negative hedonic tone, both adaptive and maladaptive, with many maladaptive instances that cannot be effectively alleviated. It's not an exciting thing to communicate, but perhaps half of the humanity (not to even mention the topic of factory farming and wild animal suffering) is at least occasionally experiencing severe bouts of completely unnecessary and involuntary misery: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/
As someone who intuitively prioritizes alleviating suffering far more than increasing happiness this post sings to me.
Alleviating intense suffering certainly carries less public appeal than the "one weird trick to make everybody happy" framing, but it's actually a prerequisite to ensure genuine happiness. For many, depending on the preferred terminology and ontological/computational assumptions, reducing suffering and increasing happiness is basically synonymous.
It would be that they enable humans to live more as humans ought to, in the same way as anaesthesia and medical care help.
This is all well and good, but in my mind suffering abolitionism doesn't go quite far enough. It's not enough to just bring about superhappiness in already existing minds. If we develop the ability to do this, then the question becomes: why not generate even more minds to experience this superhappiness? If utilitarianism is the greatest good for the greatest number, the Abolitionist project deals with the first part, but we then realize that we can make even more good by addressing the second part, increasing the number of minds in existence. I believe that once we figure out how to instantiate arbitrary levels of happiness in a given mind, it will be our duty to transform as much of the matter of the universe as possible into minds experiencing constant pleasure for as long as possible. This is what the long term progress of human technological advancement should be directed towards: figuring out how to transform the dumb matter of the universe into new minds so that we can fill our light cone with as much pleasure as is physically possible. This might be something that is far further off than the project addressed in this article, but I believe it is still what we should seek to direct our technological progress towards as the ultimate end goal of human advancement. Hopefully just as Mr. Pearce and the Far Out initiative are advocating for suffering abolitionism, others can begin to advocate for this program of creating as many pleasure-minds as possible as something to be strived towards.
Are you sincere or is this reply meant to be absurdism?
I'm as sincere as can be, I really do think this should be the ultimate end human technological progress should strive towards. We can directly experience pleasure as good in and of itself, something being objectively good implies an ought in its increase and maximization, so we should seek to maximize the total conscious experience of pleasure in the universe. After we've already maximized pleasure in extant minds, this implies the creation of even more minds to maximize universal pleasure as much as possible. So, the long term goal of humanity should be to figure out how to create new minds out of the matter in the universe, and how to maintain them in a state of maximal pleasure.
I appreciate this as the logical conclusion of pleasure-maximising type thinking, though it doesn't appeal to me much!
I absolutely agree with you. This is why I am not only pro-natalist but I never found the Repugnant Conclusion to be repugnant.
If one is a classical utilitarian, then one's long-term goal should presumably be a so-called utilitronium shockwave, aka a hedonium shockwave, i.e. optimizing matter and energy in our forward light-cone for pure bliss:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#eternalhappiness
By contrast, a negative utilitarian can settle for a forward light-cone populated by complex minds and a rich civilization underpinned entirely by gradients of superhuman bliss.
We could split the difference between those two options, which is something I think you've addressed yourself in some of your writings. The near earth system could be preserved for a civilization of complex minds in superhuman but sub-hedonium levels of bliss, while the dumb matter of the rest of the universe is converted to hedonium. Since the near earth system makes up such a small portion of the cosmos, it would be a relatively small loss to the otherwise hedonism-optimizing system, while preserving a foothold of complex cognition as a "hedge" in case there is some sort of existential meaning beyond pure utility maximization that has value in itself. So in earth and its immediate surroundings we could still have minds engaged in art, music, poetry, and creative striving, while matter that would never have been conscious otherwise in the other 99.999...999% of the universe is converted to pure pleasure.
yes, exactly, you've nailed it! Of people familiar with the currently theoretical idea of utilitronium or hedonium, almost no one is opposed to converting inert matter and energy into such hyper-blissful states. And a strict classical utilitarian can sign up to such a compromise insofar as it's (presumably) the most politically realistic option.
Here is a moral intuition I have that I absolutely cannot defend from first principles, but I still feel very strongly about:
I think that when your husband dies, it is intrinsically morally good that you feel really unhappy. Not for the rest of your life, not even for a very long time (say, a few weeks or months?), and not so intensely that you cannot function or make permanent regrettable choices. But if your loss is real, then grief should be painful; otherwise, it's as if you have nothing to grieve.
...I feel dirty having written this. I haven't experienced the death of anyone this close, it seems I would want to opt out of this kind suffering at its worst; it'd be cruel not to give people the option. So I don't really know if this means that I REALLY stand by this intuition of mine, but it gives me pause one way or another.
How unhappy? If you feel a bit sad for a day, is that enough? What if you get so unhappy that you commit suicide? What if you feel somewhat sad for a month, or deeply depressed for a week? What’s the right amount of unhappiness to feel?
Enough that other people don't think you're a monster. That's what it all boils down to.
My father died of a series of heart attacks over the course of about six months, and while it was painful to watch him go, when he finally went it was more of a sense of closure. All the grieving was already done and I was back to normal two days later.
That is to say, when you can see it coming, it's a pretty quick recovery.
I would never "blame" you or impugn guilt but my first thought would be that something was off with your emotional regulation system, your relationship with your Dad or both. I wouldn't lose respect for you, but you are so psychologically unusual I would feel a bit wary, like I feel around docile but huge domesticated animals.
You know, I'll take "docile but huge".
A very similar moral standard, near trivial to defend from first principles, is "when someone close to you dies, you should feel bad enough about that, in a foreseeable enough way, to want to avoid relevant negligence or malice." https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2017-09-16
I wonder if pain asymbolia can be trained. You hear of people getting into kink and gradually learning to 'enjoy' pain as just another interesting sensation…
Not as a matter of kink but a lot of pain can be somewhat neutralized by focusing on it, examining it, turning it over in your mind and at least to a degree reducing it to a a ‘sensory input’
Ask any distance runner about this.
There are definitely limits to this though.
I imagine kinksters are just doing the same thing (given that they have an obvious reason for focusing on the sensation).
Yes indeed. For martial arts, it’s useful to understand the difference between “annoying” and dangerous pain. An elbow digging into my thigh is sharply painful and really unpleasant, but the knowledge that it’s not damaging (a bruise at worst) allows me to deal with it deliberately. Whereas a mild sensation of pressure in the knee joint will cause me to tap out immediately.
Hmm... This reminds me of the quip that disgust is folk microbiology - useful if one doesn't have _actual_ microbiology.
In this case, unexamined pain seems to be an _approximate_ warning of impending damage - but trained martial artists have a _better_ estimate of what is _actually_ impending damage. Is this a reasonable analogy?
Yes, it's a good analogy. Goes both ways, too - I know which pain to ignore and keep going, and what not to waste my energy on because the opponent likely will ignore non-damaging pain the same way I do.
Many Thanks!
Meditation can definitely do this, Buddhist monks can do some impressive feats of pain ignoring. But it certainly has hard limits.
There are people who experience peppers as spicy and come to enjoy that!
Has Jo Cameron's genome been fully sequenced and archived somewhere? Seems like if she can be convinced to donate her data to science, making sure her full genome is available in case FAAH-OUT isn't responsible might be a good use of ~$250--$1000 (+ data storage), or whatever sequencing costs these days.
No opinion on the topic, so I'll just offer an alternate headline for the lion picture. Ahem:
"King Of The Jungle Enacts Revenge On Straw That Broke The Camel's Back."
What was the camel doing near the jungle?
Renewing its passport, I assume.
No rimshot?
> Turn-of-the-21st-century Oxford was an exciting place.
OMG We are using the past tense on turn of the 21st century!
I suppose we *are* almost a quarter of the way through...
I suppose it hits someone born in the middle of the 20th century in a different way than it would a younger person.
I think by my time, there'd already been a generation of futurism and sci-fi that didn't pan out, and I grew up with the knowledge that these sorts of predictions would be disappointing.
I did some coding for a hearing aid company to automate their product testing around 2012.
The markup on hearing aids is obscene. The operation was unbelievably bloated with people who really served no discernible function.
Anyway, it was privately owned and had money to burn.
They did a mock up of a home 40 years in the future for marketing purposes. The furniture 40 years from 2012 looked very much like the projected furniture 40 years from 1967. I almost had to bite my lip to suppress a laugh.
You have to remember, this is how the 21st century was first presented to me:
Walter Cronkite “The 21st Century” as envisioned in 1967
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I7TUZ_x57d8
1967, that fits. I could swear I saw some of that in sets for the original Star Trek. :-)
I watched snippets of that half hour program about life in the year 2000 last night. It was pretty funny in what it got right and where it might missed the boat entirely.
I’m going to watch the whole thing with my wife today. Should be fun.
That reminds me-- what happened to sous-vide?
It seemed like a big thing, but I don't think it's gone into common use.
I think it's made massive inroads into the "pre-cooked meat" section of Costco. For myself, it seemed too long and finicky and machine-intensive for home use. For daily cooking, I prefer stuff that can be done in under an hour (Thai curries!), and if I'm doing something that takes longer, like roasts or baking, I tend to gravitate to older recipes.
> This might involve patenting it themselves, so that nobody else can patent it; after doing this, they would give the patent away freely.
Does this actually work? I thought I read that this is what happened with insulin, but look where we are now. (On the other hand, the ideas that have us the Internet were successfully released into the public domain, without there being patent trolls on it.)
You absolutely can let anyone use a patent you own free of charge if you choose to. What they do with it is a different story.
All intelligent life feels pain, and the less pain you feel the less intelligent. As simple as that. We need pain for intelligent decision making, is the rational conclusion. If constant happiness with an indifferent baseline was evolutionarily viable, we would already see a large portion of populations with this disorder. But no, most of them get into accidents, not scared or warned by pain. The exception of one woman only proves the rule. A society of such people would be... strange... if not long-term unsustainable, due to the mutations from the "perfect balance" that exists in that one woman.
>The exception of one woman only proves the rule
That saying is actually often misunderstood. The correct quote is "The exception proves the EXISTANCE of the rule". The classic example is a no parking 9-5 sign, which is an exception proving the existence of a rule allowing parking the rest of the time.
Nope. The saying uses an older meaning of "prove" that is more synonymous with "test" than with "confirm".
The exception *tests* the rule.
This is getting interesting. Source please.
https://archive.org/details/stylebookofdetro0000detr#:~:text=the%20exception%20proves%20the%20rule%20is%20a%20phrase%20that%20arises%20from%20ignorance%2C%20though%20common%20to%20good%20writers.%20the%20original%20word%20was%20preuves%2C%20which%20did%20not%20mean%20proves%20but%20tests.
Thanks! Some interesting stuff here.
Well it can work either way. A sign that says “no children after 9pm” is both a rule itself and confirms the rule “children allowed until 9pm”.
This applies to house rules and the like but not scientific theories or classes. Exceptions can disprove the “rule” for classes of objects. That is a black sheep disproves the rule that all sheep are white.
ChatGPT presumably doesn't feel pain, despite presumably being more intelligent than a mosquito.
>All intelligent life feels pain, and the less pain you feel the less intelligent. As simple as that.
Does that mean when someone with Down syndrome slams their finger in the door, they don’t suffer the way an Ivy leaguer does?
“ and the less pain you feel the less intelligent”
That’s just plain wrong.
My main concern with this is network effects. I can see living as a persons with no sense of suffering but I have a hard time imagining a society. Pain response is sort of “hey do something about this” and cold hearted evolution or God or whatever you want to call it probably didn’t preserve suffering through the ages for no reason. Very curious about where this goes, however. I have some ideas about NeuraLink tech on the future and how this handles people choosing their own emotional response.
> (yes, obviously there’s a hedonic treadmill - Pearce’s goal is to find some biotech intervention that works prior to the hedonic treadmill, giving you a hedonic treadmill around a different set point)
This is a one line parenthetical, but it feels like all of my intuition around the question kind of hinges on this effect. Many inhabitants of modern industrialized countries do live in a hedonistic utopia compared to most of human history/much of the world today, but don't seem to be proportionally happier. They can get seriously depressed by thinking about problems that are objectively much smaller than what people used to deal with all the time and, as far as I know, be fine.
The physical analogies would be things like bones atrophying if you lie around all day, or developing auto-immune disorders if you live in a sterile place. Medical interventions for these problems could exist at some point, but at least right now my intuition to the question "wouldn't it be nice to lay in bed in a clean room all day" immediately snaps to issues like these (also the fact that I get antsy and have to work off energy if I sit too much). I have no idea what my intuition would be if medical interventions existed for all of these problems. Similarly, I have no idea what my intuition would be if I live in a hedonic utopia with some psychiatric intervention to prevent a hedonic treadmill effect. Right now, my intuition is something like, "this feels like you must be incapable of learning, or like a child who wants to see something comforting and familiar all the time." Of course, it's possible to posit that the intervention doesn't have these effects, but I have no idea what this society would look like or what it feel like to live there. It seems like the thought experiment has devolved into "just assume we can have only good things but no bad things" which isn't very useful. It certainly doesn't tell you that it's obviously correct to search for medical interventions on the assumption that you will eventually be able to avoid all possible negative consequences. It's like... if you really think this way, why would you oppose humanity being replaced by an AI that can just set its hedonism value to the max? Whoever these hypothetical inhabitants of this utopia are, they don't feel like they would be anything like me.
Anyway, an anecdote. Scott, you once wrote that you remember high school being miserable, but later in retrospect thought it wasn't so bad (years later). A few years ago I did a hike where, by the end, I was pretty miserable. We had done what we set out to do and were just making our way back to the car, but it was hot, we had to fight our way through brush, deal with muddy ground, we'd been out for almost 10 hours, we were tired with no idea how close we were to the end, and it was just fairly frustrating. And yet within a few weeks, I was looking forward to the next one. Outdoorsy people even have a term for this because of how common it is, "type 2 fun":
> Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect.
https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale
I should say that perhaps Jo Cameron proves I'm wrong about all this, but it's tough to wrap my head around what, exactly, she feels, and what this initiative is trying to accomplish. If it's fine for her to feel angry about politics and cry watching a sad movie, is it also expected that I might go on a hike, want it to be done in the moment, and later decide I want to do it again? What makes the difference between that situation and one in which I later decide I *don't* want to do it again, i.e. type 3 fun?
