Suffering is necessary. Biology uses it to control us. Will we ever defeat biology? How long will it take?
Suffering is inevitable. Biology is a science. It neither controls nor is it subject to defeat, or victory for that matter. Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
Who shot who in the what now?
Just how politically incorrect can you get? 
One might argue that biological suffering was defeated in 1954 at Cal Tech, when James Olds and Peter Milner discovered that electric stimulation of the lateral hypothalamus in rats resulted in a pleasure response that overrode any other biological imperatives. Rats given the ability to stimulate themselves by pressing a lever would do so as many as 2,000 times per hour, even to the point of starvation. This effect has been extensively studied as a model of how the process of addiction operates in humans. Given that the so-called “pleasure centers” of the rat brain are not too different from those in the human brain, it seems reasonable to assume that a person would find the direct stimulation of those areas to be a much more pleasureable experience than any other possible activity. In this sense, anyway, the technology necessary to ensure a life of maximum pleasure has been around for decades. Yet so far there hasn’t been any huge pressure to develop the procedure any further for human use, probably because the idea of such an artificially euphoric existence is repugnant to most people. I know it certainly creeps me out.
that does not seem like an elimination of suffering. the rats did not press the lever because of continually elevated happiness, but to escape from a default state that is undesirale in comparison.
my question is, will suffering even be a meaningful word, in a hypothetical future time?
What exactly do you imagine suffering is, if not an undesirable state from which one seeks escape?
People will stop suffering when they decide to stop suffering.
Suffering is unnecessary. In the midst of tragedy one can choose to see beauty and goodness. Pain may be inevitible, but it can be overcome. Emotional pain is largely self-imposed, or chosen out of some misdirected training/enculturation.
Why does anyone have to suffer?
This is a fascinating question, one that I’ve wondered about sometimes myself.
Suppose for a moment that all problems in the world are solved through the effort of previous generations. Would we then suffer from boredom?
It is biological urgency that we feel pain. I would not call pain caused by brainwashing self-imposed. It’s all the same.
If we never suffer, how would we know when we’re having a good time? I think some contrast is necessary to feel the full extent of pleasure.
Very good Nunavut Boy. Have you ever read The Prophet by Kahlil Gabran?
(chapter)On Joy and Sorrow
<aside>I went to the website for Iqaluit. Very impressive. I loved the maps.</asid(chapter)e>
Why are the inseparable? All that has to be done is reduce the intensity of painful stimuli, by inhibiting some function of the brain. Response to pleasurable stimuli could be enhanced.
Pleasure, Pain… they are quantifiable.
The rats still experienced pain and suffering. Their addiction to the pleasure device simply over-rode it. This would be similar to a drug addict who is slowly killing themselves with heroin, but simply can’t stop. The suffering is still experienced
My present life comprises a remarkably small amount of suffering, perhaps even to the extent that to say I experience any would be to unfairly downplay the very real suffering of others.
However, in the long term, illness, misfortune and ultimately death will inevitably happen to those close to me, or me myself. To avoid the suffering caused thereby would be to become a psychopath.
So, suffering can be minimised, and we can all work towards such a goal. But to eradicate it completely would effectively be to lose the capacity to emotionally invest in one another.
They are, but all you’d be doing is resetting the midpoint; I’m pretty sure our brains would quite quickly adapt to find exquisite ecstasy merely quite nice and to find the simple absence of pain/pleasure intolerably boring. Pleasure is so nice because of its distance from pain; removing all possibility of the pain makes the pleasure less significant a change.
I know this to be true from experience; on several occasions in my life, I have been very ill or in great pain; the sudden respite of suffering was among the most pleasurable and uplifting experiences of my life.
I’m not so sure there Mange. Those same neurological indicators of stress, pain, somatostatisfaction or endorphin-pleasure are largely the same as lizards from millions of evolutionary years ago. Was Lucy the australopithecine sadder or more pained than us in her most acute suffering? I would say not, just as I would say that I feel no less happy in my suffering-free life than someone experiencing a brief ray of sunshine in a life of continual darkness.
that may be the case from a physiological POV, but we humans have layers of perception pasted over the top of actual physical experience; people can learn to live with (and largely ignore) pain, people can become bored with pleasure; under certain circumstances people’s mental map can be altered so that they enjoy what should be unpleasant and vice versa.
Pretty much my take on it.
We know that the same biosubstrate can output different types of experience depending on the environment it is bathed in. You are conceptually converting the correlations of neurotransmitter activity <–> qualia to a more causative relation, atleast the implication that some specific neurotransmitters are necessary for some specific type of qualia. Lucy lived 3.5 million years ago and had a smaller brain. Impossible to know just what was felt.
To the OP, there’s a guy who’s believes the answer to your question can be Yes. And since 1995, has maintained a huge network of sites. I present you Paradise Engineering: The Hedonistic Imperative. He’s technically adept even if his broad beliefs are a bit …loony (to me), including the fundamental premise that Suffering can be eradicated.
Are you saying that there are mind events not caused by the brain?
Coming back to your original post, I do find some grounds for complaint.
If all mind is brain-based, then the act of finding something boring is physically-based. So theoretically, there could be a way to engineer brain such that it does not find ecstasy boring (in fact, you shouldn’t need to enhance euphoria, just its perception.) Will the mind still come to find it boring? This comes down to whether the mind drives the brain or brain the mind. Does essence precede existence? I believe it does.
But, as any good Pain Clinic physician will tell you, the quantification scale is very subjective. One person who says he is experiencing 10 out of 10 on a pain scale (worst imaginable) right this very second will be sitting and smiling while telling this. Another claiming the same degree of pain will be curled up in a ball and tearing the skin from his arms with his own teeth to distract him from the pain.
Do they both have the same degree of pain? They both report their pain as “the worst imaginable”.