But I guess you wouldn't want to extinguish every star since that would also cause suffering for other beings (living on planets for example), and so you'd advocate just extinguishing those stars that do not support life? Or maybe stars suffer so greatly that their suffering outweighs the suffering of the other life they support, in which case extinguishing a star's suffering, and hence the star, outweighs the suffering caused to the life that the star supports?

The more I think about it, the more ridiculous the proposal to end suffering in all sentient things sounds. In part, this is because we don't even know what qualifies as 'sentient'; So how can you in good faith make your proposal to end suffering in all sentient things if you don't even know what's sentient and what isn't?

I agree with you Dianah. Suffering is a perception and an interpretation which is often coupled with a behavior response. If we are to abolish suffering, which I think is foolish in any event, then we must do it by changing our current perceptions and interpretations of suffering. However, if we are so able to change our perceptions and interpretations then it seems more reasonable to re-interpret our suffering in a manner which is more useful to us. I have little problem with suffering precisely because I interpret it, and thus experience it, in this positive manner, and I suspect that the people here who want to abolish suffering should maybe make a greater attempt to reinterpret their suffering and what it means to them. Suffering is just a signal; it is how we choose to interpret it and react to it that determines whether suffering is a good or bad thing. The fact that some people regard it as an evil that we should abolish suggests that they should try to further analyze what it is about suffering that makes it seem intrinsically bad to them. There is nothing intrinsically bad about suffering, or about pain; nor is there anything intrinsically good about pleasure or ecstasy. They are just packets of information that we choose to interpret and react accordingly. However, we can exercise control over how we choose to interpret and react to this information. Thus you have the stereotypical Stoic who is unmoved in the face of both adversity and success. In the extreme, they are indifferent to pleasure and pain. Why is this? Because they have chosen to reinterpret what pleasure and pain mean to them and to react (which includes a state of indifference) accordingly.

Thus, this whole program for abolishing suffering in all sentient life is misguided.

in my opinion, there is a relation between the exertion of will and 'suffering'. That is, exertion of will implies suffering at some level, though the converse need not be true (i.e., suffering does not necessarily imply visible exertion of will). Thus, if we abolish suffering, we will lose our ability to exert our will. This logical conclusion is incontrovertible. So why do we want to abolish suffering? If anything, we should be looking for ways to endure greater amounts of it since this is a sign of strength; Strength endures great suffering and is capable of directing and giving form to a great will. Remove the suffering, and you remove the greatness of will. If you ask me, I'd rather keep greatness of will, and I'm sure most other people are too. Besides, suffering adds to the diversity and richness of life, and the ability to endure suffering and to transform it and use it as a tool is a sign of strength. Hence, those who seek to abolish it are weak. Now, do we want the weak to dictate our public policy? I should hope not! Thank the gods for natural selection and survival of the fittest.

But if we accept my claim about 'exceptions' to suffering, does that mean we want to become like them? When was the last time a Zen Buddhist monk won the Nobel Prize or achieved anything great in their life (besides achieving Nirvana, big deal!)? So, do we want to achieve great, meaningfulness at the cost of enduring suffering or do we want to abolish suffering at the cost of achieving great, meaningfulness?

Of course you can choose not to accept my claim about 'exceptions' to suffering and demand evidence supporting said claim, in which case I would have to do some looking around for convincing evidence. I can't guarantee I'll find it, but I can try.

pain and pleasure are perhaps the root factors underlying the expression of our will. Without either one, we necessarily compromise the expression of our will. Life is about contrasts. To remove one of the fundamental components of life is to experience a lop-sided life. It's like trying to draw a black-and-white drawing using a canvas and pencil of the same color; you can't do it. You need the contrast to make anything happen, both in art and in life. You need the pain and the pleasure for the proper and effective shaping and manifestation of our will. With only pleasure (i.e., without pain) you will distort the expression of your will in a very bad way. Hence the bum on the street who is not motivated to get off the street because he experiences no aversive experience from living on the street. Life is about contrasts, and it is these contrasts that determine the formation and expression of our will. Without the contrast, you become essentially will-less and unmotivated. And this, this loss of motivation, is what I am concerned the abolishing of suffering would produce, because the two seem to me to be inextricably linked. Instead of abolishing suffering we should be seeking ways to make man stronger and better able to consume the suffering.

but now I see we are at an impasse so I will give it a rest and think about this some more. Thank you for your thoughts on the matter.

ignore the bum example I brought up again; I just now saw your reply to it above about "the functional equivalents" though I am not sure whether this is or could be possible.

