Pain and suffering follow a bell curve distribution relative to cognitive abilities

Great Debates
1

I hate it when you spend 20 minutes writing something and firefox freezes up and shuts down. I switched to firefox because IE sucked. Fuck this. I’m going to seamonkey.

So if this post seems rambling that is why. Having said that…

I think with the y-axis being suffering, pain and misery; and the x-axis being cognitive abilities that the level of pain and suffering follows a bell curve distribution.

Life is 3.8 billion years old more or less. However suffering, pain and misery require advanced nervous systems. Seeing how nervous systems capable of both consciousness and suffering are probably only a few hundred million years old (I really have no idea), then that means for most of life there was no meaningful suffering in conscious being, as far as I can tell because neurology hadn’t advanced enough. So for the first 90% of life, there was likely no suffering.

So as biology advances, so do the threats to the integrity of biological organisms. Poor nutrition, blunt trauma, pathogens, environmental damage. Other threats that can do damage to our biological integrity but which we did not face much of in our evolution history (like certain kinds of chemicals or radiation) do not cause any suffering, or do not cause immediate suffering despite doing heavy damage to our biological systems. So we evolve the ability to suffer to avoid acts, behaviors and situations that threaten our biological integrity.

So then individual organisms form into groups. According to the book ‘evolution for everyone’ only about a dozen or so insects made the transition from solitary to social insects (bees, wasps, termites, beetles, ants, etc), however the evolutionary advantage was so great that these handful of insects make up half the earth’s biomass.

However in social units you now have suffering because of threats to the integrity of your social self. I do not know how much suffering, pain or misery ants are capable of but I know humans suffer deeply because of threats to our social selfs and failing to fulfill our obligations to society. Crippling diseases, unemployment, poverty, shame, degradation, humiliation, etc are all sources of suffering.

On another note, a family is also a smaller group, and people suffer heavily because of trauma to their families, especially their children.

Then as cognitive abilities become better, we develop the ability to suffer because of remembering past events or worrying about future events. Something like 90% of the things we worry about never happen (that is the stat I read), however the suffering is real. Martin Luther used to suffer heavily because he was convinced there was predestination and that the majority of humans would spend eternity in hell. As far as I know, ants and other animals do not have the ability to create dieties then cause themselves massive suffering because they are worried that those dieties are unjust. People worry about death long before it hits, and they suffer after a death for years due to memory.

So suffering advances as our biologies advance, our social units advance and our cognitive abilities (to worry and remember bad events).

However that seems, to me, to be the peak of the bell curve. After that cognitive abilities seem to alleviate suffering.

Medicine isn’t perfect, but it is a multi trillion dollar a year industry that protects us from endless threats to our biological and social integrity. The Black plague decimated europe, but can now be treated with basic sanitation and prescription antibiotics available for $4/month at Wal-mart.

Agriculture has helped protect us from the suffering of famine. Police, courts and military forces protect us from people who’d hurt our families.

As societies become wealthier, we seem to demand more freedom and civil rights. As a result subjugation goes down, alleviating suffering. The last 300 years have seen worldwide advances in economic, social, political & environmental justice as well as civil and human rights. Plus more and more behavior that was shamed becomes mainstream. The suffering from being GLBT is hopefully less than it was 50 years ago due to higher tolerance. The suffering black people endure is hopefully less now than it was 200 years ago.

So up to a point, higher cognitive abilities lead to more suffering (better biology leads to neurology capable of suffering, to social suffering and to suffering due to worrying and memory). However after that point then higher cognitive abilities lead to the ability to invent tools to alleviate suffering (wealth, industry, medicine, social justice, social sciences). I know the world isn’t perfect but we are protected from and able to obtain absolution from far more threats than we were 300 years ago.

So I think we are on the descending side of the slope. However, we are increasing suffering for other life forms by taking away their habitats.

Damn I’m depressed.