I guess I could see a goal of "people get to choose which feelings they feel and how much of them they feel and when and why etc." I think this still risks some negative consequences (like any choice does) but more importantly, I'm not sure this is the goal of the initiative?
Did Jo Cameron's two kids inherit any of their mom's suffering resistance? I am guessing no, because it would have been Big News if it were straightforwardly heritable like that, but still, seems worth being clear on that in a narrative about this.
1. Pain is necessary; without pain we can and will die early and without warning. Insensitivity to pain may mean you put off getting it addressed until it will kill you. The fact that over time we die anyways and the body breaks down and causes pain is being mortal. you'd essentially need to solve mortality in both cases to solve pain.
2. Mental suffering is a result of individuality; the capacity to love as an individual means the capacity to suffer as one.
the problem with you all is you talk about things like buddhism but you are not religious at your core and you don't "get" it. The point of those kinds of religions is to eliminate the self entirely to eliminate suffering by killing desire. The self-the thing that makes Scott, Scott-is an active impediment to the end goal, which is nonexistence or reabsorption into a world soul. you are a drop of water meant to become part of an ocean.
if you think too much about ending mental suffering entirely, you will get into ideas involving this; individuality is the cause, or existence is. You will start to be a nutter. In some sense, you need to accept in order for us to be free, thinking individuals the potential for suffering exists.
3. Honestly we need to make society as a baseline more tolerable before we can get enough resources or effort to tackle huge existential or engineering problems. It's easier and safer to mitigate suffering that way than to go all abstract and utilitarian over "big picture" thinking.
>Pain is necessary; without pain we can and will die early and without warning. Insensitivity to pain may mean you put off getting it addressed until it will kill you. The fact that over time we die anyways and the body breaks down and causes pain is being mortal. you'd essentially need to solve mortality in both cases to solve pain.
I’d rather not experience any pain and die unexpectedly than experience lots of pain in an effort to delay inevitable death. If living means living in a largely negative state, I’m not sure what exactly you’re living for.
Pain serves a purpose. I think it remains to be seen whether or not it’s necessary.
i remember reading Stephen Donaldson's The Illearth War, and in it Thomas Covenant has leprosy. Leprosy destroys the nerves, and what impressed me was that every day or more he always had to check himself because he couldn't just know he was injured; he could feel perfectly fine yet be injured and it develop into infection.
without pain we'd probably all live shorter lives. play football? you'd need to inspect yourself after every play. I'm not sure how children would survive in that kind of system.
as for pain in old age, well at some point the only answer is to "play the man" and accept it as a possibility. There's a lot of "rather nots" you'll encounter as you get older.
You'll say this then at age 50 you'll have a doctor tell you that you need to drink this horrible laxative so you can shit nonstop till you are clean inside, then they slowly will push a camera up your ass to make sure no nasty polyps are growing in you. There's no shortage of fear and indignity in growing old but you'll adapt and live.
> You'll say this then at age 50 you'll have a doctor tell you that you need to drink this horrible laxative so you can shit nonstop till you are clean inside, then they slowly will push a camera up your ass to make sure no nasty polyps are growing in you. There's no shortage of fear and indignity in growing old but you'll adapt and live.
I am exactly 50 and I’ve had three colonoscopies to remove polyps. You might think that’s what makes life great and look forward to your kids having the opportunity to have cameras painfully shoved up their butts but I don’t. My mom recently died from cancer bursting through her belly after 7 years of severe Parkinson’s. My dad, a guy with a masters in mathematics from Cal has dementia so bad a few days ago he took off his pants to take a crap in his favorite chair. He shakes with anxiety over fears that his house is somehow no longer his house. Neither of these people, nor I myself, have “adapted” as you assure me we must, and my mom certainly didn’t live, as you suggest she should. It isn’t due to a deficiency in character that some people don’t want to experience agony.
i think you have to live anyways regardless of the potential for agony or lot, because no one is going to eliminate pain. You say fuck it and live anyways and adapt until your end comes.
i'm your age too and in my own family on the men's side its rare we end well; pretty much both male grandparents and uncles died in ways no one would like, one suicide. i work in a job with elderly people as customers and the amount of seeing them degrade fast and then die is chilling. The men ALWAYS go first.
but what are you going to do? i mean you have to make peace with death and part of that is realizing it doesn't always come well. otherwise the fear will eat you alive.
> but what are you going to do?
About pain? Look for new ways for future generations to alleviate it. Like this Far Out Initiative thing. If my son suffers less, then his kids suffer less, etc. I think it’s worth looking into. If a person who’s in pain says to me, I don’t want to be in pain anymore, I’d like to help them with that. You don’t have to choose that path for yourself. You can preserve a baseline of suffering for your personal betterment/enjoyment/whatever. I don’t think anyone should (or would) stop you.
if its a matter of better palliative care or drugs for end of life pain relief I'd agree but the idea you can dispense with suffering as a concept by engineering the human race is stupid.
Rationalists have this huge failure mode where they see a problem (rents are too high, for example) and rather than try to do realistic or immediate steps (become landlords, work in local politics) they try to solve the root with one easy trick (georgism!) and do virtually nothing.
suffering is not something that can be solved, only mitigated.
You don't "have to live". People do in fact die every die, including by their own hand.
you have to live in the sense where you accept lack of control. you might suffer at the end of your life, or might not, but unless you want to suffer every single day over fear of that, or completely sacrifice any good in life by ending it early you make peace with it and live.
I sympathize about your losses. You have made very eloquent points. Thank you.
Reminds me of this post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a4HzwhvoH7zZEw4vZ/wirehead-your-chickens (Wirehead your chickens)
That's all very exciting. Obviously, you'd want very careful experimentation before introducing this kind of change into humans, which I assume is uncontroversial, and I'd probably want at least a few generations of unedited humans, which might be much more controversial.
A quick parable. When I was younger (maybe 10 years - 29 or so), I strongly believed that most negative emotions were immature, and that guilt, jealously, self-criticism, a desire for revenge, anxiety, panic, etc. were worthwhile if and only if they provided some benefit that couldn't be realized through a more dispassionate analysis. (I'm sure rationalism has some similar discussions.) I can't say whether the chicken or the egg came first, but I think I also feel those emotions much less strongly than most people, to the point that for at least some of them, I think I've only felt them once or twice in my adult life, and weakly at that.
Now that I'm older, I'm not so sure. I think my dispassionate substitute for those emotions is subject to a number of cognitive errors that I haven't been able to eliminate, and I may be missing something. I still wouldn't voluntarily choose to live a life with a lot more guilt and anxiety, but maybe if I had, I would have accomplished more of the things that are important to me?
I wonder if reducing suffering might have some similar unintended effects, to the point that I'd prefer to keep some suffering humans around for a while just to make sure.
> you'd want very careful experimentation before introducing this kind of change into humans, which I assume is uncontroversial
In this historically accelerationist anti-FDA pro selling untested medical treatments directly to the public space, that's quite a bold assumption.
I feel similarly, though maybe not exactly the same. I also felt that negative emotions were immature, but it turns out that very belief was maladaptive. Me— and people like me— who tend to feel emotion less strongly, usually feel this way for inauthentic reasons. In my case, it’s probably being cut off from my emotions and being good at intellectualizing them. In fair weather times, it’s a superpower and let’s me do work that most people can’t do. However, it is maladaptive in that it can build up and cause illness/breakdowns.
Granted, what I describe is an “inauthentic” sort of emotional regulation. Maybe a truly authentic sort of emotional regulation has all the positives with none of the downsides. Idk.
I haven't experienced illness/breakdowns as a result of even-keel emotions. I doubt emotional repression actually causes any illnesses.
I think I experience much less in the way of negative emotions than others (plausibly also positive emotions). A Hindu roommate of mine said I was like a Buddhist* because of my blase attitude. But people who know me don't think of me as an example to emulate. In another comment I said we should ask why natural selection hasn't made Jo Cameron the norm, and I'm aware the same thing applies to me to an even more obvious degree.
*I should clarify I was raised a mainline Protestant and became an atheist without dabbling in anything like Buddhism.
"The only Special Bonus Side Effect the London team was able to find is that apparently her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars"
This must be the most poetic side effect I've ever heard of.
"These are just a few of the images we've recorded. And you can see, it wasn't what we thought. There's been no war here and no terraforming event. The environment is stable. It's the Pax. The G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate that we added to the air processors. It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Well, it works. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work, they stopped breeding, talking, eating. There's 30 million people here, and they all just let themselves die. I have to be quick. About a tenth of a percent of the population had the opposite reaction to the Pax. Their aggressor response increased beyond madness. They have become... Reavers. They've killed most of us. Not just killed. They've done things. I won't live to see the results of our experiment. They were not trying to kill us all, they were trying to save us."
Let's do it to confined animals. Leave the human stuff for the future to worry about.
The presentation of the Scottish woman as atypical is puzzling. Everything she says about how she handles emotional grief is expected/ordinary social behavior, if you are an adult. Is Californian culture really that different from European culture? 10.000 western movies ( the archetypical US movie genre) does not suggest any difference. Granted, movies are not reality, but movies tend to mirror cultural norms.
European culture is not being bothered by your spouse dying? You're going to have to shoot me a reference on that one.
"Not being bothered" is twisting my words quite a bit, as well as how Cameron is quoted... Emotionally what she says echoes that old slogan the Brits had during the Blitz in 1940/41: "keep calm and carry on."
Notice that I am referring to what Scott quotes concerning how she expresses her emotional pain. Her physical pain threshold is another matter, that might be atypical.
That said, women in Africa - at least in rural Uganda - are socially expected not to ask for pain relievers, and not to show outward signs of pain, while giving birth. They are expected to labour in silence. Which most of them apparently do (google for example Vieira Silent Labour).That is Africa not Europe, but illustrates that culture also plays a part related to how even physical pain is "emotionally negotiated" and expressed. Nutshell version: Expressing as well as not expressing pain are signals to others and to yourself of what kind of person you perceive yourself to be.
... My general point is that instead of going "down" to the genetic level, perhaps going "up" to the cultural level is where the source for expressed behaviours is mainly located. The biopsychosocial frame of reference etc...it's an empirical question in which direction it tilts, though, we probably agree on that.
I love the nominative determinism that the “Far Out” Initiative is hosted on this blog and Scott still doesn’t think he’s the ideological descendant of hippies even with all the drug research, Bay Area roots, polyamory, communal homes, etc.
Hmm, did Scott ever explicitly disclaim that?
Mostly? He points out some things right or wrong about their viewpoints (which “rationalists” in 2084 would also have with 2024 rats) but never acknowledges the spiritual lineage.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the?utm_source=direct&r=qw6f2&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=6770221
I relate to Jo Cameron on a few levels. I have had two unmedicated child births. I would not describe the sensation of my births as painful in the sense of any of kind of pain I’ve ever experienced. It was a big sensation, but I would not describe it as painful. I never felt the need or desire for pain intervention.
Perhaps also similar to Jo I have experienced the deaths of people close to me, and other big negatively-charged emotional life events with a sort of detachment. I have never had anxiety or depression except for a very short bout of PPD that was likely associated with blood loss and resulting iron deficiency from childbirth.
I have always felt that I am pretty weird for the ways that I just continue to be ok when other people around me fall apart given the same set of facts. I guess if I could sum it up: I don’t really suffer. Or if I do, it’s just much less than other people seem to.
I am happily married, have decades-old friendships, and normal attachments to my children. I am definitely not a sociopath or a psychopath.
I always chalked it up to lacking a kind of existential fear that most other humans seem to have going in the background at all times, and I just don’t. I’m baseline really happy most of the time.
Thanks for this post. Very interesting.
Other commenter(s) have implied that childbirth could be a special case. What about other painful situations, like scalding, impact injuries, infections, surgery, etc?
Glad to hear you have a good psychological baseline! Me too.
Maybe I'm neuro divergent in how I process pain: I don't understand why one would want to eliminate the feeling of suffering rather than the cause of suffering. It seems to me like hearing a fire alarm that annoys you, and instead of attempting to put out the fire, instead turning off the alarm, like the meme saying "This is fine."
Pain isn't nice. If I am in pain then I want to be out of the painful situation, but I don't find memories of pain burdensome. If you tortured me for one hour today (without lasting damage) then tomorrow I would have the same experience of life (aside from having the opportunity cost of having one hour yesterday removed from my schedule).
I just don't get it. Messing with our systems of reward or pain seems dangerous (as e.g. opiates demonstrate well). There seem huge potential downsides, and to me, limited upsides. I would far rather spend effort actually making the world a better place, e.g., curing illness, preventing poverty, etc... than make people feel the world is better while leaving the actual world unchanged.
I have a lot of sympathy for those in debilitating pain, and I can see a real difference between being unable to live life (e.g., accomplish one's goals, spend time with friends, etc...) due to pain, and not being able to do that. These states of pain deserve care and attention, but a proposal to modify the human baseline seems a completely outmatched response to this (luckily) relatively rare issue that can often be addressed by e.g., treating the underlying cause of pain or specialized pain medication.
Eliminating ALL causes of pain is much much much harder then eliminating the perception of pain. Not only do you have to cure all diseases, but also you have to ensure no one ever breaks a bone or falls down again.
And yes, messing with systems of reward is for sure dangerous, but it seems pretty far off from involuntarily inflicting that on anyone.
I agree preventing all causes of pain is likely impossible. But I don't have a problem with most causes of pain. I have hurt myself in various ways over the years, and I don't really mind. As long as the pain isn't debilitating, and passes, then I am okay with it.
I've even had a medical condition that has knocked weeks of my life out with extremely intense pain. It happened sporadically each time for a day, for a few years. It was so painful I wouldn't be able to function for the day.
