Recently I can’t get past the notion that Pain/Suffering and and Joy/Pleasure shouldn’t be considered to be two poles of the same scale. It just doesn’t feel psychologically realistic. It certainly doesn’t describe my inner life. Pain/Suffering feels like it exists on its own axis, and can go from essentially zero to pretty intense states, and Joy/Pleasure/Whatever is simply a different axis.
I might not go so far as to say that these axes are completely orthogonal simply because it’s pretty hard to feel transcendent joy when you’re feeling profound suffering at the same time, but this doesn’t actually seem like it has to be a fundamental property of all minds. I can feel some pretty good temporary states of joy even when I’m having a really rough time in my life, and I can feel intense waves of suffering even when I’m deeply happy overall.
If you choose to put these two different phenomena on the same scale, and treat them as opposites, then that just leads you to really unpleasant conclusions by construction. You have assumed the conclusion by your decision to treat pain as anti-joy.
I think most people find utopias containing absolutely no suffering to be kind of off-putting. Is the kind of suffering you endure training for a sporting competition something that you would want permanently erased from the universe? I think the types of suffering most people are actually against are the types that come along with destroyed value, and if that’s the case, then just say you’re against destroying value, don’t say you’re against suffering.
Recently I can’t get past the notion that Pain/Suffering and and Joy/Pleasure shouldn’t be considered to be two poles of the same scale. It just doesn’t feel psychologically realistic. It certainly doesn’t describe my inner life. Pain/Suffering feels like it exists on its own axis, and can go from essentially zero to pretty intense states, and Joy/Pleasure/Whatever is simply a different axis.
I might not go so far as to say that these axes are completely orthogonal simply because it’s pretty hard to feel transcendent joy when you’re feeling profound suffering at the same time, but this doesn’t actually seem like it has to be a fundamental property of all minds. I can feel some pretty good temporary states of joy even when I’m having a really rough time in my life, and I can feel intense waves of suffering even when I’m deeply happy overall.
If you choose to put these two different phenomena on the same scale, and treat them as opposites, then that just leads you to really unpleasant conclusions by construction. You have assumed the conclusion by your decision to treat pain as anti-joy.
I think most people find utopias containing absolutely no suffering to be kind of off-putting. Is the kind of suffering you endure training for a sporting competition something that you would want permanently erased from the universe? I think the types of suffering most people are actually against are the types that come along with destroyed value, and if that’s the case, then just say you’re against destroying value, don’t say you’re against suffering.