"Happy experiences, and the very concept of happiness itself, are possible only because they can be contrasted with melancholy. The very notion of everlasting happiness is incoherent."

Some people endure lifelong emotional depression or physical pain. Quite literally, they are never happy. Understandably, they may blame their misery on the very nature of the world, not just their personal clinical condition. Yet it would be a cruel doctrine which pretended that such people don't really suffer because they can't contrast their sense of desolation with joyful memories. In the grips of despair, they may find the very notion of happiness cognitively meaningless. Conversely, the euphoria of unmixed (hypo)mania is not dependent for its sparkle on recollections of misery. Given the state-dependence of memory, negative emotions may simply be inaccessible to consciousness in such an exalted state. Likewise, it is possible that our perpetually euphoric descendants will find our contrastive notion of unhappiness quite literally inconceivable. For when one is extraordinarily super-well, then it's hard to imagine what it might be like to be chronically mentally ill.

Here's a contemporary parallel. It's possible to undergo, from a variety of causes, a complete bilateral loss of primary, secondary and "associative" visual cortex. People with Anton's Syndrome not only become blind; they are unaware of their sensory deficit. Furthermore, they lose all notion of the meaning of sight. They no longer possess the neurological substrates of the visual concepts by which their past and present condition could be compared and contrasted. Our genetically joyful descendants may, or may not, undergo an analogous loss of cognitive access to the nature and variant textures of suffering. Quite plausibly, they will have gradients of sublimity to animate their lives and infuse their thoughts. So at least they'll be able to make analogies and draw parallels. But fortunately for their sanity and well-being, they won't be able to grasp the true frightfulness lying behind any linguistic remnants of the past that survive into the post-Darwinian era. Such lack of contrast, or even the inconceivability of unpleasant experiences, won't leave tomorrow's native-born ecstatics any less happy; if anything quite the reverse.

It's true that a world whose agents are animated by pleasure gradients will still have the functional equivalent of aversive experience. Yet the "raw feel" of such states may still be more wonderful than anything physiologically possible today.


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4.1 "The scenarios mapped out in this paper are impracticable. None of them would work in reality. The human brain is too complex to be hardwired for lifetime bliss. Nature, in her wisdom, would ensure that some complicated cycle of feedback-inhibition eventually kicked in. This would restore more equable and subdued states of mind."

Any attempt to hardwire into the cerebral cortex a functional understanding of the Theory of General Relativity, say, or perhaps to set "by hand" the neural connections and activation weights mediating an appreciation of Shakespearean tragedy, would presumably defeat all but the most utopian neuroscience. Such virtuoso feats won't be necessary. The physiological roots of affective states lie mostly deep within the phylogenetically primitive limbic-system. They aren't "merely" limbic; this is to miss the evolutionary significance of their encephalisation. The predictive reward value of different sensory cues, for instance, is encoded by the orbitofrontal cortex as well as the amygdala. Yet the neural basis of our emotional life is still incomparably simpler than the plethora of cognitive processes they penetrate. For sure, the functional pathways of our emotions are complicated to twenty-first century eyes. Yet they should prove tractably so. Just as we can, with horrible cruelty, administer drug-cocktails that induce unremitting despair - this is sometimes done in exploring animal "models" of depression - so we can crudely, and some day exquisitely, polarise mood in the opposite direction.