I'd rather not have had that experience, but tbh, it's not a big deal. I'm lucky enough to not have that disruption be to costly (e.g., not living on the poverty line). If given the option, I wouldn't mess with my pain response.
Agree with your comparison to the "This is fine" meme. I predict no pain will lead to massive increases in undiagnosed illness.
There's a theory that our brains (which evolved solely to propagate our genes, irrespective of life quality) are suffering-production machines that are constantly on the lookout for reasons to suffer. No matter how many causes of suffering you eliminate, the theory says, your brain will find an outlet for its "will to suffer." I think it's a plausible theory. Especially if you think that people who commit suicide seem to be experiencing maximal mental pain, even if their stated reasons for committing suicide can sometimes seem trivial. I'm thinking of the teen RobinHood user who self-murdered because an app glitch made him think he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm assuming the kid didn't understand the statute of limitations on debt. Ruining your credit for life is tough but it hardly seems like it calls for suicide. But to be fair to that poor kid, it's reasonable to guess he was experiencing as much mental pain as any other suicide.
I somewhat agree, for some amount of pain. But quite a lot of pain that people experience day to day is not really a signal of 'something bad or potentially harmful is happening'. The stove example is the other end of the spectrum here - sure pain in this situation has an obvious clear reason for existing. However chronic pain? (Which is much more common than you would think; I suspect makes up the majority of pain experienced by humans in the world) is not signalling danger, it's not making a sincere 'hey don't do that' signal - it's just misfiring. I see tonnes of examples of this all the time; migraines, neuropathy, osteoarthritis (this one is in *some* sense signalling damage but not in a way that is meaningful), fibromyalgia, IBS, endometriosis. People managing these things are not some rare tiny group of people with 'chronic pain' in a way that feels alien to you, they are every day people, living their life, loads of them, getting on with things, but feeling kind of miserable because of pain.
As I write above, I have a huge amount of sympathy for people experiencing chronic pain. I think they should be treated well and cared for by society. I wouldn't want anyone to think I don't support that. I think researching to address medical issues that cause chronic pain is great, and worth funding. I would love it if nobody ever suffered chronic pain again. I would love to able to cure all instances of nerves misfiring.
However, I don't think genetic engineering humans so that they have a fundamentally altered experience of suffering (not just pain) has much to do with treating chronic pain. It seems to me wildly irresponsible to start intentionally engineering different reward systems (pain and suffering being expressions of negative feedback) into the human genome.
If David Pearce's goal is to eliminate suffering, then the first application of his ideas should not be to further subjugate and exploit animals. This initiative sets a bad precedent by normalizing the genetic manipulation of animals for commercial exploitation.
People will mistrust any tech if its initial use is ethically compromised in this way, potentially delaying the adoption of these technologies for human benefit.
Does The Far Out Initiative truly view animals as mere commodities for human use? This stance undermines ethical progress in recognizing animals as sentient beings with intrinsic value. A slippery slope could lead to arguments for applying genetic technologies in unethical ways to humans. Recent events have shown how easily public trust can be eroded. What prevents these same arguments from being used to justify creating human slaves?
Lots of technologies for animal husbandry have been adopted without any concern to the benefit of the animal. Vegans are far from the norm.
Commercial exploitation of animals is a gray area. But the genetic manipulation of animals for CALORIC exploitation is already normal. It's been normal for thousands of years. Humanity will continue molding animal genes like clay and I will never issue a blanket condemnation. I will continue to judge these things on a case by case basis.
What the Far Out Initiative is doing is a deeply pragmatic emergency stop-gap measure to minimize farm animal suffering while activists work on changing hearts and minds and tissue engineering technology gradually progresses to the point that it can produce animal-free meat with superior taste, nutrition, and price relative to animal derived meat products. All members of The Far Out Initiative are passionate supporters of animal liberation and shutting down the death factories as quickly as possible. We are a Public Benefit Company so that we can direct the revenue we generate by helping asshole meat industries transition to a suffering-free model into other potentially very high impact projects and cause areas, clever and out-of-the-box vegan activism among them.
While I have no strong views on animals myself, re "meat industries transition" you might want to be aware of https://www.wptv.com/life/food-and-drink/states-banning-lab-grown-meat-as-market-grows
In my view, any form of animal agriculture should be outlawed. Humans should be helping sentient beings, not harming them. And I'm conflicted. As you suggest, the biggest risk of ameliorating the lives of factory-farmed nonhumans is to legitimate their exploitation. Compare mandatory cameras in slaughterhouses. It sticks in the craw to "support" mandatory cameras because slaughterhouses have no place in any civilized society. We should be campaigning for their abolition. And yet at the same time, cameras massively reduce "abuses" and near-term suffering.
Do you agree with the Far Out Initiative's approach of focusing on farm animals first? Clearly it has some PR (Public Relations) issues. Couple of points:
1 - Might be worth always leading with what you just said. Don't direct people to the above ACX article as a way of introducing them to the topic (unless they have an open mind and always read all the comments before starting to form their opinion).
2 - Relatedly, regardless of how it is presented, this approach might be doomed to failure for PR / political reasons.
Happy to justify/explain/elaborate both of these, but only if you and/or the FOI would actually read my explanation.
What other approaches have been considered? What about providing a service that would allow people to include something like 'hedonic baseline' or 'pain sensitivity' as traits to consider during embryo selection? And at the same time trying to promote embryo selection in general?
Presumably this would involve focusing less on Jo Cameron, and more on relatively common genetic variation. I bet that both the above traits could be tied to polygenic scores. Other commenters here have talked about their own experience in relation to them. (Myself, I am, by default, content and happy with life. I've never had depression, and couldn't really imagine having anything like it except in some circumstances that would be exceptional (for a citizen in a liberal democracy in the 21st Century), and despite the fact that one aspect of my circumstances does seem to be positively correlated with depression in society as a whole. And my dad seems to be similar.)
1 Animal agriculture is currently the world's worst source of severe and readily avoidable suffering. So the prioritization makes sense. The biggest challenge is simultaneously working to mitigate its horrors and campaigning for its outright abolition. I'm heavily conflicted: https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#slaughterhouses
2. In my view, all prospective parents world-wide should be offered access to preimplantation genetic screening, counselling and genome editing. Access would be extremely cost-effective. All germline interventions could be framed as remedial rather than as enhancement. After all, no one in history by the WHO definition of health ("a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being") has ever yet been healthy. If our focus were just on physical pain, then offering prospective parents the option of "low pain" alleles of the SCN9A gene ("the volume knob for pain") would probably suffice: https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#physical What's tantalizing about the Jo Cameron case is the possibility that a couple of genetic tweaks could defang physical _and_ mental pain while leaving the bearer essentially "normal". The role of benign alleles of the FAAH gene in good mood, reduced anxiety and high pain tolerance was already known. Whether Jo's rare dual FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutation explains her condition, or whether her genetic make-up holds other surprises, won't be known until her full genome is put in the public domain. I'm impatient.
At this point, bioconservative critics start talking about reckless genetic experimentation. But this is precisely what all sexual reproduction involves: untested genetic experiments with sometimes tragic consequences. Not everyone thinks such experiments are ethically justified (“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?” Schopenhauer). But if one _does_ think such genetic experimentation is warranted, then one should at least attempt to load the genetic dice in favour of one's future offspring - in my view.
This issue reminds me of a couple others. There was some UTube guy who helped people and got attacked for it, I don't remember the specifics and didn't understand what the fuss was about. I think he was accused of "exploiting" the people he helped in order to boost his fame. The other more directly comparable issue is folks opposing CO2 sequestration because it doesn't reduce CO2 emissions but rather "encourages" them.
Did the lady Jo feel no pain, and no anxiety? Or did she just THINK she wasn't feeling pain or anxiety? What's the difference?
The whole point of emotions (such as pain) is to be aware of them. That's what being conscious does...
But I am trying to reach a state (as Hindu) where I am very much functioning in the real world but simultaneously aware that I am not this entity "I" that I keep thinking I am. The boundary between that "I" and everything else is arbitrary, I have been taught, by "Advaita", a Hindu philosophical concept. We dissolve into the universe as an entity, if we can only switch our thinking, rid ourselves of our ignorance (avidhya).
Is this lady the ultimate Advaitin?!
The boundaries are obviously not arbitrary. I prefer the term "nebulous" that David Chapman tries to popularize - it doesn't seem like popular culture has a ready conceptual handle for this general idea, which equally obviously is true. But, likewise, when various spiritual traditions try to fix that gap by completely denying boundaries they end up sounding crazy.
Advaita is a very deep concept. I don't expect someone to understand it with my short tangential comment here.
Scott says “Think of the wounded soldiers who lie on the battlefield screaming for water until they finally expire, or the animals who get eaten from the inside by parasites”
as an argument for being a pain abolitionist.
To me this is a bad argument since while, yes, it would be good if extreme, intense pain were eliminated, the anti-pain abolitionist in me is worried about eliminating subtle emotional pain.
Indeed, the worry about losing subtle emotional pain, for me, mostly starts as a desire to not lose that pain for yourself. So even the statement by Scott: “To me, you either start with a deep hatred for the suffering of your fellow beings…” is a bit disingenuous, as it paints the pro-pain position as being “uncaring for others” whereas in reality I am pro pain for myself and for others equally.
—---------------------
I also notice a bit of an inconsistency with how things are presented here.
On the one hand Scott Says this about Cameron:
“One might worry that she might lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement, but in fact she has strong political opinions (she doesn’t like Boris Johnson) and attends protests.” –
thus implying that pain is not a necessary motivator for action. Presumably because Cameron cares about stuff other than limiting her own pain. I.e. Reducing pain and increasing happiness is not a complete statement of her values.
But on the other hand, Scott also says: “On the other, you have people like Epictetus and the Buddha. Even if you improved the world, they say, you would never be happy. If you want happiness, you have to look within.”
But wait? Who says we want happiness? I thought we wanted to deny Boris Johnson from being in power. Indeed, someone who never suffers ever still wants to remove Boris Johnson from power. So we can turn the statement on itself “Even if you looked within, you wouldn’t improve the world. If you want to improve the world, you have to look without.”
—-----------------------
As for the real crux of the argument which is
“Can people still care about improving the world without emotional pain” I want to say
1. To the point Scott makes that:
“Obviously there’s a hedonic treadmill - Pearce’s goal is to find some biotech intervention that works prior to the hedonic treadmill, giving you a hedonic treadmill around a different set point”
I would be very skeptical of any such intervention since “the hedonic treadmill” is such an abstract concept that includes all sorts of types of emotions: physical, emotional, psychological, social etc so that changing anything on such a fundamental level of your brain is inherently risky.
2. To the point that Cameron is still apparently an activist… I find in myself that anger is often a motivator for me to want to care about issues. Indeed, powerful anger can make people do crazy things. Things that maybe a fully rational person would not do. Sure there are other motivators too so if you removed anger I wouldn’t literally care about nothing. But I wouldn’t care about things the same amount. And I think real change often happens when you have extremely committed people to a specific cause. And that level of extreme commitment could be harder without anger.
3. To my thinking there are 3 basic motivators for political action:
a)anger/pain
b)Cerebral Effective Altruism type thinking
c)Social signaling.
I think if you removed (a). You are left with (b) and c. (b) is very small. I don’t think most people have the drive and perspective to be effective altruists. And (c) only works if some large group of people have a motivation other than (c). So even though a single person without (a) could still care about things because they live in a world where people do that and they learn it’s good to care about things, if literally no one felt any emotional pain, it wouldn’t obviously work the same way.
4. As I alluded at the top of my comment. I have a general desire not to lose the capacity for emotional pain. In general I have a desire for more capacity, for more ability to sense stuff. Just like physical pain can help you avoid fires, I have an intuition that emotional pain can also help you in some way. Maybe it’s not “you need emotional pain to be anti-boris Johnson” as disproven by Cameron. But in general, increased sensation-capacity is better than decreased sensation-capacity.
Sure if you told me there was a way to fully keep my capacity to sense the presence of pain and fully keep the capacity of the sensation of the presence of pain to motivate me, and it’s ability to help me empathize but skip out on the unpleasantness of the sensation itself, I wouldn’t necessarily be against that. But I would be very skeptical of any claim to actually accomplish that due to the subtleties involved and the inherent uncertainties. In fact, I can’t really conceive of any experiment that could convince me that the “emotional pain removal” doesn’t also remove any of the aspects of pain that I would want to keep.
Altruistic motivation in the absence of emotional pain is something that should be enhanced when the positive valence, warm, meaningful, connected compassionate aspect of empathy that actually motivates engagement is liberated from the personal distress aspect of empathy that makes us flinch away from thinking about the suffering the world holds and find altruistic engagement aversive.
It seems to me that there’s a dilemma for this view. Either this end to suffering has significant behavioral effects on people, or it doesn’t.
If it doesn’t, then in what sense is it really an “end to suffering”? Do people try angrily to avoid mere bliss rather than the better thing?
If it does have significant behavioral effects, then it seems to me that we really have deep questions to answer about whether these include apathy about real harms to self and others, even if not as obvious as the kids that burn themselves to death. What is stated here isn’t enough to reassure me.
This sounds like what we did to wolves to get dogs (happier, less neurotic creatures with higher pain thresholds).
The question is, who gets to be the master?
I imagine that a growing sub-population of fearless, compassion-driven, anxiety-free, unshakably equanimous people with Cameron's condition would be very difficult for tyrants and demagogues to manipulate:
1. There is no status anxiety to exploit; they would not fear standing up and opposing injustice, which would make them much more likely to do so.
2. Fear and status anxiety-driven conformity would be absent.
3. Self-deception would plausibly be more difficult in the absence of negative valence "ugh fields" that we erect around ideas we don't want to consider and then subconsciously flinch away from when we detect a negative valence gradient.
4. Self-deceptive preference falsification should be much more difficult for the same reason: they would not fear honestly expressing their minds whenever and to whomever they wish.
