If I can’t rewire animals brains to stop suffering, screw it. Pave over every forest and jungle and other natural habitat on the Earth. Drive every animal species extinct but us (save pets people want to keep). Find a plant species that can generate oxygen and food without being pollinated by insects. (algae, maybe?) Also, save dolphins and great apes, who I would probably count as people, rather than “pseudo-people,” like other animals, construct luxurious habitats for them. Find some way to limit their population besides Malthusian scarcity (sterilization of most adults, probably).
Get rid of religions, try and make everyone as wealthy as possible, try and invent drugs that don’t screw up your brain that much but still feel awesome, make sure they are (obviously legal) and widely available. Eliminate every communicable disease, including STDs. Invent some kind of male-usable birth control. Eliminate nudity and sex taboos, and hold enormous public orgies every day, convince Eliezer Yudkowsky that the singularity is not gonna happen and he should spend all day writing HPMOR.
Get rid of religions, try and make everyone as wealthy as possible, try and invent drugs that don’t screw up your brain that much but still feel awesome, make sure they are (obviously legal) and widely available. Eliminate every communicable disease, including STDs. Invent some kind of male-usable birth control. Eliminate nudity and sex taboos, and hold enormous public orgies every day
It still amazes me how many people read Brave New World and think Huxley’s dystopia sounds like Utopia.
Those unaware of the past are doomed to repeat its errors (a traditional justification for exhaustively studying the history of philosophy before being allowed to actually do philosophy oneself).
Read it, and as you go, you can tick off the whole of your shopping list. One might give only half a point for “wealthy”, as only the Alphas get to be wealthy, but everyone’s happy with their lot. They’re made that way in artificial wombs.
I read the plot summary on Wikipedia. It looks like what is wrong with Brave New World is not present in my utopia. I don’t want to dumb people down or physically weaken them as they develop, I don’t want to brainwash them. I don’t want everyone believing “‘ending is better than mending’ or ‘more stiches less riches’” I don’t want to get rid of families, and have the very concept be considered “pornographic.” I don’t want spending time alone to be frowned upon. I don’t want people to die at age 60, having been conditioned that it’s not a bad thing because they have no family and no one will mourn them. I don’t want everyone locked into a single job by brainwashing for their entire lives. I don’t want Shakespeare (or any literature) banned. I also don’t want a caste system.
Also, soma doesn’t sound like the kind of drug I was imagining, it sounds from the plot summary like it takes away your emotions and is used to quell riots. I’m thinking more like “crack, minus addiction and brain damage, and imprecision in dosing. (maybe some other downsides I missed, because I am not that knowledgeable about drugs)”
Orgies, drugs (of the right hypothetical variety), and mass atheism bad in some hidden, profound way that I would understand if I read Brave New World. Brave New World just associates them with bad stuff. Huxley was not doing a careful analysis of what they would be like. He was trying to write an interesting story.
This reminds me of a livejournal entry Yvain wrote about sci fi dystopias. Brave New World is very much a “rigged thought experiment.”
That said, I don’t think I’d be comfortable with elimination of all nudity and sex taboos coupled with massive public orgies, because I’d rather be able to exercise more discrimination with regards to whom I have sexual contact with without being regarded as weird and prudish. If we’re not rewriting human nature here, then anyone not participating in all the public sex is probably going to be stigmatized.
I also definitely wouldn’t be happy having all the natural ecosystems developed and most of the biosphere driven to extinction. Some people don’t give a crap about nature, and I can intellectually accept that there’s no reason other people have to actually like it, but it still makes me uncomfortable even if they’re not actually acting to destroy it, much like you’d probably feel discomforted to hear someone argue that there’s no reason for any more works of fiction to be made, ever, and all the people engaged in creating it and the resources dedicated to storing it should be redirected to more useful things.
I would probably be uncomfortable with nudity and public sex too (at first), but it’s not really a part of my personality that I like. If I had the chance, I would basically just try to get used to it. I don’t want to make people who wouldn’t want to adapt adapt, but I would rather that future people were not limited like me than that things stayed nice for people who had been raised in the bad old days like you and me.
I understand your reaction to the thought of killing Mother Nature. I would do it with some regret. I agree that she is beautiful, and I would miss her from an aesthetic point of view. But I think it’s worth it.
