Convo at Sentient Developments on Hedonistic Imperative
Some heavy-hitting philosophers, like David Pearce and Mark Walker, have gotten involved at a discussion in the comments thread of my guest post at Sentient Developments. They are trying to convince Athena Andreadis that having more control over our emotions is a good thing and that we can eliminate pain without becoming drooling zombies. Note that hyperthymic (very happy) people not only are completely functional, but they have a tendency to be more creative than people in the middle of the happiness bell curve.
In the thread, people point out the value of pain -- it's evolutionarily useful, etc. I consider it quite likely that we'll find workarounds to all the obstacles that stand in the way of removing it, however. The vast majority of pain is useless. The minority of pain that is useful could be replaced by automatic "warning signals" that pop up when we would otherwise be feeling useful pain, or even connecting the cause of pain directly to pain-avoidance instincts without the intermediary of conscious pain.
People find that last part really hard to grasp. How could you jerk away your hand from a hot stove in a fraction of a second without feeling pain? The fact of the matter is that, in the end, pretty much any stimulus can be arbitrarily connected to any reaction in a physical system as long as you have the necessary access and a well-specified description of the stimulus and reaction. In the long term, we'll be able program ourselves to laugh insanely at the sound of drops of water, or recoil in fear from beavers. There are no magical connections between stimuli, conscious feelings, and instinctual reactions. Evolution built them all from scratch. As our ability to reengineer the human brain increases, we'll gain the ability to reprogram literally anything we want. I think that people will eventually choose to make practically every stimulus result in some shade of happiness -- the question is how to program these "gradients of bliss".
Nothing in the world is inherently happiness-causing or pain-causing. It's all based on the neural circuitry doing the perceiving. Thinking otherwise is falling prey to the Mind Projection Fallacy, an error we seemed programmed to make, but once we realize it's wrong, we ought to drop it forever.
June 20th, 2009 - 19:41
If it really were possible to have us react to “warnings” as efficiently as we do to real pain, then why did pain evolve at all? Why is anything truly painful?
Most responses to pain are not reflexes…they are conscious choices that are invariably made because pain is painful. If there were some extremely urgent reason to ignore the pain, we are capable of overriding that decision. So responses to pain are conscious voluntary actions, not reflexes.
And when it comes to reflexes like pulling your hand away from a hot stove, you actually pull your hand away BEFORE you even sense the pain.
I think it’s tough to say for sure what is possible and what is not. Pearce and Walker may be right, but they can’t know for sure without knowing the answer to the question I posed above.
June 21st, 2009 - 00:12
If your parents recoiled in fear from beavers then you would probably do the same at least until the age of about 10. After that time you would probably spend the rest of your life trying to recover from your beaver-phobia. But if your parents are not afraid of wild animals then you would probably be unafraid too – the Irwin family is an example of this.
A sharp pain when touching a hot stove is not a big deal. What is mostly pointless is the ongoing pain for the rest of the day after a minor burn or the weeks of pain involved in the process of recovering from major burns. I would be happy to keep the small pains when I do things that cause damage to my body if I could just avoid the needless pain during the recovery process.
If I was offered a cheap and reliable change to my nervous system that eliminated small sharp pains, I wouldn’t bother – not even if it was well proven to avoid side-effects. If however I was offered a moderately expensive change that would eliminate the recovery pain then I would be interested.
June 21st, 2009 - 07:44
If it really were possible to have us react to “warnings†as efficiently as we do to real pain, then why did pain evolve at all? Why is anything truly painful?
This is a question that must be taken seriously by those of us who think pain should be abolished. As Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg note in their excellent paper, The Wisdom of Nature, “In order to decide whether we want to modify some aspect of a system, it is helpful to consider why the system has that aspect in the first place.” So why hasn’t evolution produced creatures motivated solely by gradients of pleasure, as Dave advocates? One speculative answer is that such beings would be less energy-efficient. This would be so if pleasant and unpleasant states were more metabolically costly than states of hedonic neutrality, and if sentient organisms adapted to their environment could act on their motivations most of the time. For under such conditions, a creature motivated by pain would experience fewer total painful experiences than would a similar creature motivated by pleasure. (Consider the parallel question: why do legal systems motivate people by punishments rather than rewards? The answer seems to be that, since most people would comply with the law under either system, it saves resources to punish offenders than to reward compliers.) If this story is correct, then we have an instance of what Bostrom and Sandberg call “value discordanceâ€: a mismatch between what nature selects for and what morality would. Unlike evolution, we care about pleasure and pain not only for their instrumental role as causal antecedents of behavior, but also for their intrinsic value as phenomenal states of mind.
June 22nd, 2009 - 08:37
Pablo raises an important question about evolution. I don’t know the answer. Nonetheless, I think we have clues. Why is unipolar euphoric mania by far the rarest of the mood disorders? Mania can be euphoric, dysphoric, or “mixed”; but for subjects with euphoric mania, life really is driven almost entirely by gradients of bliss. Unipolar mania is much rarer than bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression) which in turn is much less common than depression. What do their relative frequency tell us about the ancestral environment of adaptation? Some evolutionary psychologists think they have the answer. If depression can be regarded as the internalized correlate of the “losing” behavioural sub-routine, then the euphoria of mania may be regarded as the internalized correlate of the “winning” sub-routine. Only in exceptional circumstances is the behaviour associated with euphoric mania going to be genetically adaptive. Genetically, it’s a high reward, (very) high risk strategy. Euphoric mania is characterized by grandiosity, exuberant energy, high libido, sexual promiscuity, increased goal-directed activity – and an extremely high pain tolerance. A whole tribe of euphorically manic people presumably wouldn’t be socially cohesive. [Imagine, for instance, if all the males were convinced they were "Alphas".] The extreme optimism of euphoric mania might also lead to fatally impaired “reality testing” in a harsh, predator-filled environment.
Needless to say, those of us who want to abolish suffering don’t want to replace a genetic predisposition to low or mediocre mood with a predisposition to euphoria mania. Fortunately, gradients of bliss can take other guises.