5. They would not be susceptible to the negative-valence caricatures that politicians and other Machiavellian undesirables use to mobilize the population against groups they wish to attack.
6. Motivation is dopamine driven - it's vastly more about anticipated reward than anticipated punishment - so people with this condition will continue to want what they want and would have no fear of standing up to tyrannical governments that stand in the way of their exploration of the state-space of happiness.
I'd like to believe that this is true. Unfortunately, I've noticed a tendency for people in power to be miserable. Look at Elon Musk - the dude has money beyond the count of grief, money enough to enact his desires to the limit of what is legally and physically possible (and more, in the former case). And yet he appears to be miserable. There's a screaming wound inside him that cannot be satiated.
And look at every successful revolutionary - did any of them seem like they were particularly blissed-out and content?
Do you really think that the current masters of the universe are going to take the happiness cure? And, if they did, do you think that they won't just be replaced by people who didn't?
So don't you inevitably end up with a leadership that's just as grotesque and rapacious as ever, only now the rest of us proles are more tolerant and compliant? This is a recipe for dystopia.
Our leaders cannot resist taking conventional recreational drugs so they will never be able to resist taking the Happiness Cure. Whoever replaces them will probably succumb to temptation and start taking the Happiness Cure. But I admit I am at a loss to understand why suffering-free dystopias should be more off-putting then a utopia with suffering.
There are many competitive advantages that high valence brings. Imagine being able to build a project or launch a campaign without having to battle negative valence every step of the way. Even small inconveniences can prevent us from doing something highly beneficial. Imagine how much more innovation and entrepreneurship there would be with the huge barriers of anxiety, stress, and fear no longer blocking ambition. Motivation is primarily driven by anticipated reward, not negative valence. So, in the absence of negative valence one will still want what one wants and pursue the dopamine hit of obtaining it.
Here are a few counterpoints to the OP's claim that high valence makes us easier to exploit and the notion that misery correlates with success:
1. Happier people have more agency
Research suggests that happier individuals are more likely to care about and take action on social issues, indicating a higher sense of personal agency. A study found that happier people are more involved in civic activities, such as voting and volunteering, likely due to their greater optimism and trust in others.
(https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/.../why_taking_care_of...)
(https://www.weforum.org/.../happy-employees-more.../...).
2. Happier people are more creative
Studies have shown that positive emotions broaden an individual's thought-action repertoire, enhancing creativity and problem-solving abilities. Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory posits that positive emotions expand cognitive resources, leading to increased creativity (Fredrickson, 2001).
3. Happier people are more successful
Research by Lyubomirsky, King, and Diener (2005) demonstrates a strong correlation between happiness and various measures of success, including income, job performance, and workplace success. Happier individuals tend to be more productive, perform better in leadership roles, and receive higher evaluations and pay.
(https://www.weforum.org/.../happy-employees-more.../...)
4. Happier people are less inclined to tolerate abuse
Happier individuals are more likely to have higher self-esteem and a stronger sense of self-worth, making them less tolerant of abusive relationships. A study found that happiness and self-esteem are significantly correlated, with happier people being less likely to remain in abusive or unsatisfying relationships (Orth, Robins, & Widaman, 2012).
5. Happier people are less subject to social conformity pressures and peer pressure
Happier individuals often exhibit greater authenticity and self-assuredness, which reduces their susceptibility to social conformity. Research has shown that people with high levels of well-being are more likely to resist peer pressure and make autonomous choices (Sheldon & Houser-Marko, 2001).
There are a lot of fishy things about this. Anyone doing work with them in advised to conduct a background check on the principles. Request government ID.
First Jo Cameron was the answer, now FAAH OUT may be bogus.
Then minicircles were the answer, now CRISPR.
Smells like a scam that Scott got caught up in. Watch out.
Marcin is not being paid. Who is? Follow the money.
Scott mentions the clinic in Prospera may be fraudulent. What is the story there? Has The Far Out Initiative given them investor funds?
re: patent situation. I suggest he should patent it and sell the patent to the highest bidder, who will presumably have a strong incentive to market and sell it to make lots of money, and the proceeds can be used to do more suffering mitigation work.
Monopolies don't generally result in low prices. I think they would be better off publishing and not patenting at all.
I gotta suspect this is a utilitarian madhouse of sand that stems from thinking pain/pleasure exist on some kind of linear spectrum. But, still, I would love to hear more about how Jo Cameron's mind supposedly works. I had assumed people stay alive by noticing their bodies are hurting, painful, tired, and then being strongly motivated to change what's causing these problems. I find it extraordinary that someone could become a functioning adult without any of this motivational apparatus.
Cameron doesn't have complete pain insensitivity. She has an astronomically high pain tolerance: her nociceptive neurons send signals to her brain and she reported a pain score of 1/10 while convalescing from a hip surgery notorious for its agonizing recovery period. We aren't aiming for the elimination of pain signalling; we are trying to tone it down to a level where its a trivial inconvenience at worst. We will still know when we are being damaged and we will quickly respond out of the self-preservation instinct.
I agree with your observation that pain and pleasure do not exist on a linear spectrum. Pleasure and pain are vast multidimensional spaces. However, there is a "magnitude of badness" and a "magnitude of goodness" property that even the most exotic qualia possess, and this allows us to roughly say one thing is better or worse than another.
My understanding is that the ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ systems of the brain are correlated but distinguishable. Motivation is largely dopaminergic where as ‘pleasure’ is governed by the mu-opioidic system among others, and anxiety by the amygdala etc (obviously drastically oversimplifying) so you can actually have motivation with or without positive or negative affect.
Ah, but what kind of Scottish person? A Scot, or a Scott?
Later realisations:
- this kind of solves the repugnant conclusion
- (more weird this one) we say suffering is necessary for growth but you can play games that don't have as big of a punishement as the real stuff.
It may amuse you to find I never found the Repugnant Conclusion repugnant.
I don't doubt that we can experience profound growth through suffering.
However, we can obtain many of the same forms of growth through (nearly) painless methods:
1. Read books on evolutionary psychology and how to navigate the dark side of human nature instead of learning about human shittiness the hard way.
2. Meditate to deepen your phenomenological acuity so that you can uncover self-deception and maladaptive tendencies, instead of suffering agonizing social drama that makes such realizations vastly more painful.
3. Practice Metta to cultivate self-love and self-acceptance that is internally centered and independent of the whims of others.
4. Acquire and cultivate coping skills through therapy or bibliotherapy.
5. Read philosophy
I think the "just world bias" is making people think that pain is necessary to develop positive characteristics, while flinching away from the idea of exploring more humane strategies to deliberately cultivate these virtues.
There's a line of thinking in dealing with chronic pain that says it's not the pain itself that causes it to be perpetuated, it's anxiety and catastrophic thoughts that cause ordinary pain to be prolonged and become chronic. One name for the approach to that is Pain Reprocessing Therapy. If a drug could address this, that might cause a decrease in suffering without a decrease in compassion.
My mom is one of those people who feels pain in a negative situation, for instance when her husband died, but she tends to get over it quite quickly.
I want to talk about the AI-generated image of a post-suffering utopia. It looks suspiciously like Waikiki Beach, with a beautiful natural environment despoiled by a bunch of skyscrapers.
Ignoring the practicalities like how we are going to feed all these people without roads and ports to spoil the view (maybe food is delivered by hang glider), does anyone really think that a tiny-footprint ultra-dense city seems like a nice place to live? It seems like the logical endpoint of a lot of "urbanism" but it also seems deeply depressing (much like Waikiki).
Yes, it seems like a nice place to live.
it looks like it maximizes the preservation of wild nature as well as the amenities of density. sign me up!
"If you could CRISPR something like FAAH-OUT into cows, chickens, etc, you could create breeds of animal that don’t suffer. They think farms would go for it - non-suffering livestock isn’t just good press, it’s also healthier and (potentially) produces tastier meat. Then vegans could continue fighting for factory farming abolition as usual. But it wouldn’t be quite as desperate, and there wouldn’t be as many casualties along the way."
This is the most vile and reprehensible thing I've ever read from Scott's pen. This scenario is a literal nightmare. I couldn't read the rest of the article but I skimmed it for some indication that this was irony, without success. It should not be lost on you what this would mean: a million chickens squeezed into square-foot cages standing in their own shit and covered in ulcers (as they are now, for instance) all thinking the chicken equivalent of "well, bad things happen in life, you just have to move on".
I have never posted a comment here before but I'm posting this one. I assume that's some of that righteous anger I would still feel when I couldn't otherwise tell that I'm being abused.
How would it be worse than the status quo?
Okay, apply this to human slavery and get back to me.
I don't get your point. Slavery with suffering is better than slavery without suffering?
Did you even read 1984?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logical-fallacy-of-generalization-from-fictional
I figured that the real argument implicit in that fictional work would be better than whatever I could write. Well, I will try, in short sentences.
Slavery is bad. I should not need to explain this. To enslave is a moral ulcer for the slaver. To remove the slaves' suffering is to make them complicit in their situation. And the situation isn't even any better for them. They still get beaten and worked to death. You want to be on the side of the ones who would do this?
Now I'm flashing back to discussing related topics on LW 15 years ago https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dvc7zrqsdCYy6dCFR/suffering#pjPbCamDYMNsPf9HB
I'm a vegetarian and I agree with Scott here.
Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general during the American Civil War:
>>> It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.
To what extent is this - in Scott's terms - pure and raw cope? It has *some* merit, I suppose. Obviously when something is painful or inconvenient, you have to be more careful and not trigger-happy when doing it. It's good that shit smells like shit, or some would eat it and die.
The problem with this in the case of war is that it hasn't worked for millennia. For millennia, people have murdered each other, ate each other's dead meat, raped each other, etc etc etc... It didn't decrease war one bit. When the concept of "Laws of War" began appearing in the late 1940s, you would have thought that - because it made war less awful - it would have the effect of increasing wars, but no, not at all, both wars and casualties of war has been decreasing since WW2.
As David says again and again and again in this thread, this isn't Brave New World. Signals don't have to be pain, you're perfectly well capable of steering your car even though there is absolutely no pain involved in hugging a couple of cars at 20 Km/h without causing a major accident. If you think "Well if I do that there would be lots of money claims involved and a massive headache in resolving the conflict which will involve insurance and courts and...." then all of that would still exist in a pain-free world, it wouldn't be the strawman heaven world with rainbows and ponies you're imagining, there would still be conflict and lawsuits and money and all the other negative signals that people use to dissuade each other from anti-social behavior, it just wouldn't be all attached to that ancient led that lights up whenever the signal is delivered.
Humans are consistently awful at sensing and empathizing with others' pain. Slavery was outlawed several times during its history by several benevolent dictators, and each and every time it came back after the dictator died or was deposed. Slavery was abolished once and for all when - for the first time in history - we could enslave non-thinking beings. It's likely that meat-eating - a practice whose victims are not recognizably human and can't advocate for themselves, for one difference from slavery - would be orders of magnitudes harder to abolish peacefully or even with reasonable 3x-as-the-wars-of-slavery casualty budget.
It's likely that the vast seas of people uninterested in animal welfare won't begin to give a shit unless and until cloning and lab-grown meat reaches the markets, only then will the first culture and law-making war around meat-eating begin in earnest. Unless you have a technology that will make humans directly feel all the neurological pains of exploited animals in their heads, opposing the mitigation of their suffering while the battle for their emancipation rages is just cruel.
Alternatively, consider that your argument is a general-purpose argument against mitigating any animal suffering at all. Why give animals medicine? That can prolong their suffering. Why raise them as free-roaming and respect their social structures (e.g. by not putting aggressive males into tiny enclosures together)? Those are all bandages that don't solve the problem and can be used to justify even more farming and exploitation of animals. Except they are bandages that **do** decrease animal suffering, and what animal rights advocate won't like decreasing animal suffering? There will **always** be people who point out to any remotely humane procedure and say that it is enough and that we don't need to abolish the entire immoral practice from its roots, to allow those people to ruin mitigations is beyond cruel and idiotic.
The obvious question is why did natural selection make Jo Cameron an unusual mutant rather than the norm.
> The world is on fire, and although some of us live on nice little islands of bearability, it’s hard to enjoy them when you can look just off your island and see everyone else on fire.
No, most people who exist seem to like existing. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/poor-folks-do-smilehtml
> the post-Darwinian transition
That will never happen as long as organisms are born & die.
Preferring to be alive rather than dead seems more relevant to me than some 10 point scale.
It does seem like our physical pain set-up is way overpowered. The worst pain people can feel seems a couple orders of magnitude too high to do the necessary job of teaching us not to do things that will injure us.
And it also happens in situations where there is nothing to be learned -- as when someone is dying from a painful illness or injury. Can anyone think of some benefit we incur from being built so that we can experience extreme pain for long periods of time?
There's already a consensus that we should try to control extremes of pain e.g. when someone is injured or dying. I think this debate is about whether to remove pain in more 'normal' situations – e.g. your dog dies, should you be sad? you see someone being mugged randomly, should you feel bad for them? you stand on broken glass, should the stab of pain overtake all other thoughts or should it be presented as more neutral information along the lines of 'oh look there's a bird'?
Yeah, I get that. I was more asking whether there's any evolutionary advantage to our present set-up, where we are subject to extreme physical pain. I suppose it's simpler than a set-up that allows for more modulation. Right now the set-up seems to be something like the more tissue damage there is, the more pain. So to have the pain max out at a 6 because that's enough to convince us to avoid whatever gave us the level 6 pain, no matter how much damage there is, is a more complex set-up. And to have no pain in situations where there is nothing to be learned, because the subject is dying, requires more intricacy still. On the other hand, fear of extreme pain is very stressful for us, and chronic moderate pain makes many people low-functioning & joyless -- some even commit suicide. And we also take a huge hit if we must witness our loved ones suffering greatly. So I'd say the cost to the organism of the present pain punishment set-up is pretty high.
Probably the evolutionary advantage is that experiencing a minor pain as a leg is being chewed off, or the animal starts walking on hot coal, wouldn’t be as much as a deterrent as an incredible pain.