The idea of wiping out other species to prevent their suffering strikes me as pretty bizarre. It’s the same sort of extension of Negative Utilitarianism that leads to the suggestion that we should do the same to humanity, and I don’t think that’s a very practical approach to utility maximizing.
In any case, I doubt most of the natural world suffers nearly as much as the philosophers in that link suggest, partly because I suspect a lack of abstract awareness and other neurological faculties limits the ways in which most animals can suffer, and partly due to the same hedonic treadmill tendencies that exist in humans.
It seems like we have two disagreements. The first is whether there are living conditions to which death is preferable, and the second is over how bad the conditions wild animals live in are. About the first:
I’m not a negative utilitarian, I don’t think suffering should lexically override happiness. I just think the suffering outweighs the happiness here because there is more of it. I definitely don’t think humanity should be wiped out too. Humanity wouldn’t otherwise be living in conditions worse than nonexistence, and has a good chance of living in better conditions in the future. Humanity is also the only potential manifestation of good in the universe, as far as we know.
If you have a problem with wanting to kill someone to put them out of their misery in general, what if you were going to be tortured forever? Wouldn’t you want to die then? If staying alive seems like it should lexically override pain when you look at a single individual, think about all the future individuals who you probably don’t think have any special claim to life that comes with already existing, whose suffering you would be preventing by killing the present generation. If the species is expected to continue long enough, barring time-discounting, they should vastly outweigh the cost of killing the current. And no matter how long the species is going to continue, it’s going to die some time, so you’re really only moving an event forward in time, not introducing it from nowhere.
About the second:
I see no reason to expect that if animals have reduced awareness and other neurological faculties that reduce their ability to suffer, it wouldn’t also limit their ability to experience positive things too. Even if with what they’re lacking, they suffer only 1⁄10 as much as humans, the vast numbers of animals in the world seem to outweigh that.
The possibility of a hedonic treadmill in animals is something to keep in mind, but I suspect that it is not as evolutionarily helpful in short lived animals that aren’t likely to live for many years after a major negative event. The Wikipedia article said it took weeks in humans for the treadmill to kick in and make it so “positive emotions actually outweighed their negative ones.”
There is an obvious evolutionary force that would push animals like humans that can live for decades to mentally recover from terrible circumstances, but there is nothing for all of the animals that are hit by something they have a low chance of surviving. If a gazelle breaks a bone in its leg, it is basically dead, and there is no selective pressure to keep its mind in operable condition.
And most animals don’t live the kind of lives that shape the genes of their species. Most animals die before reproducing. I expect that the genes of most animals are tailored to benefit the lucky ones who aren’t infected by some parasite, and who can find enough food.
It seems like we have two disagreements. The first is whether there are living conditions to which death is preferable, and the second is over how bad the conditions wild animals live in are.
I agree that there are circumstances to which death is preferable, although I’ve argued a number of times on this site that people who’re making that decision with respect to themselves are usually in a bad position to do so.
I strongly disagree that the conditions on wild animals are that bad.
There’s a very strong selective pressure for animals to be adapted to their own specific living circumstances. Animals can certainly become upset or depressed when removed from circumstances they’re comfortable with, witness the preponderance of zoo animals whose habitats aren’t made sufficiently reflective of what the animals would have to live with in the wild. They often become visibly depressed or neurotic, despite living much safer, physically healthier, and longer lives.
As for the hedonic treadmill, if a human is hit by something they have a low chance of surviving, they’re probably not going to survive. That’s tautological. But that doesn’t mean that practically any injury an animal receives is probably going to result in its death. It’s not as if humans have a an evolutionary pressure to be able to bounce back from ailments that other animals simply don’t have.
Try watching some amputee dogs. See if they seem so miserable.
This was the first one I found that had any information about the dog’s reaction after the amputation, and much later. It says the dog took 4 weeks to “start acting like himself,” and still whined at night, 6 weeks later. This seems about the same timescale as humans adapting to disabilities, so you’re right about hedonic treadmills in dogs. Probably a lot of other animals have them too. There’s still all the animals that don’t have time in the rest of their lives to get used to what happens to them. But you have made me up my estimate of how good the average animal life is.
