There’s a well-documented attitude where humans will twist themselves into mental knots trying to come up with reasons why death or work are actually good. The thing is, even the anti-deathists (looking at you, Big Yud) will turn around and do the exact same thing about suffering, telling themselves that OF COURSE humans need suffering to be happy (just like *~death gives meaning to life~*, right?).
We COULD be working on destroying the hedonic treadmill, or making a version of MDMA without tolerance or negative side effects, or figuring out how to make wireheading work without interfering with our ability to earn a living, but instead we’ve decided to make all of that illegal.
I still haven’t seen Inside Out yet, but I get the sense that I would hate it, since really Sadness needs to be taken out behind the toolshed and put out of her misery, and out of the misery of her host.
Do you think pain is bad?
Not always, no. Define pain.
The sensation of physical pain. I asked wirehead actually but that was a rhetorical question so I will answer.
Pain is the body signalling “something is wrong!”. It’s of course very unpleasant, and thus technically “bad”. On top of that, the human body doesn’t deal with it all that well: it keeps telling us something is wrong when we are already aware, misreports the damage, etc.
There are people who don’t feel pain. They don’t live long.
Even every human having the ability to flip the switch to say “hey, I’m aware something is wrong, got it, bye” might have catastrophic consequences when the social expectation for manual laborers becomes “ignore the pain forever”.
Sadness is most likely exactly like that, and intentionally experiencing sadness is much more of a universal human experience.
Yep.
I think abolishing suffering kind of includes “abolish need for manual labor” as a sub-point… Just a slight hunch.
#FullyAutomatedLuxuryCommunism
#MouseUtopiaHereWeCome
Okay, but major depression and chronic pain are probably both pretty worthless, as compared to, say, the feelings of loneliness and dejectedness one might have in an exotic relationship type one has entered for ideological reasons, or the fatigue one gets to signal it’s time to stop exercising.
Also we should unbundle chest pain so it’s easier to diagnose heart attack vs just other issues. (Or slap a monitor on it. You get the idea.)