Imagine an animal encountering lava for the first time and deciding to walk amongst this shiny new thing.
The body has only a fraction of a second to encourage the animal to run away before serious injury occurs.
As for why it is long lasting when not needed - It does look like animals that are being eaten alive give up, and stop threshing around and there’s some evidence of an endorphin flow.
However humans seem not to have that ability, not with chronic pain anyway.
I think that’s right. Without experience or instinct, pain and pleasure are an organism’s primary teachers. But it seems pain has greater depths than pleasure, and I imagine that’s because the stakes are much higher. Pleasure encourages you do keep at something, so there’s less urgency. Pain encourages you to stop doing something (maybe something fatal) so time is of the essence. Pain in extreme cases needs to communicate to an organism that not only must it run screaming from the source of it, but pain also needs to leave such an indelible impression on the organism that it will never go near that source again.
Maybe humans, with so many other ways to determine what is good or bad for them compared to other organisms, don’t need pain to be such a severe teacher. Its utility is arguably diminished in the face of human technology, expert instruction and reason.
To say that pain is an outsized source of misery in the world sounds a little silly, but I don’t think it’s wise to give it so much control over our modern lives.
There are a lot of arguments that I could think of against this, but they're all really just problems that need to be solved. There's nothing in the laws of physics that says we need to suffer. Why shouldn't we have heaven on Earth?
There's a woman named Steph Davis who's done lots of unroped climbing of long, difficult climbs, and also lots of wingsuit flights. She wrote a book about it, and while she did experience fear at times, she seems not to have been much subject to it at all. The first time she jumped out of an airplane wearing a wingsuit she was ecstatic from the very first second she was airborne. She has been doing these jumps for 20 years. In 2010 she saw her husband die during a jump, and in 2013 her second husband. She's still wingsuiting and loving it. She's now 50 years old -- so has survived for more than 2 decades doing these extraordinarily dangerous things. Oh, and she has a brother who's the same -- I believe he also does wingsuit flights. If not, it's maybe skydiving. And his job? -- Critical Care Medicine. He's a physician in the ER. These 2 thrive on thrills. If not fearless, they seem to be very low-fear people. Wonder if anyone's studied them.
I've read both of Steph's books, and she sounds quite sane and very happy. Writes well, too.
Sounds horrible, and I mean that genuinely. Engaging in a needlessly risky hobby that kills multiple people you know is not sane in the slightest. And she apparently is wasting her entire life on it, no kids, no family, and is even working hard to popularize that lifestyle. I feel very bad for her poor parents.
Fortunately, Jo Cameron doesn't experience thrill, so if her condition is fully replicated in others, the dangers posed by fearlessness will be partially mitigated by the absence of a thrill response that could be triggered by risk-taking.
She's an articulate psycho who is making the world a worse place by promoting wingsuits. She's might be in some sense complicit in her husband's
death. To quote John Cleese in Time Bandits, "Awful people."
Coupla mighty judgy responses here -- as though you don't get there are a lot of different ways live life besides the way you do. Seems to me one has to work pretty hard to make a case that Steph's doing harm. " She might be in some sense complicit in her husband's death". Well you put in so many qualifiers that your point's hard to refute -- sort of like trying to push back against a cloud. But for the record she married committed wingsuiters who had been flying longer than she had.
All this makes me think of a remark of Tom Wolfe's in Kandy Colored Tangerine Fake Streamline Baby. He described a newpaper article about the kid who'd decorated and amplified the hell out of his car. Article made no criticisms at all, but was woven through with irony and subtle sneer. Wolfe: "It's a way of saying, don't worry, these people are nothing."
Yes, I am judgy about people who wingsuit, free climb high cliffs and do other extremely dangerous sports. In my view, extreme sports show a lack of respect for life and a sense of callousness towards friends and loved ones. Dying in a wingsuit accident is a vicarious act of violence against those left behind to grieve.
Wow, there are quite a few differences between free climbing high cliffs and shooting heroin into your foot. I'll bet if you were taking some kind of verbal ability IQ subtest for a job where questions were of a "what's the difference between" sort, you'd have no trouble listing 6 or 8 essential differences between the 2. But here you are not motivated to be accurate, but instead to show contempt. If I said there was no difference between posts like yours and farting through silk would you agree?
I meant "there's no difference in terms of callousness and irresponsibility."
Something doesn't sit well with me about this.
I'm not sure if we are considering primary suffering or the mental discomfort of imagining other beings suffering.
Mormons are frequently invited to ponder the cumulative suffering of all beings across space and time as something that Jesus experienced in Gethsemane (to effectively atone for all the suffering inherent in Life/Creation). Whether we believe this or not, there is a violence in prompting a congregation or population (including children) to imagine or conceptualize this.
I believe efforts and intentions discussed here are more to address/alleviate the discomfort experienced by many a brilliant and sensitive mind in *imagining* effectively infinite amounts of cumulative suffering (some quite exquisite) as we are made aware of it through observation, experience, and information transmission.
I think I suffer about one or two standard divinations less than people on average. It has something to do with my mild autism and mild masochism. Some things I just do not notice. Some things I find actually pleasant - unreciprocated love, for instance, was a huge source of pleasure in my teen years. And some - most of fear and disgust - I've trained myself from experiencing through a self inflicted exposure therapy.
I do not grieve much. I do not hold grudges. It's quite hard to make me angry and I'm quick to forgive. I do cry while watching sad movies, occasionally, but this sadness feels pleasant. And I do not fear death, I used to credit this to mental adaptations from my Christian youth where I was completely confident that I will go to Heaven after death and so got accustommed to thinking about it as a good thing, but it probably has more to do with my general psychological profile.
My girlfriend seems to be in the opposite direction. She suffers a lot. Took us some time to get accustomed to our differences in processing negative emotions - I can just switch to a happier though and find a silver lining very quickly, while she needs much longer time in the state of feeling how awful everything is and receive empathy.
On the other hand, I suspect that I may not feel pleasure as intense as other people as well. Recreational drugs are rather uninteresting to me. I once made a New Year resolution not to drink alcohol for a year which not only I kept but then stopped drinking it completely, because this year of abstinence made me loose the ability to find alcohol pleasant at all, which wasn't much to begin with.
There seem to be a lot of variance in humans regarding the way we process emotions, positive and negative alike. And the quest to find some optimal value is an interesting and noble one. I'm mostly satisfied with the way my own psyche is, but there are a lot of people for whom it can be very helpful.
> one or two standard divinations
This term could be an overconfident actuary's Freudian slip!
I came to the comments in a rapture. The idea of the abolition of suffering is extremely new to me and captures my imagination. I can’t conceive of the world that we might create if it becomes possible to end individual suffering. Thank you, Scott, for being the one place I come to find ideas that can light up the world
If Pearce wants to reduce suffering he should shut down his website! The horror!
Do you seriously find the idea of a world without suffering distressing? Or are you speaking tongue-in-cheek?
I think he doesn’t like the font on the website. O
ah. State-of-the-art web design 1996. I gather the world has moved on,
Yes ,the second one .Like GeoCities by a Goth kid.
Ever since I was a teenager, I've been able to imagine a button in my brain that I can press, that makes me happy.
"Pressing" it gives me physical chills and makes me smile
The weird (I mean, it's pretty weird already) thing is that I don't "press" it all the time, in fact it took this post to remind me that it's a thing that I can do and I haven't done in months
Somewhat related to this, in my early twenties I had to teach myself how to feel dissatisfied, as it was pretty clear that if I continued on the path I was at, I'd end up homeless somewhere under a bridge enjoying life
One thing rather curious to me is that this topic causes a near-instant disgust reaction, and in general the entire concept of hedonism is intuitively horrifying to me. Meanwhile, I arguably already have a mild form of what is proposed here compared to most people - I feel emotions and sensations, but I seem to be able to simply ignore them much more easily than most. This includes pain.
As such, this is imo similar to poverty/wealth: Getting people out of [negative thing] is quite valuable, but once you're out, you hit diminishing returns quite quickly.
(If any hedonist is curious about my moral stance, I find life and flourishing intuitively valuable. Good or bad feelings are mostly an orthogonal issue - if they help with flourishing, I'm in favor, if not, I'm against. So I'll probably always be in favor of some level of negative emotions, including pain.)
Edit: I'll also note here that Scott's summary of Jo Cameron seems unusually uncritical. As others write, she does seem to have quite a few scars due to accidents, calling the scar-less healing into question, and there's a good chance that she was plain lucky not to be substantially hurt by them. At least, "most people with pain resistance mutations die or get substantially disabled from them, but some are lucky to have enough mild accidents to learn from them and/or live relatively risk-free lives that they get through, in a way that is not generalisable to the entire population" is much more plausible to me than "there happens to be a mutation that allows you to feel almost no pain, but without the usual drawbacks of feeling no pain". Doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate it, but most reporting around this just smells fishy to me, overly exited and not nearly critical enough.
> Our physical differences are easy to notice. Everyone knows that some people are black, some white, some Asian or Hispanic.
I suppose this is my hobby horse now. Being Hispanic isn't a physical difference; it's purely cultural. Hispanics can be white, black, red, yellow, brown, mestizo, zambo, mulatto or whatever.
One problem with abolishing suffering is that it would eliminate all the art, music and other great creative works that can only come from the minds of tormented people. I once asked David Pierce about this (he's pretty accessible) and he didn't have a good response. He just said ending suffering was more important.
Also, if technology lets us achieve medical immortality and our lifetimes become infinite, then a period of suffering in your life becomes vanishingly small in importance over time. Let's say you have a ten-year period when you're in a bad marriage and have a bully boss. For a normal person, that's 1/8 of their life, but for someone who lives 300 years before finally dying in a freak accident, it's 1/30.
You might derive important life lessons from the bad 10 year period and also produce good artwork or stories as a result of it, and in the long term, time would heal your wounds from it.
First, many apologies for not offering an adequate reply.
Allow me to cut-and-paste a paragraph I wrote elsewhere.
"The fate of the arts?
Glorious beyond human imagination. Perhaps compare personalised medicine. Artificial intelligence will soon outperform hard-won human expertise in all medical specialities. Likewise, artificial intelligence promises original, inspiring, soul-stirring personalised music, literature or visual art tailored specifically to your individual psychology: artistic genius that surpasses any human creator. And artistic creation is only half the story. Our neurological capacity for artistic appreciation will be revolutionised too. Compare how neuroscience is poised to decipher the molecular signature of pure bliss; the brain’s ultimate “hedonic hotspot” has been narrowed (in rats) to a cubic millimetre. Neuroscience will also decipher the molecular signature(s) of pure beauty. Armed with such aesthetic knowledge, biohackers may launch the most profound artistic revolution of all time. The neural substrates of beauty-perception can be enriched, purified and amplified at will. If given a glimpse of superhuman beauty, not even the basest philistine would wish to preserve the visual squalor and cultural wasteland of Darwinian life. Everyday post-Darwinian life will be more sublime, and subjectively more meaningful, than anything physiologically feasible today."
(https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#negativeemotion)
Hi David (see I told you all he was pretty accessible),
Seems like you're claiming AI will be able to make art better than humans, including works of art that only tormented humans are capable of making. That means nothing will be lost if suffering is abolished among humans because AI will be able to generate world-class dark and depressing artwork if anyone cares to see it.
However, what about the ethics of forcing AIs to make that artwork? Wouldn't it require us to simulate an environment full of suffering for those AIs so they can get the right inspiration for making the artwork?
Apologies for the lazy cute-and-paste. People don't believe me when I say I type only with one finger until they see it; but it's true. Imagine if I could type with 10!)
If AI were a subject of experience, then yes, compelling AI to simulate suffering-inspired art would have troubling ethical implications. However, for technical reasons I think AIs with existing computer architectures are just zombies, incapable of solving the phenomenal binding problem and maturing into full-spectrum superintelligences:
https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/full-spectrum-superintelligence.pdf
AIs with existing architectures are only capable of generating output contained within the multidimensional space defined by their training set. Without a significant breakthrough in our understanding, the moment we hand over creation of new things to these is the moment we lose the possibility of ever experiencing anything outside this space.
I absolutely expect some form of breakthrough will come, but it is unclear whether the reasoning about AIs being zombies will apply to whatever systems we end up with once this problem is fixed.
But we have a superpower that classical digital computers lack - phenomenal binding. Binding is the bedrock of mind, sentience and the entire empirical ("relating to experience") realm. The ignorance of digital zombies can't be overcome: it's architecturally hardwired. As far as I can tell, the future belongs to super-sentient, genetically rewritten, AI -enhanced full-spectrum superintelligences - our biological descendants.
Compared to mature full-spectrum superintelligences, classical digital zombies are just toys.
We already do this.
The problem is that (e.g.) mass market food hyperoptimised to trigger our reward and pleasure receptors to the greatest possible extent isn't haute cuisine; it's a McDonalds happy meal or a KFC bargain bucket.
In our glorious new utopia, all human experience will be the equivalent of free KFC bargain buckets, forever, and we will be perfectly content with that, because even those still aware there might be other possibilities in life will not be capable of feeling their lack.
Health considerations aside, if everyone in the future eats KFC and McDonalds, that's absolutely not a problem. I appreciate fine cuisine and avant-garde cinema but I would never be such a pretentious snob as to assume my highbrow druthers "matter" in a cosmic sense. My appreciation for art films over Marvel is a simple matter of taste. I also don't care for the taste of papaya but it matters not a whit.
That reminds me of a post I wrote on a recent Hidden Open Thread:
===================================================
You must take one of two pills.
Take the blue pill and you end up living in a full immersion virtual reality Matrix that is run by AGIs who tailor every moment to your particular needs. It's a world of your choosing (medieval, space exploration, WWII, etc.) where you do whatever you want and are always encountering challenges and intelligent NPCs that are exactly what you need at the moment.
Take the red pill and you get computers implanted in your brain that deliver electric stimulation and dump synthetic hormones and neurotransmitters in such a way that you are in a semiconscious altered state of mind, buffeted by one wave of indescribable pleasure after another. The technology also has ways of preventing your brain from habituating to its effects.
