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.
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