We’re too intelligent to not suffer. Take for instance the foodstamp/steak/lobster thread in the BBQ Pit. Someone suggests that poor folks should not be allowed to use foodstamps to buy fancy/junk food, that it should be used for staples like rice and beans. The immediate claim? That we want poor people to suffer by taking away their food choice. It’s a common stereotype that a way to punish people in prison is to give them “bread and water” instead of food. We consider this punishment, people locked up in a small place and made to eat nothing but bread and water are “suffering”.
However, my indoor cats never leave the house and eat the same damn kibble every single day of their lives, are THEY suffering, curled up on the radiator, occasionally getting up to stretch before lying down again? Of course not, it seems silly to even suggest it. They’re happy because they’re dumb and don’t care about food variety or the world outside the window.
We’re smart, we care, we want more things tomorrow than we have today, we want variety, excitement and adventure. If we don’t get it, we get sad.
Ignorance is bliss. We don’t get bliss, we suffer.
I don’t know. Wouldn’t an occasional lack of good things in and of itself be enough? Why must having bad things be necessary to have good things, wouldn’t just lacking good things now and again be enough to make the good things seem valuable? Thats my view at least.
The opposite is true in a way too, If you need bad things to value the good things then you need good things to fear the bad things. People who don’t have jobs don’t worry about being fired, and people who don’t have families do not worry about theirs falling apart. People who aren’t members of society do not experience shame, etc.
That definition sounjds rather self-referential or circular to me - if you design the experience and the response, the whole thing is meaningless; you might just as well decide (and define) that a light bulb experiences pure pleasure when you switch it on.
I don’t know about this. You might have more of a problem keeping a bobcat or a jaguarandi as a pet and encouraging them to accept the same environment. The difference may not necessarily be that your cats are less intelligent than their wild cousins (although they probably are), but that they have been domesticated for thousands of years to accept the shelter that we humans provide. In a way, they are sort of analagous to the hypothetical genetically engineered hedonists mentioned earlier: their definition of a pleasureable, stimulating environment has been radically altered from that of their feral ancestors. Yes, prisoners find excessive confinement and radically limited dietary choice to be unpleasant–this is to be expected, since under most conditions it’s comparatively unhealthy. If a population of humans were forced to subsist in a confined environment with no other alternative, they would eventually acclimate and probably come to find it preferable after many generations. On the other hand, if you were to take your cats to an unfamiliar place and abandon them, I would think that surely they would suffer because of it.
If this were the case, this psychic reward would apply to other areas of life, yes? If I get that much satisfaction from stapling, how much would I get from, say, making the bed? Tying my shoes? Brushing my teeth? All of these activities are more complicated than collating paper, so would they not give me a better ‘reward’? And, assuming they did, there I’d be a work, getting a little stimulation from stapling, but wishing I could be at home making the bed (or whatever else gives more ‘reward’ than stapling).
If it’s a little machine that you hook up to your brain that excites you when it knows you are stapling, I’m pretty damned sure that 5 minutes after it was sold to the public, hacker kids would find a way to make it work regardless of what you were doing. So, you’d be at work stapling and wishing you could be at home with your own little machine maxed out while you watch the TV.
If that is true then mild to moderate suffering is valuable enough to keep around but it still doesn’t justify keeping the more severe forms of suffering on earth.
I can agree to that in principle…but then again, maybe the world would be a completely different place if we took away all ‘severe’ forms of suffering. Maybe people would be too apathetic to throw off tyrannical dictators. Perhaps all social evolution would cease. Maybe in order for social evolution to occur, people need to have an idea of what ‘BAD’ is so they can better understand in what direction their society needs to move in.
Something else to think about: As I understand it, European technological dominance was due, in part, to the fact that in Europe there are many different cultures packed closely together that were, at one time, all vying to achieve dominance over each other. Thus, the reason we have much of the technology we have today is due to people trying to come up with inventive ways of CAUSING suffering on other people. What does that say about the elimination of suffering?
Modern peoples, I would think, in general suffer far far less (whether or not you account for the fact that their much longer lifetimes give them more opportunity to suffer). Seeing that people seem to get on just fine living their lives without the extreme and constant suffering that characterizes other lives, it seems pretty difficult to justify the severe suffering of the mass of humanity.