Which pill do you take, and why?
Depending on which pill all of humanity decided to take, would there be any difference to the Earth or whoever stays awake running the technology?
===================================================
The equivalent of the McDonald's Happy Meal and KFC bargain bucket is the red pill. If you're in a state of constant, ineffable rapture, then not only are you incapable of exploring other activities and interests, but you're not even able to engage in higher thinking.
I think my Red Pill scenario is actually a variation of the Repugnant Conclusion. If you accept the premise that we should optimize human pleasure, the endpoint is trillions of human brains floating in vats of liquid with wires stimulating their pleasure regions forever with no letup.
What if I told you that long-term machine-brain interfaces fail due to the body's immune system, and even the best chemistry of materials science won't be able to get around this basic issue because it's not a problem that can be solved by chemistry?
What if I told you that the multisystem integration and sequencing of embryological development preclude most of the extreme promises made by biohacking enthusiasts? — and that even if they could solve implant problem of DBS electrodes, messing with the body's immune systems that identify foreign materials would probably lead to catastrophic health failures?
What if I told you that, despite the glib claims of some neuroscientists, we don't have a good model of how consciousness works, so even if we get past the first two issues we won't be able to map our the sum of our consciousness plus our memories into a software platform? And of course, we don't even have a software platform that can maintain conscious state.
What if I told you've that Moore's Law expired over a decade ago, and we'll probably reach the limits of the number of circuits we can etch on a chip (at great cost) within the next decade? And quantum computing as it's understood now will be unsuitable for generative AI (which would be required for these sorts of advanced simulations).
What if I told you that even if we could map consciousness into software, the data centers to support this sort of AI will consume too much energy to be economically feasible? In fact, unless we finally are able to make fusion energy work as a power source, we won't have enough energy to support today's massive cloud data centers (and humanity will be living at the economic level of East Germany in the 1970s — if we're lucky).
What if I told you that Scientism is the irrational belief that Science can go on making new breakthrough discoveries forever, despite every indication that Science as an enterprise hasn't made any great advances in the past 50 years?
I feel like I did when I told my stepson there wasn't any Santa Claus.
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/05/scientific-progress-is-slowing-down-but.html
I'd tell you you're naive to assume those trends will constrain technology at the far future era when we will actually have the ability to implement David Pierce's ideas. That's the problem with you people. You can't think but five minutes in front of your face.
Fair enough. But substitute "Jesus" for "Science" and this sounds to me like my Fundamentalist neighbor who's sure he and his family are going to be lifted into the Rapture any day now.
"we'll probably reach the limits of the number of circuits we can etch on a chip (at great cost) within the next decade"
We can start stacking thinner and thinner wafers on top of each other like some kind of silicon layer cake. We've barely started to explore that design space.
We can also compute with things other than electrons; e.g., photons. We've barely started to explore that design space.
The real, pressing, immediate limit is how much waste heat we can remove from a given volume of space; because computation takes energy, which then has to go somewhere, and we are already firmly in the territory of "this thing goes through more energy than my space heater" at the high end. The laws of physics are breathing down our neck on that one.
|We've barely started the to explore the design space
But we come up against physical limits in whichever direction we push. With miniaturization, resistance goes up while capacitance goes down, so it becomes more difficult to perform correct computations. And ultimately, computation is limited by the speed of an electron moving through transistors. Of course, at the chip level or multi-chip wafer level that can sorta kinda be solved by parallelling computations, but then there's an upper limit when it comes to moving data in and off a chip. Currently, the max we can transmit over an optical or copper link (with PAM4 signal modulation) is 112 Gbps/channel. Infiniband and Ethernet can stripe data across 8 channels to reach 800Gbps tput. But that requires FEC to correct for the high error rate. FEC requires computing power and it generates heat. Last I heard (before I was involuntarily retired from the networking side of the industry), we're not going to reach 224Gbps/channel without QAM, and probably a new more-CPU intensive FEC. Queue longer development times plus significantly more heat dissipation issues.
Although the cost per circuit is still dropping, the cost of development, the cost of manufacturing, and the cost of running the computations are increasing (estimated in a to be a second order curve — the curve of Moore's Law in reverse). Spintronics? Optical Computing? They're at least a decade out if at all. Quantum computing? Possibly. But that's only suitable for certain types of algorithms. Excuse me if I'm not an optimist.
> Artificial intelligence will soon outperform hard-won human expertise in all medical specialities
They need to stop hallucinating, or we will still need the humans.
Edit. That response was a bit pithy. So to elaborate I’m working in a company where we try to use AI to test students on parts of their course - a lecture, part of a book, whatever.
We can right now only use this as a game, with a disclaimer that the results are not to be taken seriously.
It's always interested me how some techno-literate rationalists recapitulate Christian eschatological dogma in a framework without a god-entity.
Yes. Even the intuitively wildest aspects of the abolitionist project have ancient roots. Consider the herbivorization of predators - prophesied (without any technical details) in "peaceable kingdom" of the Biblical Book of Isaiah:
https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/paradise.pdf
I'm not especially devout but I consider myself a Christian and I also find this interesting and amusing. I see rationalists tie themselves in knots trying to intellectually justify their visceral aversion to wireheading and it just can't be done very easily. So much more efficient to say "it's against God's will" and spend the rest of your day more productively.
Convergent wish-fulfillment fantasies? :-)
Frankly, most long term plans fail. Yes, many of our technologies advance - but a good chunk of that is unpredictable roadblocks or successes. I'm leery of treating anything as serious (e.g. some of the genome modification proposals in this post's comments) till there is a prototype working in a lab. And, even then, most lab prototypes don't make it to general use.
Why do you think there’s a category of “great works can only come from tormented people”? Not-suffering clearly doesn’t result in an inability to perceive or evaluate or empathize with bad things.
Even if there were a particular genre that somehow requires alchemizing intense psychological suffering to produce, are you really arguing that its “natural” existence (as opposed to simulation) is worth…well, *literally all of humanity’s suffering*? You say “ending suffering is more important” isn’t a good response, yet your comment only says “this vague subcategory of potential art is more important”.
That also implies it would be a good thing to torture people if that produces “great art”. An Art School of Omelas!
Also, “short periods of suffering are inconsequential if you live long enough” is absurd because the significance of experiences is not simply divided by percent of lifespan, and time does not, in fact, heal all wounds (see: Trauma). It also implies torture and abuse is fine as long as the victim survives long enough relative to its duration, or you just sincerely believe they have an immortal soul.
"Why do you think there’s a category of “great works can only come from tormented people”?"
One glance at the artwork of H.R. Giger or Zdzislaw Beksinki, and I can tell neither came from the minds of non-tormented people.
"are you really arguing that its “natural” existence (as opposed to simulation) is worth…well, *literally all of humanity’s suffering*? You say “ending suffering is more important” isn’t a good response, yet your comment only says “this vague subcategory of potential art is more important”."
No, I'm not arguing that and never did. I think there's a case to be made that some fraction of the human race should not have its suffering abolished. The pain and misfortunes they endure could produce things of value to themselves and everyone else.
"Also, “short periods of suffering are inconsequential if you live long enough” is absurd because the significance of experiences is not simply divided by percent of lifespan, and time does not, in fact, heal all wounds (see: Trauma). It also implies torture and abuse is fine as long as the victim survives long enough relative to its duration, or you just sincerely believe they have an immortal soul."
But if the thought experiment is taking place within the future scenario that David Pierce envisions, then the technological means to cure that trauma must also exist. You could experience some awful thing, improve your character and learn valuable life lessons to pass on, perhaps be inspired to make a creative product that derives from your bad experience, and then swallow the pill to get rid of your PTSD and transform your memory of the past event into something emotionally neutral.
> One problem with abolishing suffering is that it would eliminate all the art, music and other great creative works that can only come from the minds of tormented people.
One problem with abolishing slavery is that it would eliminate all Art, Music, Diaries, and other great creative works that can only come from the minds of enslaved people. And one problem with abolishing war is that it would eliminate all Art, Music, and other great creative works that can only come from the minds of fighting people.
Your Terms Are Acceptable.
Not a bad point.
Pete Seeger observed that there are so many songs about unrequited love because if the love is requited, then the song writer has better things to do than write songs. Those missing never written songs may be a great loss, but the song writer will gladly accept the tradeoff.
> Everyone knows that some babies are born with one arm, or three eyes, or webbed fingers.
I didn't know that. Where does the third eye appear?
There's a lot of awareness of third nipples, but I think people tend to assume that they appear on the line between your normal nipples, a la Blade Runner. In reality, they appear just where you'd expect if you were familiar with nonhuman mammalian anatomy, on the lines between your nipples (at one end) and your groin (at the other). And, also as you'd expect by comparison to other mammals, you can have more than three, but there's no awareness of that either.
"Where does the third eye appear?"
Pineal gland, or so I'm led to believe. Unless the 80s adaptation of Lovecraft's "From Beyond" lied to me?
(Warning: very gory)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICvDCCDAjhU
Wikipedia suggests that there are animals which develop an eye from their pineal gland (a "parietal eye"), but that no mammals can do so. I can't find anything suggesting that humans can have a third eye.
Given that the human pineal gland is well inside the head, even if some people were born with eyes there, no one would have noticed.
About the woman who sees additional colors:
It's not obvious to me why pictures created by here would look any different, to me, than pictures created by anyone else. If she paints in strange colors as a result of differences in her vision, that tends to suggest that I can see colors she can't, not that she can see colors I can't.
I struggle with the sanctimonious correction at the bottom of the piece:
>> The original story stated that all men have one X and one Y chromosome and that all women have two X chromosomes. This statement neglected to include those with Klinefelter Syndrome and transgender individuals. We regret the error.
The original statement was fine. But if you're going to correct it, at least be correct when you do. Why spit in the faces of the Turner's Syndrome people? Where's the sympathy for XYY men? CAIS? Out of all groups mentioned so far, CAIS patients seem the most likely to be offended/hurt by the original statement.
> I struggle
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
HTH, HAND
Imagine a world where, due to *magic*, there was 0 chance of any physical injury? In this world, would it matter if you were psychologically incapable of suffering pain or not? I don't think it matters much. If anything I would prefer not to tamper with my psychology, maybe?
So, the question is, how much do we want to take pain as a bad thing in itself, and how much is it an indication of a bad thing happening?
I just want to know where I can find the "big book of human neuro and biodiversity" that lists all the weird discoveries of people with superpowers.
I suspect that if you dig into some of the studies underlying the claims, they'll turn out to be less persuasive than the claimants claim. ;-)
Have caught up on the discussions and collective sentiments, and I must say it's been a ride.
Folks have caught sight of a utopian vision and rush headlong towards it, barring only a few doomers with uninformed implausible scenarios that have been considered and roundly rejected. Everything has been taken into account except the tiny possibility of being wrong. Modify all the kids! Happiness, free, for all, and may none leave unsatisfied!
...David, please. I know you're reading this. For the love of all that is good. Put an off switch in. A simple, reliable off-switch that the population who get this spliced into their genome can toggle at will in the comfort of their own home, without needing a specialist's cooperation and/or large sums of money. Not a would-be-nice-if premium extra that the organisation can throw under the bus when the money runs low or the research hits a dead end or Moloch looks an investor in the eye while whispering elevator pitches of a more efficient Disneyland; but a core founding principle: no human will get given one of these adjustments without a way to turn it on and off.
Yes, it'll take more research and more money. But we're meant to be the responsible people here, the humble people who take into account even X-risks we ourselves find unintuitive.
Lead the initiative with that; top, front and center: we are building a utopia and /people can choose to enter or leave as they please/.
There was a saying in the Soviet Union. It doesn't translate well - the original is snappy and has a nice cadence to it - but it goes: "We tried to make things better, but it all turned out like it always does."
The road to hell is paved with broken utopias, cemented together by unforeseen consequences. Just this one time. Just in case it turns out, after the fact, that it wasn't such a great idea to turn the dream into reality after all, and we start to wish it was a dream again. Do the right thing. Humor the risk-averse naysayers and turn them into loyal customers.
Put an off switch in.
A pill/injection would likely work pretty well for that. There may still be permanent consequences, but that's a lot easier to undo than invitro gene splicing or whatever.
Strong agree on being aware of *unintended* consequences. We call them unintended for a reason, because we didn't think they would happen, but they did.
Somatic gene therapy may indeed be feasible:
https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/beyond-humanism.pdf
But its mass adoption is scarcely imminent - I gloss over the technical challenges. That said, it's worth recalling that all children born today are unique, untested generic experiments - and the upshot of such reckless genetic experimentation is often tragic.
…so, no off-switch for us?
Oh, I'm all in favour of an OFF-switch. I'm just sceptical it will be used (cf. "What if you don't like it in Heaven?" https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#heaven)
Sure, and we're skeptical of all the doom / x-risk scenarios as well. I hear you.
Let's just make certain, though. Y'know, because we're all fallible humans who might not have thought of /every/ contingency. Right now, commitment, front and center: you won't be forced to stay in my utopia if you decide it's not for you after all.
Yes, it's a long way off. But if we can write thousands of words about transhumanism and genome editing the kids, we can spare a couple for this, so it's definitely in place from the start, as a core aim that informs every aspect of the movement, and not an optional afterthought that people might maybe start taking seriously once it's too late.
Because eastern europeans at least all know how things go when you have to put a giant fence around your utopia to stop people leaving.
oh, I hear you. It's easy to slide from being an advocate into a propagandist. Whole treatises could be written on the ways things could go wrong with genome reform. But suppose we _don't_ upgrade our reward circuitry. Suppose the age-old genetic crapshoot continues indefinitely. If so, then the cruel biology of mental and physical pain will proliferate indefinitely.
Feels like a politician's response.
You hear the concerns and the requests for a commitment, and claim to understand and even share some of the concerns, but you seem strangely reluctant to say the words, even here buried in the comments section of a relatively niche forum, never mind anywhere that might be even a little binding like on your actual website or in a far out initiative communication.
