[SEQ RERUN] Serious Stories
Today’s post, Serious Stories was originally published on 08 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Stories and lives are optimized according to rather different criteria. Advice on how to write fiction will tell you that “stories are about people’s pain” and “every scene must end in disaster”. I once assumed that it was not possible to write any story about a successful Singularity because the inhabitants would not be in any pain; but something about the final conclusion that the post-Singularity world would contain no stories worth telling seemed alarming. Stories in which nothing ever goes wrong, are painful to read; would a life of endless success have the same painful quality? If so, should we simply eliminate that revulsion via neural rewiring? Pleasure probably does retain its meaning in the absence of pain to contrast it; they are different neural systems. The present world has an imbalance between pain and pleasure; it is much easier to produce severe pain than correspondingly intense pleasure. One path would be to address the imbalance and create a world with more pleasures, and free of the more grindingly destructive and pointless sorts of pain. Another approach would be to eliminate pain entirely. I feel like I prefer the former approach, but I don’t know if it can last in the long run.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Emotional Involvement, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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It seems to me that suffering is easier to produce than eudaimonia (I prefer that to the pallid notions of “happiness” or “pleasure”) for the same reason that to be wrong is easier than to be right. Truth and eudaimonia are small targets in their respective seas of possibilities. They cannot be achieved without striving and are easy to miss. With the wrong methods, you may be systematically led away from them. Though small, they are deep: progress opens up new vistas you never imagined.
Is suffering any larger a target than eudaimonia? It seems to me like they’d be the same size, just in opposite directions. The only reason suffering is easier to hit is that humans are all built facing that direction.
They can’t feel a certain sensation. They can still suffer.
Considering addicting things can replace joy with an urge to do certain things that lacked the intolerable subjective quality of joy, I would expect the reverse to be possible. I strongly suspect that the only reason we know more about addiction is that people tend to keep doing addicting things, so they’re more noticeable.
That one’s easy. You have no way of telling what happened to you. You have memory, but having a memory of being tortured does not have the subjective quality of pain that past!you would feel had you actually been tortured. That’s probably not the best way to do it, but it shows there is a way.