You could (in principle) verify that the average animal life was Mestroyer::worse than nonexistence by spying on the operation of the brain of every animal on Earth, and seeing how much each was put into and kept in states that caused them to try to get out of those states, also weighted according to how high a priority getting out of those states gets, how often the things that they tried to prevent from happening to themselves happened anyway, weighted according to how hard they tried, or would try, if there was any course of action available to them to avoid them, how much time they spent thinking about their damaged bodies, how much they are changed by signals indicating damage coming from their bodies, and how intense those signals are compared to the minimum intensity that triggers the mind to try to avoid the stimulus.
Multiply each of those amounts by a weighting constant I am not exactly sure of (what units would I use?), add them together, and subtract the whole thing from the amount each is put into and kept in states that cause them to try to stay in those states, or where not being in those states causes them to try and get into those states, weighted according to how hard they try, how much the things they tried hard to make happen to themselves happened, and how much things they did not plan to have happen to themselves, but would have if they understood how they could get them, weighted by how much they would sacrifice to get those things, how much they were changed by signals that had the effect of making them seek the stimulus more, weighted by how intense those signals are compared to the minimum intensity that triggers the mind to seek the stimulus.
The second part should also be multiplied by some weighting constants (I bet they are roughly the same as the amount that the average human cares about these things happening to human minds, that’s the best I can tie them down). Then divide by the number of minds you summed up stuff from. That number will be negative iff I’m right.
The second part is much simpler. I am correct about that iff there are at least 10^11 minds capable of all of those things, with a negative average of the per-individual quantity I described on Earth (ignoring quantum mechanics).
shudders Given my sense that the externalities of destroying all animal life on Earth apart from humans and a couple pets include destroying those humans and their pets, I think you might qualify as some sort of inverted utility monster.
There are reversable vasectomies out there, one specially promising was on the verge of becoming available. Also an israeli scientist made the Male Pill, but that will still take a few years before approval.
It depends how long I had to hold off. Realistically, I think capturing a few individuals to study from each species could probably be done in the course of wiping most out, so even though both operations would take a while, the gene-cataloging would not significantly slow down the killing (pipelining!)), so I would do it.
If I can’t rewire animals brains to stop suffering, screw it. Pave over every forest and jungle and other natural habitat on the Earth. Drive every animal species extinct but us (save pets people want to keep). Find a plant species that can generate oxygen and food without being pollinated by insects. (algae, maybe?) Also, save dolphins and great apes, who I would probably count as people, rather than “pseudo-people,” like other animals, construct luxurious habitats for them. Find some way to limit their population besides Malthusian scarcity (sterilization of most adults, probably).
Get rid of religions, try and make everyone as wealthy as possible, try and invent drugs that don’t screw up your brain that much but still feel awesome, make sure they are (obviously legal) and widely available. Eliminate every communicable disease, including STDs. Invent some kind of male-usable birth control. Eliminate nudity and sex taboos, and hold enormous public orgies every day, convince Eliezer Yudkowsky that the singularity is not gonna happen and he should spend all day writing HPMOR.
It still amazes me how many people read Brave New World and think Huxley’s dystopia sounds like Utopia.
Haven’t read it, actually.
Those unaware of the past are doomed to repeat its errors (a traditional justification for exhaustively studying the history of philosophy before being allowed to actually do philosophy oneself).
Read it, and as you go, you can tick off the whole of your shopping list. One might give only half a point for “wealthy”, as only the Alphas get to be wealthy, but everyone’s happy with their lot. They’re made that way in artificial wombs.
But Brave New World is not history. It’s fiction.
I read the plot summary on Wikipedia. It looks like what is wrong with Brave New World is not present in my utopia. I don’t want to dumb people down or physically weaken them as they develop, I don’t want to brainwash them. I don’t want everyone believing “‘ending is better than mending’ or ‘more stiches less riches’” I don’t want to get rid of families, and have the very concept be considered “pornographic.” I don’t want spending time alone to be frowned upon. I don’t want people to die at age 60, having been conditioned that it’s not a bad thing because they have no family and no one will mourn them. I don’t want everyone locked into a single job by brainwashing for their entire lives. I don’t want Shakespeare (or any literature) banned. I also don’t want a caste system.
