Can we taboo “Suffer”? Because at this point I’m not even sure what that means. Is it “a biological signal that identifies damage”? That seems too simple, because most sophisticated machines can detect damage and signal it, and we don’t particularly worry ourselves about that.
Catch-22 re God & pain:
Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of his celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that.
Listening to RadioLab they described a wasp who’s midsection had been accidentally crushed. As it was dying it began to eat it’s own viscera. Likely because it detected a rich food source and began executing the standard action when in the presence of a rich food source. It was at this point that I finally intuitively understood that insects are simply biological replicating machines. I cannot think of them as feeling anything akin to suffering any more, merely damage-avoidance subroutines.
It seems we’re concerned about the capacity of a mind to experience something it wants to avoid. Doesn’t that imply that the complexity of the mind is a factor?
It sucks to experience it personally, but maybe it serves an evolutionary purpose that we don’t yet fully understand & eliminating it completely would be a mistake?
“It serves an evolutionary purpose” and “eliminating it completely would be a mistake” are two completely different claims. While there is correlation between evolutionary purposes and human purposes, the former has no value in and of itself.
It serves an evolutionary purpose that’s pretty obvious and eliminating it entirely would cause a lot of problems. We can still find a way to improve the status quo though. We didn’t evolve to maximize net happiness, and we’re going to have to do things we didn’t evolve to do if we want to maximize it.
I think we already have more than an inkling of the usefulness of suffering over warning signs which are less burdensome to experience. It can be awfully tempting to override such warning signs when we can.
Imagine a group of hunters who’re chasing down a valuable game animal. All the hunters know that the first one to spear it will get a lot of extra respect in the group. One hunter who’s an exceptional runner pulls to the head of the group, bearing down on the animal… and breaks a bone in his leg.
In a world where he gets a signal of his body’s state, but it’s not as distressing as pain is, he’s likely to try to power on and bring down the game animal. He might still be the first to get a spear in it, at the cost of serious long term disability, more costly to him than the status is valuable.
The hunter’s evolutionary prospects are better in a world where the difficulty in overriding the signal is commensurate with the potential costs of doing so. If attempting to override such signals were not so viscerally unpleasant, we’d probably only be able to make remotely effective tradeoffs on them using System 2 reasoning, and we’re very often not in a state to do that when making decisions regarding damage to our own bodies.
Can we taboo “Suffer”? Because at this point I’m not even sure what that means. Is it “a biological signal that identifies damage”? That seems too simple, because most sophisticated machines can detect damage and signal it, and we don’t particularly worry ourselves about that.
Catch-22 re God & pain:
Listening to RadioLab they described a wasp who’s midsection had been accidentally crushed. As it was dying it began to eat it’s own viscera. Likely because it detected a rich food source and began executing the standard action when in the presence of a rich food source. It was at this point that I finally intuitively understood that insects are simply biological replicating machines. I cannot think of them as feeling anything akin to suffering any more, merely damage-avoidance subroutines.
It seems we’re concerned about the capacity of a mind to experience something it wants to avoid. Doesn’t that imply that the complexity of the mind is a factor?
We cannot, for the same reason we can’t taboo consciousness. None of us are sure what it means.
All I can say is that it’s the sucky part of consciousness.
It sucks to experience it personally, but maybe it serves an evolutionary purpose that we don’t yet fully understand & eliminating it completely would be a mistake?
“It serves an evolutionary purpose” and “eliminating it completely would be a mistake” are two completely different claims. While there is correlation between evolutionary purposes and human purposes, the former has no value in and of itself.
It serves an evolutionary purpose that’s pretty obvious and eliminating it entirely would cause a lot of problems. We can still find a way to improve the status quo though. We didn’t evolve to maximize net happiness, and we’re going to have to do things we didn’t evolve to do if we want to maximize it.
I think we already have more than an inkling of the usefulness of suffering over warning signs which are less burdensome to experience. It can be awfully tempting to override such warning signs when we can.
Imagine a group of hunters who’re chasing down a valuable game animal. All the hunters know that the first one to spear it will get a lot of extra respect in the group. One hunter who’s an exceptional runner pulls to the head of the group, bearing down on the animal… and breaks a bone in his leg.
In a world where he gets a signal of his body’s state, but it’s not as distressing as pain is, he’s likely to try to power on and bring down the game animal. He might still be the first to get a spear in it, at the cost of serious long term disability, more costly to him than the status is valuable.
The hunter’s evolutionary prospects are better in a world where the difficulty in overriding the signal is commensurate with the potential costs of doing so. If attempting to override such signals were not so viscerally unpleasant, we’d probably only be able to make remotely effective tradeoffs on them using System 2 reasoning, and we’re very often not in a state to do that when making decisions regarding damage to our own bodies.