You could perhaps engineer scenarios where humans will genuinely evolve to like a dystopia
I think that this kind of misrepresents the scale on which evolution happens—it’s not one generation, or two, it’s hundreds and thousands, and it’s taken relatively good care of the sources of suffering that are fundamental enough to persist and keep the selection pressure on across that time frame—we’re pretty good at not eating things that are toxic, breeding, avoiding predators and so on. The problem with evolution is that a significant number of sources of suffering are persistent enough to have a detrimental impact on an individual’s life, but transient enough to not be able to affect selection across generations.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough. My critique refers to your point about scenarios where humans evolve like a dystopia not being applicable because if it were, suffering should be a rare occurence—if I understand you correctly, you’re stating that if we could evolve to like dystopias, by this point in time we would have evolved to either avoid or like any source of suffering. My counterpoint to this is that there is a massive sub-multitude of sources of suffering that do not affect evolution in any way because they are too transient to effect any serious selection pressure.
I’m still confused about your critique, so let me ask you directly: In the scenario outlined by the OP, do you expect humans to eventually evolve to stop feeling pain from electrical shocks?
Eventually—sure. But for that eventuality to take place, the “electrical shock tyranny” would have to be more resilient than any political faction we’ve known of and persist for thousands of year. I doubt that this would be possible.
I think that this kind of misrepresents the scale on which evolution happens—it’s not one generation, or two, it’s hundreds and thousands, and it’s taken relatively good care of the sources of suffering that are fundamental enough to persist and keep the selection pressure on across that time frame—we’re pretty good at not eating things that are toxic, breeding, avoiding predators and so on. The problem with evolution is that a significant number of sources of suffering are persistent enough to have a detrimental impact on an individual’s life, but transient enough to not be able to affect selection across generations.
Yes, that’s what pessimistic errors are about. I’m not sure what exactly you’re critiquing though?
Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough. My critique refers to your point about scenarios where humans evolve like a dystopia not being applicable because if it were, suffering should be a rare occurence—if I understand you correctly, you’re stating that if we could evolve to like dystopias, by this point in time we would have evolved to either avoid or like any source of suffering. My counterpoint to this is that there is a massive sub-multitude of sources of suffering that do not affect evolution in any way because they are too transient to effect any serious selection pressure.
I’m still confused about your critique, so let me ask you directly: In the scenario outlined by the OP, do you expect humans to eventually evolve to stop feeling pain from electrical shocks?
Eventually—sure. But for that eventuality to take place, the “electrical shock tyranny” would have to be more resilient than any political faction we’ve known of and persist for thousands of year. I doubt that this would be possible.