Why is that?
Some fact checking nitpicks:
The provided Wikipedia link indicates that increased pain sensitivity after a platypus scratch lasts days to months, not years: "Information obtained from case studies shows that the pain develops into a long-lasting hyperalgesia that can persist for months but usually lasts from a few days to a few weeks."
The "woman who can see 100x more colors than normal" actually just sees more dimensions and nuances of color on objects than normal. The actual colors themselves are the same, as described in the article.
These inaccuracies aren't important to the main point of the post, but I expect ACX to have higher standards of not presenting misleading facts to make things sound more impressive than they really are.
Thanks! I have the same issue about the woman with presumed tetrachromacy, but looking into Google scholar, I don't think the data is very convincing.
From the link in Scott's article: "This Woman Sees 100 Times More Colors Than The Average Person"...
> One percent of the world’s population is thought to be tetrachromatic, but it’s not easy to demonstrate empirically.
I guess I must be a person who has 100x more questions than the average person. Or maybe I'm 100x more disbelieving — but this article raises all sorts of questions for me. The author's breathless sense of wonder made me initially suspicious of the claims. After all, if it's not easy to demonstrate empirically, how *do* they demonstrate it?
I checked out Google Scholar, and the most recent pro-tetrachromacy papers seem to come out of KA Jameson's lab at UC Irvine. In one paper (linked below), she has n=4 subjects — one subject who seems to display hypersensitivity to colors (presumably due to tetrachromacy), and three controls who are the presumed trichromatics. Of course no one has done a microscopic dissection of the subjects' retinas, so we don't really know whether the experimental subject actually had four color cones. Excuse me if I'm unconvinced — intrigued but unconvinced.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kimberly-A-Jameson/publication/277558682_The_Veridicality_of_Color_A_case_study_of_potential_human_tetrachromacy/links/556cfa7408aeccd7773beb26/The-Veridicality-of-Color-A-case-study-of-potential-human-tetrachromacy.pdf
And here's a response to the tetrachromacy arguments for enhanced color sensitivity. These researchers claim enhanced color sensitivity can be explained by higher levels of melanopsin in retinal ganglion cells.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1214240110
Another question I had was whether people could be trained to distinguish a wider variety of hues? Way back in the early 90s, while working at the Getty, I remember being told by the color reproduction team that the human eye can distinguish 23 million distinct hues (that's much more than the 1 million in the article that Scott referenced). I don't know if this was one of those unattributed factoids that get passed around like urban myths, but the Getty team felt that 8-bit-per-pixel computer monitors, that could only display 16 million hues, were inadequate for their work.
It's clearly a marketing shtick for this woman to say she can see more colors. What the researchers believe is that she has a fourth cone between the normal human ones for red and green. So maybe she can see more variation in orange-yellow hues than a normal person? But she perceives light in the exact same visible spectrum as everyone else.
> Of course no one has done a microscopic dissection of the subjects' retinas
There was a molecular genetic analysis, so her genes do in fact encode an extra cone in the retina. That's not quite the same as showing the cones are actually there. Personally I think an eyepatch would fit her quirky artist persona well.
It's not clear that someone could see extra colors even if they had say, a cone in the UV spectrum. There needs to be properly developed structures in the brain. It might be enough for the existence of the mutant cone to train the proper neural pathways, which maybe happened in some animal studies. But the literature is very conflicted and unsure about this.
If someone had a cone in the UV spectrum, presumably that cone is going to be sending its signals somewhere, so you would expect that person to be able to perceive colors in the UV spectrum. Is there any reason to believe in a genetic basis for neural architecture encoding color processing in a 3-dimensional LMS color space, as opposed to this being something that emerges from having 3-dimensional input into some sort of general capacity for processing color?
nit: While I've heard of tetrachromism, and _haven't_ heard of a cone that peaks in the UV in humans, people who have had cataract surgery and where the replacement lens is UV transparent _can_ see UV light, albeit as stimuli to the normal 3 cones. https://www.2020mag.com/article/uv-vision-seeing-invisible-ultraviolet
I think Rothwed meant the humans with UV-sensitive cones to be a hypothetical situation. That's how I was taking it, anyway.
Many Thanks! Yes, I think Rothwed was writing of a hypothetical of a cone with sensitivity that _peaked_ in the UV. And that, AFAIK, indeed doesn't exist for humans (finches, on the other hand, have a 370 nm peak cone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy ). But our existing cone cells seem to be (unselectively!) sensitive to near-UV. From the wiki page:
>The photoreceptor cells of the retina are sensitive to near ultraviolet light, and people lacking a lens (a condition known as aphakia) see near ultraviolet light (down to 300 nm) as whitish blue, or for some wavelengths, whitish violet, probably because all three types of cones are roughly equally sensitive to ultraviolet light (with blue cone cells slightly more sensitive).[17]
Indirect evidence for
>this being something that emerges from having 3-dimensional input into some sort of general capacity for processing color
https://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/research/podcast/2022/nemmers-prize.html
>With primate neuroscientist Jerry Jacobs, Nathans genetically engineered mice so that instead of seeing only two-color receptors as mice normally do, they were able to see three color receptors as primates do. This project strongly suggested that the primate brain is not unique in its ability to analyze color at trichromatic level, but that each mammalian brain has an inherent plasticity that will allow it to process an additional complexity of color signals.
Yeah, that's an intriguing experiment. It leaves open the question of how far that sort of plasticity might extend. (Is it easier to go from 2D color spaces to 3D than from 3D to 4D? And wtf is going on in the brain of a mantis shrimp?)
Many Thanks! Yup, it would be interesting to see how far that can be pushed. Yeah, the 12 color channels in the mantis shrimp are impressive...
Yes, that is a fascinating experiment. But the mantis shrimp 12-color theory may have been debunked. Did you know that you could train shrimp to respond to specific colors? I didn't know that. Or maybe that's also dodgy science. I'm getting very cynical about scientific claims in my old age.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14578
>That's not quite the same as showing the cones are actually there.
Dim memory from very long ago:
THere are some techniques in nonlinear optics (4 wave mixing?) that let you produce a _very_ sharp focus even through pretty cruddy optics - basically you construct a wavefront that compensates for the distortions. One thing that was done with it was to stimulate _individual_ cones. So you could get a situation where e.g. light that normally is around the peak of someone's "red" cones could stimulate just one green cone, and they saw a green point. Something like that would allow a nondestructive functional equivalent of microscopic dissection of the retina.
Interesting. I didn't see that anyone tried this in the literature. That's not to say they haven't.
Many Thanks! I haven't read the full article, but
https://opg.optica.org/josaa/abstract.cfm?uri=josaa-14-11-2884 has an abstract:
>Even when corrected with the best spectacles or contact lenses, normal human eyes still suffer from monochromatic aberrations that blur vision when the pupil is large. We have successfully corrected these aberrations using adaptive optics, providing normal eyes with supernormal optical quality. Contrast sensitivity to fine spatial patterns was increased when observers viewed stimuli through adaptive optics. The eye's aberrations also limit the resolution of images of the retina, a limit that has existed since the invention of the ophthalmoscope. We have constructed a fundus camera equipped with adaptive optics that provides unprecedented resolution, allowing the imaging of microscopic structures _the size of single cells in the living human retina_.
[emphasis added]
But do those genes actually produce an extra cone? No one seems to have confirmed this. According to Wikipedia tetrachromacy may be linked to two cone cell pigment genes present on the X chromosome. And it says that these genes in XX situation *could* produce the extra cone cells. It all sounds like unconfirmed speculation — but people are credulous, so it gets a lot of traction. However, that would suggest that color hypersensitivity is limited to females and people with Klinefelter's syndrome. Have any males with tetrachromacy been identified?
> "In humans, two cone cell pigment genes are present on the X chromosome: the classical type 2 opsin gene OPN1MW and OPN1MW2. People with two X chromosomes could possess multiple cone cell pigments, perhaps born as full tetrachromats who have four simultaneously-functioning kinds of cone cell, each type with a specific pattern of responsiveness to different wavelengths of light in the range of the visible spectrum.[9]
I hope they're in touch with https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/reducing-suffering-in-laboratory-animals/overview/
> I can’t find anyone claiming to know exactly what went wrong with BIA 10-2474 (see here for what we do know). But the FDA released a statement a few months later saying they were confident that it was a particular feature of BIA 10-2474 and not a problem with FAAH inhibition in general.
This seems right, both Perplexity and FutureSearch conclude that off-target, neurotoxic effects were almost certainly responsible. (Also the dose in that trial was 10x what was necessary for FAAH inhibition.)
So this is not really evidence that drugs that target FAAH are dangerous.
I'm curious how you asked FutureSearch. I tried to ask it some questions about the past to see what would happen and I got errors. Is it better at that now?
I guess in a pain free future, only a subset of pleasures will be available. I wonder how restricted the set of pleasures will have to be for a stable equilibrium to be possible. Schadenfreude is pretty awesome, I'm not sure if I can do without.
I suppose we can still crush our enemies, drive them before us, and hear the lamentation of their women. It would be a sort of mild, intellectual sort of lamentation, but that's OK with me, I'm more about the crushing and driving.
Tertullian believed one of pleasures of Heaven was taking delight in the torments of the damned. In reality, any form of Schadenfreude just expresses our epistemological limitations. The craniopagus Hogan sisters, who can partially share each other's thoughts and feelings, are in one sense the most cognitive advanced beings on Earth. The rest of us are trapped in solipsistic island-universes of ignorance.
> any form of Schadenfreude just expresses our epistemological limitations.
Can you elaborate on this? Why is expressing Schadenfreude a form of ignorance?
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
Consider why mirror-touch synesthetes can't experience Schadenfreude. Or the Hogan sisters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1Mac4FeKXg) whom I alluded to above. How might our conception of knowledge and understanding change in a future world where reversible thalamic bridges allow "mind-melding"? In a Darwinian world, egocentric virtual worlds are fitness-enhancing. But perhaps our successors will find such virtual worlds - and the possibility of callousness and even Schadenfreude they allow - as a form of adaptive psychosis.
I broadly agree, I tend to phrase this in the pseudo-Computer-Science terms with the saying of "All humans are a single program, run multiple times". If we imagine that DNA is the "Source Code" of humanity, then every human is just a single "execution path" through that code, a different arrangement of activations and deactivations.
I would object to taking this to absurd lengths, though. I don't feel kinship with war lords or child rapists. They *might* have been relatable or recognizable in an earlier part of their career, but some crimes are too horrific for me to even imagine a sequence of events that would persuade me to commit. So there has to be reasonable limits for "We're all a single program run multiple times".
In practice, me neither. But perhaps this just reflects our mentalizing deficits. For example, if Hitler were just a brain-in-a-vat, we might feel compassion for this poor psychotic creature tormented by alien demons conspiring against the noble Aryan race to which it belonged.
> Yet why "lock in" mediocrity if intelligent life can lock in sublimity instead?
So on a personal level locking in just mediocrity would have an appeal because altering into an entity that experiences sublimity just isn't actively appealing to me and I'd prefer not to have permanent mental changes which i don't actively want. (though not locking in either and just leaving whether to switch to sublimity to my future selves and sticking with mediocrity for the short term would be more appealing still)
Additionally when I imagine scenarios in which ending aging and/or uploading have been solved, but not the inevitable heat death of the universe, it'd seem likely to me that there would, in the very long term be a tradeoff between how super super super etc sublime an entity's experiences can be and how long those experiences can last for (holding the amount of negentropy they have access to constant) and I'd rather not jump straight into reducing my longterm lifespan by even just 0.1% for something I don't even actively want.
Agreed. As a NU, I've given much less systematic thought to the kind of practical, technical, ethical and political challenges of moving from a civilisation with a hedonic range of, say, +20 to +30 to a civilization with a hedonic range of, say +40 to +50, let alone the highest theoretically feasible reaches of the hedonic scale.
I get annoyed when people use acronyms that I have no idea of what they mean. It conveys an attitude of "I'm an insider, and if you're an outsider who doesn't know it then I don't care whether you understand what I'm trying to communicate". A quick internet search yields 43 possible meanings for NU, none of which make sense in this context.
If you read the rest of the comments here, you'll figure out that it means "negative utilitarian." (Not that I'm blaming you for not wanting to read through the entire comments section — heck, even Substack apparently doesn't want you to do that, judging by how long they take to load...)
And my point is that I should not have to figure out that it means "negative utilitarian". That's not one of the 43 possibilities I found searching on-line, so according to "the internet" it must be something confined to a small niche.
Dino, you are absolutely right. Apologies. As Quiop kindly points out above, "NU" = negative utilitarianism, the view that our overriding moral obligation is to minimise and prevent suffering. Contrast classical utilitarianism (https://www.utilitarianism.com), which gives equal weight to maximizing happiness. Classical utilitarianism is sometimes misnamed positive utilitarianism.
Sorry again!
Somewhat related, I'm concerned about the "reading level" of your writings. I haven't read the other web sites involved, so maybe it's not an issue there, but here your "reading level" is "graduate school". This commentariat knows that when you say "valence" you aren't talking about electrons and orbitals, but in the outside world the reaction would more likely be "whatchu talkin about?" Your cause is controversial, so you need to be persuasive, and you can't persuade someone who doesn't understand what you're saying. For the general public, I suggest a "reading level" of "high school", and try to write like Scott here.
Considering that JZP150, a FAAH-OUT inhibitor, recently failed in a trial, it makes me skeptical that FAAH is the underlying cause of Jo's perpetual good mood. I think the initiative really needs to address this point.
