This belief people have that “beings kinda different to me” aren’t suffering strikes me as near-far bias cranked up to 11.
In some people, perhaps that is the reasoning; but there really is more to this discussion than anthropocentrism.
Suffering as we experience it is actually a very complicated brain activity, and it’s virtually certain that the real essence of it is in the brain structure rather than the neurotransmitters or other correlates. AFAIK, the full circuitry of the pain center is common to mammals, but not to birds (I could be wrong), fish, or insects. Similar neurotransmitters to ours might be released when a bug finds itself wounded, and its brain might send the impulse to writhe and struggle, but these are not the essence of suffering.
(Similarly, dopamine started out as the trigger for reinforcing connections in very simple brains, as a feedback mechanism for actions that led to success which makes them more likely to execute next time. It’s because of that role that it got co-opted in the vast pleasure/reward/memory complexes in the mammalian brain. So I don’t see the release of dopamine in a 1000-neuron brain to be an indication that pleasure is being experienced there.)
I agree with your points on pain and suffering; more about that on a former Less Wrong post here.
However, reducing the ocean of suffering still leaves you with an ocean. And that suffering is in every sense of the word perverse. If you were constructing a utopia, your first thought would hardly be “well, let’s get these animals fighting and eating each other”. Anyone looking at your design would exclaim: “What kind of perverse utopia is that?! Are you sick?!”. Now, it may be the case that you could give a sophisticated explanation as to why that suffering was necessary, but it doesn’t change the fact that your utopia is perverted. My point is we have to accept the perversion. And denying perversion is simply more perversion.
To specify a particular theory, my guess is that suffering is an evolved elaboration on pain unique to social mammals or possibly shared by social organisms of all sorts. It seems likely to me to basically mediate an exchange of long-term status for help from group members now.
I agree, but I wonder if my confidence in my extrapolation agreeing is greater or less than your confidence in my agreeing was. I tend to claim very much greater than typical agnosticism about the subjective nature of nearby (in an absolute sense) mind-space. I bet a superintelligence could remove my leg without my noticing and I’m curious as to the general layout of the space of ways in which it could remove my leg and have me scream and express horror or agony at my leg’s loss without my noticing.
I really do think that at a best guess, according to my extrapolated values, human suffering outweights that of the rest of the biosphere, most likely by a large ratio (best guess might be between one and two orders of magnitude). Much more importantly, at a best guess, human ‘unachieved but reasonably achievable without superintelligence flourishing’ outweighs the animal analog by many orders of magnitude, and if the two can be put on a common scale I wouldn’t be surprised if the former is a MUCH bigger problem than suffering. I also wouldn’t be shocked if the majority of total suffering in basically Earth-like worlds (and thus the largest source of expected suffering given our epistemic state) comes from something utterly stupid, such as people happening to take up the factory farming of some species which happens, for no particularly good reason, to be freakishly capable of suffering. Sensitivity to long tails tends to be a dominant feature of serious expected utility calculus given my current set of heuristics. The modal dis-value I might put on a pig living its life in a factory farm is under half the median which is under half the mean.
In some people, perhaps that is the reasoning; but there really is more to this discussion than anthropocentrism.
Suffering as we experience it is actually a very complicated brain activity, and it’s virtually certain that the real essence of it is in the brain structure rather than the neurotransmitters or other correlates. AFAIK, the full circuitry of the pain center is common to mammals, but not to birds (I could be wrong), fish, or insects. Similar neurotransmitters to ours might be released when a bug finds itself wounded, and its brain might send the impulse to writhe and struggle, but these are not the essence of suffering.
(Similarly, dopamine started out as the trigger for reinforcing connections in very simple brains, as a feedback mechanism for actions that led to success which makes them more likely to execute next time. It’s because of that role that it got co-opted in the vast pleasure/reward/memory complexes in the mammalian brain. So I don’t see the release of dopamine in a 1000-neuron brain to be an indication that pleasure is being experienced there.)
I agree with your points on pain and suffering; more about that on a former Less Wrong post here.
However, reducing the ocean of suffering still leaves you with an ocean. And that suffering is in every sense of the word perverse. If you were constructing a utopia, your first thought would hardly be “well, let’s get these animals fighting and eating each other”. Anyone looking at your design would exclaim: “What kind of perverse utopia is that?! Are you sick?!”. Now, it may be the case that you could give a sophisticated explanation as to why that suffering was necessary, but it doesn’t change the fact that your utopia is perverted. My point is we have to accept the perversion. And denying perversion is simply more perversion.
To specify a particular theory, my guess is that suffering is an evolved elaboration on pain unique to social mammals or possibly shared by social organisms of all sorts. It seems likely to me to basically mediate an exchange of long-term status for help from group members now.
Perhaps: pain is near-mode; suffering is far-mode. Scenario: my leg is getting chewed off.
Near-mode thinking: direct all attention to attempt to remove the immediate source of pain / fight or flight / (instinctive) scream for attention
Far-mode thinking: reevaluate the longer-term life and social consequences of having my leg chewed off / dwell on the problem in the abstract
I agree with this point, and I’d bet karma at better than even odds that so does Michael Vassar.
I agree, but I wonder if my confidence in my extrapolation agreeing is greater or less than your confidence in my agreeing was. I tend to claim very much greater than typical agnosticism about the subjective nature of nearby (in an absolute sense) mind-space. I bet a superintelligence could remove my leg without my noticing and I’m curious as to the general layout of the space of ways in which it could remove my leg and have me scream and express horror or agony at my leg’s loss without my noticing.
I really do think that at a best guess, according to my extrapolated values, human suffering outweights that of the rest of the biosphere, most likely by a large ratio (best guess might be between one and two orders of magnitude). Much more importantly, at a best guess, human ‘unachieved but reasonably achievable without superintelligence flourishing’ outweighs the animal analog by many orders of magnitude, and if the two can be put on a common scale I wouldn’t be surprised if the former is a MUCH bigger problem than suffering. I also wouldn’t be shocked if the majority of total suffering in basically Earth-like worlds (and thus the largest source of expected suffering given our epistemic state) comes from something utterly stupid, such as people happening to take up the factory farming of some species which happens, for no particularly good reason, to be freakishly capable of suffering. Sensitivity to long tails tends to be a dominant feature of serious expected utility calculus given my current set of heuristics. The modal dis-value I might put on a pig living its life in a factory farm is under half the median which is under half the mean.