[Epistemic status: Piecemeal wild speculation; not the kind of reasoning you should gamble the future on.]
Some things that make me think suffering (or ‘pain-style suffering’ specifically) might be surprisingly neurologically conditional and/or complex, and therefore more likely to be rare in non-human animals (and in subsystems of human brains, in AGI subsystems that aren’t highly optimized to function as high-fidelity models of humans, etc.):
1. Degen and Finlay’s social account of suffering above.
Pain management is one of the main things hypnosis appears to be useful for. Ability to cognitively regulate suffering is also one of the main claims of meditators, and seems related to existential psychotherapy’s claim that narratives are more important for well-being than material circumstances.
Even if suffering isn’t highly social (pace Degen and Finlay), its dependence on higher cognition suggests that it is much more complex and conditional than it might appear on initial introspection, which on its own reduces the probability of its showing up elsewhere: complex things are relatively unlikely a priori, are especially hard to evolve, and demand especially strong selection pressure if they’re to evolve and if they’re to be maintained.
(Note that suffering introspectively feels relatively basic, simple, and out of our control, even though it’s not. Note also that what things introspectively feel like is itself under selection pressure. If suffering felt complicated, derived, and dependent on our choices, then the whole suite of social thoughts and emotions related to deception and manipulation would be much more salient, both to sufferers and to people trying to evaluate others’ displays of suffering. This would muddle and complicate attempts by sufferers to consistently socially signal that their distress is important and real.)
3. When humans experience large sudden neurological changes and are able to remember and report on them, their later reports generally suggest positive states more often than negative ones. This seems true of near-death experiences and drug states, though the case of drugs is obviously filtered: the more pleasant and/or reinforcing drugs will generally be the ones that get used more.
Sometimes people report remembering that a state change was scary or disorienting. But they rarely report feeling agonizing pain, and they often either endorse having had the experience (with the benefit of hindsight), or report having enjoyed it at the time, or both.
This suggests that humans’ capacity for suffering (especially more ‘pain-like’ suffering, as opposed to fear or anxiety) may be fragile and complex. Many different ways of disrupting brain function seem to prevent suffering, suggesting suffering is the more difficult and conjunctive state for a brain to get itself into; you need more of the brain’s machinery to be in working order in order to pull it off.
4. Similarly, I frequently hear about dreams that are scary or disorienting, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone recalling having experienced severe pain from a dream, even when they remember dreaming that they were being physically damaged.
This may be for reasons of selection: if dreams were more unpleasant, people would be less inclined to go to sleep and their health would suffer. But it’s interesting that scary dreams are nonetheless common. This again seems to point toward ‘states that are further from the typical human state are much more likely to be capable of things like fear or distress, than to be capable of suffering-laden physical agony.’
[Epistemic status: Piecemeal wild speculation; not the kind of reasoning you should gamble the future on.]
Some things that make me think suffering (or ‘pain-style suffering’ specifically) might be surprisingly neurologically conditional and/or complex, and therefore more likely to be rare in non-human animals (and in subsystems of human brains, in AGI subsystems that aren’t highly optimized to function as high-fidelity models of humans, etc.):
1. Degen and Finlay’s social account of suffering above.
2. Which things we suffer from seems to depend heavily on mental narratives and mindset. See, e.g., Julia Galef’s Reflections on Pain, from the Burn Unit.
Pain management is one of the main things hypnosis appears to be useful for. Ability to cognitively regulate suffering is also one of the main claims of meditators, and seems related to existential psychotherapy’s claim that narratives are more important for well-being than material circumstances.
Even if suffering isn’t highly social (pace Degen and Finlay), its dependence on higher cognition suggests that it is much more complex and conditional than it might appear on initial introspection, which on its own reduces the probability of its showing up elsewhere: complex things are relatively unlikely a priori, are especially hard to evolve, and demand especially strong selection pressure if they’re to evolve and if they’re to be maintained.
(Note that suffering introspectively feels relatively basic, simple, and out of our control, even though it’s not. Note also that what things introspectively feel like is itself under selection pressure. If suffering felt complicated, derived, and dependent on our choices, then the whole suite of social thoughts and emotions related to deception and manipulation would be much more salient, both to sufferers and to people trying to evaluate others’ displays of suffering. This would muddle and complicate attempts by sufferers to consistently socially signal that their distress is important and real.)
3. When humans experience large sudden neurological changes and are able to remember and report on them, their later reports generally suggest positive states more often than negative ones. This seems true of near-death experiences and drug states, though the case of drugs is obviously filtered: the more pleasant and/or reinforcing drugs will generally be the ones that get used more.
Sometimes people report remembering that a state change was scary or disorienting. But they rarely report feeling agonizing pain, and they often either endorse having had the experience (with the benefit of hindsight), or report having enjoyed it at the time, or both.
This suggests that humans’ capacity for suffering (especially more ‘pain-like’ suffering, as opposed to fear or anxiety) may be fragile and complex. Many different ways of disrupting brain function seem to prevent suffering, suggesting suffering is the more difficult and conjunctive state for a brain to get itself into; you need more of the brain’s machinery to be in working order in order to pull it off.
4. Similarly, I frequently hear about dreams that are scary or disorienting, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone recalling having experienced severe pain from a dream, even when they remember dreaming that they were being physically damaged.
This may be for reasons of selection: if dreams were more unpleasant, people would be less inclined to go to sleep and their health would suffer. But it’s interesting that scary dreams are nonetheless common. This again seems to point toward ‘states that are further from the typical human state are much more likely to be capable of things like fear or distress, than to be capable of suffering-laden physical agony.’
Devoodooifying Psychology says “the best studies now suggest that the placebo effect is probably very weak and limited to controlling pain”.