2

There seem to be a couple of flaws:

  1. Psychic suffering

You are only discussing physical suffering. Much suffering, at least for higher animals, is surely psychic, yes? If you agree then doesn’t our ability to alleviate physical suffering closely parrallel our ability to experience psychic suffering? For example slug presumably suffers only form physical ailments. A dog can suffer anxiety with an immediate cause, but not angst or fear of death. Humans suffer from all manner of psychological ailments, often with no immediate cause or cure. In fact I could argue that most human suffering has always been psychic. So doesn’t suffering simply continue to increase, with physical suffering being replaced by psychic?

  1. How does “taking away their habitats” increase suffering? Best we can tell there just as many animals on Earth now as there were a million years ago, neither more nor less. The composition changes but the raw numbers remain static. So why does a rat that was killed because we cleared its forest home forest last week suffer any more than a rat that was eaten by a bear a million years ago? I can’t see any justification for this claim.
3

I detailed psychic suffering pretty heavily, and talked about how higher cognition leads to more psychic suffering. Like I said, ants do not invent deities and then suffer because they believe those deities to be unjust the way Martin Luther did.

Reptiles, to my knowledge, do not give a shit about their kids. Some will eat their own children. It is the mammalian brain and limbic system that seems to create interpersonal bonding. So advances in neurology create the capability for new forms of suffering.

At the same time social organisms create new suffering because the individuals within the social unit are not fulfilling their obligations and/or are subjugated by the group. So social animals can feel shame, humiliation, isolation, loneliness, etc. Emotions that I’m guessing solitary animals do not feel.

So you develop the ability for physical suffering, for suffering because of personal bonds (family and friends), for social suffering and for suffering due to higher cognition due to memory and worrying. As biology (and cognition/neurology) advances, so do the types of suffering we are capable of. Single celled organisms do not suffer. Modern humans have physical suffering, interpersonal bond suffering, intrapersonal suffering, social suffering, cognitive suffering, and probably other forms as well.

  1. My point was that we humans seem to be on the downward slope of a bell curve as far as cognitive ability and suffering is concerned. Knowledge compounds and doubles every few years. As a result we become better and better at manipulating ourselves and our environments to avoid suffering. However, we are damaging the environment which could cause suffering for other life forms. We are in a 6th age of extinction because of our behavior.
4

Most pertinent sentence in the OP.

5

I am somehow reminded of the book Flowers for Algernon by the OP. I think suffering is a result of our particular type of mental make up that was selected only to meet reproductive/survival criteria, not for happiness. And as long as our thinking organs are ill suited in this way, an increase only in mental capacity will only serve to increase our unhappiness. Our physical needs may be perfectly met by technology in the future, but until we can understand how our brains and minds work and alter it for the better, the human experience will remain filled with dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

6

Have you ever been to the website the hedonistic imperative?

They discuss what you are referencing, the fact that our minds are designed for reproduction/survival, and that we are going to have to use manmade technologies to rewire our brains so that life is more enjoyable.

Dissonance - thank you for catching that.

7

On another note, I know this will sound like shite coming from a guy who just wrote a detailed OP about being depressed, but we are beginning to learn how to manipulate the brain to reduce suffering.

Neuroscience combined with buddhism is showing what brain areas are activated when certain buddhist cognitive exercises increase a person’s level of happiness or compassion.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43006-2005Jan2.html

Various dietary supplements like omega-3, selenium or magnesium can help alleviate stress or depression.

What is going to be really cool is when we figure out how to combine cognitive exercises with drugs (probably neuroplasticity drugs, I don’t know) nutrition and electronics technology. It probably won’t be too far into the future either.

I know a lot of bodybuilders. And when they combine drugs, nutrition and exercise they can see a massive gain in muscle mass in a short period of time. Gaining 20 pounds of muscle in 8 weeks is not unheard of, which is a muscle gain most people will not gain their entire adult life.

So I’m hoping we are beginning to learn how to do that with the brain. Combine the right drugs with the right exercises, nutrients and electronics technologies (binaural beats, biofeedback, TMS, etc) and as a result people who want to be happier, more content and have lower stress (but not to the point that it blinds them from reality) can do so.

I wonder if there is a quality of life neuroscience journal. A journal devoted to using neuroscience advances (in electronics, medication, nutrition, physical exercise, cognitive exercise, etc) to improve quality of life. If so that would be awesome to read.