Also, soma doesn’t sound like the kind of drug I was imagining, it sounds from the plot summary like it takes away your emotions and is used to quell riots. I’m thinking more like “crack, minus addiction and brain damage, and imprecision in dosing. (maybe some other downsides I missed, because I am not that knowledgeable about drugs)”
Orgies, drugs (of the right hypothetical variety), and mass atheism bad in some hidden, profound way that I would understand if I read Brave New World. Brave New World just associates them with bad stuff. Huxley was not doing a careful analysis of what they would be like. He was trying to write an interesting story.
This reminds me of a livejournal entry Yvain wrote about sci fi dystopias. Brave New World is very much a “rigged thought experiment.”
That said, I don’t think I’d be comfortable with elimination of all nudity and sex taboos coupled with massive public orgies, because I’d rather be able to exercise more discrimination with regards to whom I have sexual contact with without being regarded as weird and prudish. If we’re not rewriting human nature here, then anyone not participating in all the public sex is probably going to be stigmatized.
I also definitely wouldn’t be happy having all the natural ecosystems developed and most of the biosphere driven to extinction. Some people don’t give a crap about nature, and I can intellectually accept that there’s no reason other people have to actually like it, but it still makes me uncomfortable even if they’re not actually acting to destroy it, much like you’d probably feel discomforted to hear someone argue that there’s no reason for any more works of fiction to be made, ever, and all the people engaged in creating it and the resources dedicated to storing it should be redirected to more useful things.
I liked the link.
I would probably be uncomfortable with nudity and public sex too (at first), but it’s not really a part of my personality that I like. If I had the chance, I would basically just try to get used to it. I don’t want to make people who wouldn’t want to adapt adapt, but I would rather that future people were not limited like me than that things stayed nice for people who had been raised in the bad old days like you and me.
I understand your reaction to the thought of killing Mother Nature. I would do it with some regret. I agree that she is beautiful, and I would miss her from an aesthetic point of view. But I think it’s worth it.
The idea of wiping out other species to prevent their suffering strikes me as pretty bizarre. It’s the same sort of extension of Negative Utilitarianism that leads to the suggestion that we should do the same to humanity, and I don’t think that’s a very practical approach to utility maximizing.
In any case, I doubt most of the natural world suffers nearly as much as the philosophers in that link suggest, partly because I suspect a lack of abstract awareness and other neurological faculties limits the ways in which most animals can suffer, and partly due to the same hedonic treadmill tendencies that exist in humans.
It seems like we have two disagreements. The first is whether there are living conditions to which death is preferable, and the second is over how bad the conditions wild animals live in are. About the first:
I’m not a negative utilitarian, I don’t think suffering should lexically override happiness. I just think the suffering outweighs the happiness here because there is more of it. I definitely don’t think humanity should be wiped out too. Humanity wouldn’t otherwise be living in conditions worse than nonexistence, and has a good chance of living in better conditions in the future. Humanity is also the only potential manifestation of good in the universe, as far as we know.
If you have a problem with wanting to kill someone to put them out of their misery in general, what if you were going to be tortured forever? Wouldn’t you want to die then? If staying alive seems like it should lexically override pain when you look at a single individual, think about all the future individuals who you probably don’t think have any special claim to life that comes with already existing, whose suffering you would be preventing by killing the present generation. If the species is expected to continue long enough, barring time-discounting, they should vastly outweigh the cost of killing the current. And no matter how long the species is going to continue, it’s going to die some time, so you’re really only moving an event forward in time, not introducing it from nowhere.
About the second:
I see no reason to expect that if animals have reduced awareness and other neurological faculties that reduce their ability to suffer, it wouldn’t also limit their ability to experience positive things too. Even if with what they’re lacking, they suffer only 1⁄10 as much as humans, the vast numbers of animals in the world seem to outweigh that.
The possibility of a hedonic treadmill in animals is something to keep in mind, but I suspect that it is not as evolutionarily helpful in short lived animals that aren’t likely to live for many years after a major negative event. The Wikipedia article said it took weeks in humans for the treadmill to kick in and make it so “positive emotions actually outweighed their negative ones.”
There is an obvious evolutionary force that would push animals like humans that can live for decades to mentally recover from terrible circumstances, but there is nothing for all of the animals that are hit by something they have a low chance of surviving. If a gazelle breaks a bone in its leg, it is basically dead, and there is no selective pressure to keep its mind in operable condition.