I imagine that from their viewpoint, they were trying to come up with inventive ways of keeping those other groups from inflicting suffering on them. But I suppose that whether they were trying to overcome it or inflict it, suffering could be seen as the catalyst. Necessity being the mother of invention, and all that. But then on the other hand, would it matter if invention stagnated, if it happened after suffering was eliminated? If all your percieved needs are met, why would you feel compelled to develop any further technology?
Note to future humanity: Invent foolproof asteroid/alien invasion-destroying satellite system before you conquer suffering.
You were describing the problem in psychological terms. Given that you agreed that mind is entirely of the brain, the mental states corresponding to experiencing bliss and knowing that bliss is being experienced, have physical correlates. If and when there’s a successful model of mind <-> brain mapping, and if and when it’s figured out how to establish a new homeostasis with the ‘experience & knowing of ecstasy’ circuits at a high baseline activity, then the creatures will experience bliss and know it as such. Your objection seems to be that the circuit that is believed to represent ‘knowing ecstasy’ won’t produce the same mental state we think it will unless there’s a circuit that can produce suffering. This goes to the heart of the matter. Does the mind drive the brain? I’m with you on this one. This project seems fundamentally impossible.
Granted. Pain is a message from the biosystem to correct a problem.
When the message has been successfully communicated, the pain is no longer necessary.
With little training, one can stop the pain message once it has become unnecessary.
Subsequently stopping the suffering.
Pain imposed by brainwashing… I call that reversable deception.
Tyrannical dictators would not be tyranical dictators if people did not suffer and the term tyrannical dictator would be meaningless if people couldn’t suffer. This is kindof like circular logic, saying we need suffering to throw off dictators when dictators wouldn’t matter if we didn’t suffer.
Not only that, but there have to be other methods to develop the world other than suffering. Alot of our advancements are not based on terror, they are based on overcoming small inconveniences. Overcoming inconveniences & adam’s smith invisible hand has largely shaped our world. Curiosity, overcoming inconveniences, and a desire to create a happier healthier world would still be motives. If you look at academic research i’m sure most of it isn’t based on curing intense suffering as much as minor isolated advances made out of curiosity and a love for the subject matter.
From a philosophical viewpoint mental suffering is a side effect of being unable to be the person you deep down inside desire to be. An event that causes suffering can permanently alter the ability to do this, leading to permanent suffering. There may be no way to rectify this kind of situation.
Physical pain is a sign you are hurting yourself biologically. When you do things that threaten your physical life you suffer. Mental pain is more or less the same but with a mental image of yourself, your relationships, your society, etc. Unless a person radically transforms their views they may be stuck suffering for the rest of their lives, and radical transformations are easier said than done.
On another note I think this is the motive behing Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, changing your view of yourself and your society so that things that would cause suffering and anxiety do not cause them nearly as badly.
I agree with the last, however, in the context of the OP (how can I make stapling papers more fun?" I would say that some might consider small inconveniences to be a type of suffering. Nothing earth-shattering, to be sure, but suffering nonetheless.
Assuming that the hypothesis of no pain being felt during stimulation is correct, that is a very interesting theory. Part of this would be dependant on how you define suffering however. The flaw is that you really are only stopping the perception of suffering, not the actual suffering itself, nor is it a sustanable state. It should also be pointed out that in your experiment that not only did the rats not experience the suffering, but they most likely did not experience ANY meaningful awareness outside the pleasure stimulation. One would need to be constantly stimulated and could never conduct a meaningful existance, which is why I compare it to the use of drugs. The effect the you refer to is basically the same as drug use, the only difference is that it may be even more intense. What we are talking about here is a temporary escape as opposed to a solution.
Exactly, our goal must be to minimize suffering, as opposed to escaping from it. This would be selfish for everyone else if we did as well, and certainly non-productive.
I do find this an intriguing angle, but old sci-fi novels come to mind like “Brave New World” and “1984”. People are given drugs that make them “happy” but all the ills and suffering of society still remain. Everyone is just oblivious to it.
The thing to remember is this method is perception vs reality this does not end hunger, disease or death.
Maybe the question is what is suffering, and what are the root causes of suffering