Is there any reason to believe that a CRISPR intervention will work despite drugs that don't?
https://investor.jazzpharma.com/news-releases/news-release-details/jazz-pharmaceuticals-provides-update-phase-2-trial/
It will be great to get Jo's full genome in the public domain - and likewise the genome of her later father, who shared similar traits. The role of the FAAH gene and its variant alleles in mood, anxiety and pain-tolerance has been known for some time, both from "animal models" and human studies
(https://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/research-news/all-english-research-news/genes-may-contribute-to-making-some-nations-happier-than-others/7117266
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37761966/#:~:text=Fatty%20acid%20amide%20hydrolase%20(FAAH,subjective%20well%2Dbeing%20remains%20underexplored.
etc)
Jo's "case" is unusual because of the rare dual FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutation, but it will be interesting to see if her genome has any other anomalous features.
There are downstream changes to the expression of genes, plausibly caused by her 8kb FAAH-OUT micro-deletion, that directly and substantially impact systems we know regulate pain intensity and mood. The endocannabinoid system plays an important role, but downstream changes in gene expression caused by her mutation likely contribute more to her unique phenomenology than FAAH/FAAH-OUT.
"There are downstream changes to the expression of genes, plausibly caused by her 8kb FAAH-OUT micro-deletion "
If thats true then a CRISPR intervention will cause the same downstream changes to the expression of genes, is that correct?
If they don't, we will just target the genes of interest directly. This will likely have to be the strategy for species with less similar variants of FAAH/FAAH-OUT.
The point BNW is making is that you can't have a healthy or good society merely by simulating positive mental and emotional states. Actually having a meaningful, loving relationship in your life is different than if some opiate makes you feel like and meaning while under its effects.
You're right about BNW. But we're all dependent on endogenous opioids to function. Some people in one's life are more effective at triggering their release than others. And one advantage of hedonic recalibration is how healthy relationships can be enriched and sustained with better default mood. By contrast, depression can have a disastrous effect on personal relationships, both intimate and casual.
Yeah, I'm not against antidepressant or therapy or etc. It makes sense to get yourself to a healthier place mentally where you can sustain meaningful relationships more easily, but it's key that the relationships are what's important, not arbitrary mental states unlinked from external relations.
Indeed. Hence the critical distinction between being blissful and "blissed out". Hedonic recalibration allows information-sensitivity to "good" and "bad" stimuli to be retained while hugely enriching default quality of life. Despite (or because of?) being chronically mildly high, Jo Cameron's personal relationships are at least as rich those of as neurotypical folk.
> And most of us realize that very poor people struggling to put food in their mouths can’t fully enjoy love, family, beauty, etc.
Don't people in poorer cultures generally report being happier? I feel like a combination of atomization, areligiosity, life being easier and more boring, etc., make people in Western cultures more resentful about minor hindrances.
It's complicated and confusing. See e.g.
https://www.economist.com/international/2012/02/25/chilled-out
where Indonesia, India and Mexico occupy the happiness top slots,
or most recently
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13156261/Uzbekistan-nation-miserable-Britain-Global-report-says-Dominican-Republic-tops-world-wellbeing-charts.html
("The researchers found that national wealth indicators such as per capita GDP negatively correlated with average mental wellbeing scores.")
Some studies adjust for "objective" measures of (un)happiness rather than relying entirely on self-reports.
In making the case for genome reform and a biohappiness revolution, it's important not to underplay in any way the roll of environmental stressors. But only biological-genetic interventions offer a long-term solution to the problem of suffering.
I emphatically agree with you about not romanticizing life in poorer countries. Indeed, the biggest risk of citing studies like the ones above is of reducing concerns about social justice and the urgency of promoting economic development. Despite these worries, we need to take on board what such studies - and modern neuroscience - tell us about hedonic adaptation and need globally to raise hedonic set-points via genome reform. If instead we opt to conserve the genetic status quo, then horrific levels of suffering will persist indefinitely.
For sure, there's a reason everyone wants to move to wealthy countries. But if we're looking at mental wellbeing or happiness then it's worth looking into the relative differences and why they might exist (tighter social circles, clearer purpose, whatever they may be).
I am lucky in having a favorable hedonic set-point, and my positive experience living with it (e.g. saved me during the pandemic) leads me to think that improving the hedonic set-point of people in general would be a good thing. So I hope this project succeeds, and when the magical substance that causes this effect appears I will gladly try it. Reading the comments here, I note that some people disagree with me. I respect that disagreement, and think those people should be free to choose to continue as they are, even if that means suffering needlessly.
The disagreement puzzles me. No one is proposing coercive bliss. Rather, the idea is to phase out the biology of coercive misery. And when the technology of hedonic uplift becomes widely accessible, I wonder how many people will actively say "no" to a higher hedonic set-point?
Agree no one is proposing coercive bliss, but I get a vibe from some comments here expressing fear of something similar. Trying to steelman it - maybe a fear of "everyone else is doing it" peer pressure? Or just "all the cool kids are doing it". And I get the impression there are some folks posting here that would actively say "no".
indeed. Over the years I've found a surprising number of people entertain the dark suspicion that someone, somewhere, is plotting to force them to be happy. Our Darwinian biology of coercive misery and malaise is surely the real problem. But yes, to spike guns, it's worth stressing time and again that we are talking about phasing out _involuntary_ suffering. As it happens, I also tentatively predict that (eventually) all experience below hedonic zero will be relegated to the dustbin of history; but this prediction is a distinct issue.
I lead the team and was a first author on the first analysis (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf7497) of BIA 10-2474 in grad school (my PI discovered FAAH). The tl;dr is that it was a fairly promiscuous serine hydrolase inhibitor (the general class of enzymes that FAAH belongs to). It should never have gone into humans without chemo-proteomic analysis that we did to show this. It's hard to prove exactly but it is very likely the BIA 10-2474 tox was off-target not on-target.
(This is all slightly complicated by the fact that the Bial team did do an extensive set of pre-clinical tox studies in mice, rats, dogs, and monkeys at doses ~100x those which caused the cerebral hemorrhaging/death in humans and didn't see much negative signal.)
Luckily many other FAAH inhibitors have gone into humans and none showed anywhere near the level of AEs as the Bial drug. Unfortunately though none have shown any super promising efficacy either. The general consensus in the field is that (for pain at least) FAAH inhibition just doesn't have as much oomph in humans as it does in other species. There is another endocannabinoid degrading enzyme known as MAGL which degrades 2-AG (related to anandamide and at least 10x more abundant) for which inhibitors are being explored in humans, and it will be interesting to see how those, or partial/dual FAAH/MAGL inhibitors work.
MAGL and 2-AG are on our radar. We find the pro-motivational effects seen in MAGL KO mice very interesting given our goal of maximally adaptive (in the context of a modern technological society rapidly entering the 4th industrial revolution) suffering abolition. FAAH inhibition alone contributes what appears to be low-moderate anti-anxiety and anti-nociceptive benefits, but it appears that genes downstream of FAAH/FAAH-OUT - known to alleviate anxiety and diminish physical pain - are likely the more central factors creating Jo's phenomenology than FAAH/FAAH-OUT itself. There's more to say here, but, alas, strategic constraints are a factor.
off topic, but has anyone looked at them for developmental seizure disorders?
not super up to date on this lit but yes I think so, and the endocannabinoid system in general
There is no possible way you could eliminate one of the most widely felt experiences in all of humanity and not expect some second order effects. Maybe it's good changes or maybe it's bad but it would be massive and for that reason alone, people are right to be skeptical.
People are right to be sceptical. But the biology of mental and physical pain is shortly going to become genetically optional. As a society, we need a debate on whether to conserve it - or switch to a more civilized signalling system.
This reasoning ignores an important factor: “The most interesting feature of Cameron’s condition is her total normality. One might worry that a person who couldn’t suffer would be cold and psychopathic, but in fact Cameron was a special education teacher known for her kindness…. One might worry that she would be unable to relate to regular humans, but she’s been married twice and has two children, who she’s on great terms with.”
The factor this reasoning ignores is that Cameron interacts only with people who can and do suffer, and who have been conditioned to interact under the assumption that all others can be hurt. If Cameron were to live in a society with many others like her, would she still be this kind? Maybe not. A lot might get unravelled in a society of non-sufferers. There’s a strand in evolutionary psychology literature that sees the capacity to suffer as essential to maintaining cooperation (see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46444721_Evolution_of_vulnerability_to_pain_in_interpersonal_relations_as_a_strategic_trait_aiding_cooperation )
It's possible. But consider the intensely pro-social effects of the empathetic euphoriant and "hug drug" MDMA (Ecstasy): https://www.mdma.net. People who take MDMA together get off on each other's shared joys. Sadly, today's empathogens like MDMA are short-acting and potentially hazardous. But hypersocial MDMA-like consciousness is one post-Darwinian option for future civilization.
Since the majority of comments here appear to be making the case that living things with the capacity to suffer are either better off because of it, or foolish to think it could be otherwise, I’d just like to come down squarely on the other side and commend David Pearce and the Far Out Initiative for imagining thoughtful alternatives to this position and hope they continue their well intentioned work. Thanks for listening carefully to people’s objections and thanks for trying to help.
Thank you. A lot of critics focus (rightly) on the important functional role that mental and physical pain typically plays in our lives. But this role is often conflated with a much stronger claim, namely that the experience of suffering is functionally indispensable - that our lives would be impossible without it. Yet just consider the unfolding AI revolution. We're seeing an ever-increasing separation of intelligent behaviour from mind and consciousness. Scott touches parenthetically on my fondness for AI art. It's striking how a few well-chosen prompts can now generate personalized art that stirs (in me at least) an aesthetic response stronger than to multimillion dollar artworks hung in Louvre - and without even a faint twinge of the soulful suffering allegedly needed for great art. This lesson can be generalized to life itself. I don't know what balance of smart neuroprostheses and information-signalling gradients of bliss will underpin future civilization. But I can't see any long-term role for experience below hedonic zero at all. It won't be missed.
I mean, Jo Cameron is normal in every way.. Makes sense. Suffering is prerequisite to exceptionalism - at least exceptionalism that is more a product of internal decisions than circumstance.
Artificial intelligence shows high intellectual performance is possible without any suffering at all. Yet what about humans? Chronic unipolar depressives rarely achieve much. Bipolarity involves great suffering too, but in the (hypo)manic phase, bipolar disorder is associated with unusually high achievement in the humanities but not the sciences. The person I know personally with maybe the highest hedonic set-point is transhumanist polymath Anders Sandberg; his intellectual output is enviable. That said, I don't want in any way to make light of the far-reaching intellectual implications of a civilizational shift away from suffering. But I've yet to see any evidence that the ghastly raw feels of mental distress are computationally indispensable.
AI (and likely zombie AGI) demonstrates high level logic is possible without any suffering (or joy, or emotion, or appetite), this logic function precludes these while enabling their mimicry (as a psychopath would mimic emotion). Thus, correct there is no evidence that mental distress is required for computation.
In defining high level function we need to decide if it requires a three part consciousness that is not alien/ramen per Orsen Scott Card, ie logos/spirit-emotion/appetite and thus human relatable, or not.
Was Anders not enabled in reaching this hedonic set point because of his awareness or experience of (potential) suffering?
I don't think so. Anders says he finds it hard to stay sad at funerals: death and misfortune diminish his well-being; but he has "a ridiculously high hedonic set-point". As members of the transhumanist community can attest, he's also extremely likeable and socially responsible. Unlike Jo Cameron, Anders reports having a normal pain-threshold, but I don't think it's ever been rigorously tested.
(btw, I discuss such "case studies" only with express prior permission. But I think they are important in preparation for when - I should probably say if - human society decides genetically to elevate hedonic set-points world-wide. Extreme hyperthymics are much less well-studied than depressives and bipolars)
I read over his old blog entries, and it's true anecdotally that he comes off as not having suffered, or not concerned with bringing this to attention. His exceptional /particular intelligence may lead him to not spending the time/focus on suffering - may allow him to essentially move on 'ridiculously' more rapidly than most toward 'the utilitarian good.' Without his ability to suffer and thus empathize (consciousness) at some de-facto low level I am not sure he would be driven toward this output for 'good' - would have the insight that it was 'good'. I do agree finding a way to raise the set point could be highly worthwhile and helpful for special cases; though perhaps this is more about degree/type of intelligence that avoiding pain , if goal is not to drive people toward 'normality' - fitting in and getting on with it as a path of least resistance. The incentive to create a false narrative (which I do not see you doing here/now, I see intellectual honesty) and potential risks of carelessness are a concern (:
Thanks. Agreed. I've read an advance copy of Anders' 1200-page magnum opus "Grand Futures". The abolitionist project occupies a modest unfinished section; Anders thinks it will happen: I don't know the details. But Anders' "master narrative" of life in the universe clearly differs from suffering-focused philosophers and researchers who find it self-evident that life on Earth is a story of suffering and its eventual conquest. My "master narrative" focuses on the pleasure-pain axis (and in future, the pleasure-superpleasure axis): all futurology has an element of disguised autobiography. Let's just say I hope the future belongs to folk like Anders and Jo Cameron and not to depressive negative utilitarians. I hope that one day NU will be literally unthinkable.
Article is reek with false information regarding Jo Cameron's condition. Almost making her condition very positive and having less cons. Nothing but a bias and propaganda article.
Could you possibly say more about what you have in mind? Although Jo has always thought of herself as "normal", her nociception is impaired. But have you other worries?
Bit late to the discussion here but I searched over the comments and didn't see the point below:
Given "concern about "a few other people in the UK Biobank with Cameron’s pattern of FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutations, none of whom had any unusual pain resistance.":
Has Jo Cameron's microbiome been sequenced/profiled?
Here's a paper on the interplay between gut microbiome and macroscopic human behavior and experience: The gut microbiota–brain axis in behaviour and brain disorders
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-gut-microbiota%E2%80%93brain-axis-in-behaviour-and-Morais-Schreiber/db68b97106033eb2cb30f9b7e546bbe036b0d694
I don't know feasibility or if they'd be interested, but it might be interesting to try a microbiome transplant with those other people sharing the knockout. I've never heard of it but potentially this could be tried with an animal study but I'm not aware of cross-species microbiome experiments (human -> animal).
Interesting speculation. One complication is Jo Cameron is vegan - a transition that will presumably have had a substantial effect on her gut microbiota.