Pain and pleasure are signals that we are on the wrong or right path. There’s a point in making it a better signal. But the following propositions are wholly absurd:
to eliminate pain itself (i.e. no more signal)
to bias the system to have either more or less pain in the average (i.e. bias the signal so it carries less than 1 bit of information per bit of code).
to forcefully arrange for others to never possibly have pain in their own name (i.e. disconnecting them from reality, denying their moral agency—and/or obey their every whims until reality strikes back despite your shielding).
to feel responsible for other people’s pain (i.e. deny the fact that they are their own moral agents).
As for promising a world of equal happiness for all, shameless self-quote: “Life is the worst of all social inequalities. To suppress inequalities, one must either resurrect all the dead people (and give life to all the potential living people), or exterminate all the actually living. Egalitarians, since they cannot further their goal by the former method, inevitably come to further it by the latter method.”
A rational individual has no reason to care for the suffering of alien entities, or even other human entities, except inasmuch as it affects his own survival, enjoyment, control of resources.
25% suicide rate? Over something completely abstract that they haven’t felt yet?
You didn’t tell us about humans having been overcome by some weird Death Cult.
But, now it makes sense why they would give power to the Confessor.
Obviously, in this fantasy of would-be-immortal 21st century abstract thinker, your immortal 21st century abstract thinkers are worshipped as gods. And unhappily, they were told too much about Masada and other Kool-Aid when they were young.
There comes your judeo-christian upbringing again, in addition to the intellectual masturbation.
Eliezer—get a life! The worst thing that ever happened to your intelligence was to be disconnected from reality by too early success.