And most animals don’t live the kind of lives that shape the genes of their species. Most animals die before reproducing. I expect that the genes of most animals are tailored to benefit the lucky ones who aren’t infected by some parasite, and who can find enough food.
I agree that there are circumstances to which death is preferable, although I’ve argued a number of times on this site that people who’re making that decision with respect to themselves are usually in a bad position to do so.
I strongly disagree that the conditions on wild animals are that bad.
There’s a very strong selective pressure for animals to be adapted to their own specific living circumstances. Animals can certainly become upset or depressed when removed from circumstances they’re comfortable with, witness the preponderance of zoo animals whose habitats aren’t made sufficiently reflective of what the animals would have to live with in the wild. They often become visibly depressed or neurotic, despite living much safer, physically healthier, and longer lives.
As for the hedonic treadmill, if a human is hit by something they have a low chance of surviving, they’re probably not going to survive. That’s tautological. But that doesn’t mean that practically any injury an animal receives is probably going to result in its death. It’s not as if humans have a an evolutionary pressure to be able to bounce back from ailments that other animals simply don’t have.
Try watching some amputee dogs. See if they seem so miserable.
I just watched some youtube videos about amputee dogs, including this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJxEIXRz_Kk
This was the first one I found that had any information about the dog’s reaction after the amputation, and much later. It says the dog took 4 weeks to “start acting like himself,” and still whined at night, 6 weeks later. This seems about the same timescale as humans adapting to disabilities, so you’re right about hedonic treadmills in dogs. Probably a lot of other animals have them too. There’s still all the animals that don’t have time in the rest of their lives to get used to what happens to them. But you have made me up my estimate of how good the average animal life is.
...why?
...why?
Because I think the average wild animal life is worse than nonexistence, and there are quite a lot of them enduring such lives.
How would I go about (in principle) verifying whether you are correct?
You could (in principle) verify that the average animal life was Mestroyer::worse than nonexistence by spying on the operation of the brain of every animal on Earth, and seeing how much each was put into and kept in states that caused them to try to get out of those states, also weighted according to how high a priority getting out of those states gets, how often the things that they tried to prevent from happening to themselves happened anyway, weighted according to how hard they tried, or would try, if there was any course of action available to them to avoid them, how much time they spent thinking about their damaged bodies, how much they are changed by signals indicating damage coming from their bodies, and how intense those signals are compared to the minimum intensity that triggers the mind to try to avoid the stimulus.
Multiply each of those amounts by a weighting constant I am not exactly sure of (what units would I use?), add them together, and subtract the whole thing from the amount each is put into and kept in states that cause them to try to stay in those states, or where not being in those states causes them to try and get into those states, weighted according to how hard they try, how much the things they tried hard to make happen to themselves happened, and how much things they did not plan to have happen to themselves, but would have if they understood how they could get them, weighted by how much they would sacrifice to get those things, how much they were changed by signals that had the effect of making them seek the stimulus more, weighted by how intense those signals are compared to the minimum intensity that triggers the mind to seek the stimulus.
The second part should also be multiplied by some weighting constants (I bet they are roughly the same as the amount that the average human cares about these things happening to human minds, that’s the best I can tie them down). Then divide by the number of minds you summed up stuff from. That number will be negative iff I’m right.
The second part is much simpler. I am correct about that iff there are at least 10^11 minds capable of all of those things, with a negative average of the per-individual quantity I described on Earth (ignoring quantum mechanics).
shudders Given my sense that the externalities of destroying all animal life on Earth apart from humans and a couple pets include destroying those humans and their pets, I think you might qualify as some sort of inverted utility monster.
Upvoted because of the frank and detailed reduction of pleasure, pain, and preferences in general.
There are reversable vasectomies out there, one specially promising was on the verge of becoming available. Also an israeli scientist made the Male Pill, but that will still take a few years before approval.
Ending animal suffering is more important to you than understanding the only known instance of life and evolution in the universe ?
Or would you consider holding off at least until the global genome project is complete ?
Yes.
It depends how long I had to hold off. Realistically, I think capturing a few individuals to study from each species could probably be done in the course of wiping most out, so even though both operations would take a while, the gene-cataloging would not significantly slow down the killing (pipelining!)), so I would do it.