Right, absolutely. These are all things that we don’t know, but should.
Are you familiar with David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative movement? He makes a lot of the same points and arguments, basically outlining that it doesn’t seem impossible that we could (and should) radically reduce, and eventually eliminate, suffering via technology.
But the problem is, we don’t know what suffering is. So we have to figure that out before we can make much radical progress on this sort of work. I.e., I think a rigorous definition of suffering will be an information-theoretic one—that it’s a certain sort of pattern within conscious systems—but we know basically nothing about what sort of pattern it is.
(I like the word “valence” instead of pain/pleasure, joy/suffering, eudaimonia, hedonic tone, etc. It’s a term from psychology that just means ‘the pleasantness or unpleasantness attached to any experience’ and seems to involve less baggage than these other terms.)
I hope to have a formal paper on this out by this winter. In the meantime, if you’re in the Bay Area, feel free to ping me and I can share some thoughts. You may also enjoy a recent blog post: Effective Altruism, and building a better QALY.
Right, absolutely. These are all things that we don’t know, but should.
Are you familiar with David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative movement? He makes a lot of the same points and arguments, basically outlining that it doesn’t seem impossible that we could (and should) radically reduce, and eventually eliminate, suffering via technology.
But the problem is, we don’t know what suffering is. So we have to figure that out before we can make much radical progress on this sort of work. I.e., I think a rigorous definition of suffering will be an information-theoretic one—that it’s a certain sort of pattern within conscious systems—but we know basically nothing about what sort of pattern it is.
(I like the word “valence” instead of pain/pleasure, joy/suffering, eudaimonia, hedonic tone, etc. It’s a term from psychology that just means ‘the pleasantness or unpleasantness attached to any experience’ and seems to involve less baggage than these other terms.)
I hope to have a formal paper on this out by this winter. In the meantime, if you’re in the Bay Area, feel free to ping me and I can share some thoughts. You may also enjoy a recent blog post: Effective Altruism, and building a better QALY.