It will be recalled that the monoaminergic neurons, peptides and endorphins that underlie the emotional tone of experience play an essentially modulatory role. They are not individually directed on notional site-specific representations pre-coded by genes. If the receptors, enzymes, cytoplasmic proteins and genetic switches in one's ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens are suitably reconfigured, and if these wonderful cells continue to fire away vigorously, then one is going to be outrageously happy indefinitely. Natural selection has no powers of foresight and anticipation with which to frustrate us. Nature isn't waiting to take its revenge. Given a richer dopaminergic and mu opioidergic innervation of the neo-cortex, then the focus of future ecstatic happiness will be on a shifting and unpredictable panorama of intentional objects. The potential complexity and variety of those objects - i.e. what one will be nominally happy "about" - is indeed staggering. Yet when each fleeting neocortical coalition is blissfully innervated from "below", every one of them can be a focus of delight. Life will always be exhilarating, and the fun simply won't stop. For the hedonic treadmill will have been genetically dismantled for ever.


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4.2 "If we were always elated, we'd suffer the same fate as intra-cranially self-stimulating laboratory animals. We'd starve, or die of general self-neglect. Both physical and psychological pain do more than promote the inclusive fitness of genes. For the most part, they protect the individual organism from harm too. If a regime of universal happiness were attempted, we'd never want to have sex and reproduce. Therefore we'd become extinct as a species."

A project geared to crude biological pleasure-maximisation alone could well undermine the autonomous survival-skills of its participants. In a comprehensively automated, computerised, robot-served civilisation, this supposed incapacity wouldn't in the long run pose a particular problem. Moreover it is only certain types, not intensities, of pleasure which are incompatible with efficient bodily self-maintenance. Pragmatically, however, worry over the incapacitating effects of excess well-being on its victims illustrates the advantages of retaining both well-defined intentional objects and the goal-directed behaviour advocated in this manifesto. Tomorrow's paradise-engineering specialists will probably judge it prudent to keep these traditional forms of life. Such modes of old-style intentionality will be needed for the purposes of any practical medium-term utopia, at least. No heroic sacrifice of subjective well-being is thereby demanded.

The role of pain isn't as straightforward as it seems. Its dreadfulness has been adaptive in our evolutionary past. Yet any full explanation of pain's phenomenological nastiness, as distinct from the functional role of "nociception", still eludes us completely; and perhaps it always will. The spectre of raw nastiness, however, is not the only way a complex adaptive system can be induced to avoid, and respond to, injury. Unfortunately, it seems to have been the only adaptive response open to primordial carbon-based organisms consistent with the principles of natural selection. Fortunately, other strategies are now feasible. Whereas Evolution can't jump across deserts in the fitness landscape, paradise-designers in the era of post-genomic medicine certainly can. Humans can already build robots armed with "self-taught" artificial neural networks. These toy robots can learn to negotiate simple environments. They are capable of avoiding noxious stimuli via their responses to functional isomorphs of our pain states. Robotic silicon circuitry presumably lacks organic wetware's raw feel of phenomenological nastiness. So a less barbarous and primitive means of avoiding tissue damage in organic life-forms can surely be devised as well. [This expression of carbon chauvinism is controversial. It is not idle prejudice, however, but an inference drawn from the structurally and micro-functionally unique valence properties of the carbon atom and complex organic molecules.]

One way to promote pain-free nociception would be to use inorganic prostheses adapted from the design of our own future robots. A slightly more elegant solution would exploit our innate if often inept tendency to pleasure-maximisation. Peripheral nerves signalling noxious stimuli currently synapse on neural pain cells. They could instead be re-targeted on neurons which were simply less efficiently hedonistic in their biochemistry than their cellular neighbours. With their post-sensory signals remapped, infants could then learn self-preservation and pleasure-maximisation in harmony. At least as a stopgap, exploiting pleasure gradients is a much more civilised way to live. It's far more humane than responding to the contours of their nasty, and sometimes utterly excruciating, aversive counterparts.

A further presupposition of the question needs examining. One should be wary of assuming that we're the folk who can properly look after ourselves, whereas our descendants, if they become genetically pre-programmed ecstatics, will get trapped in robot-serviced states of infantile dependence. For it shouldn't be forgotten that exuberantly happy people also have a fierce will to survive. They love life dearly. They take on daunting challenges against seemingly impossible odds. One of the hallmarks of many endogenous depressive states, on the other hand, is so-called behavioural despair. If one learns that apparently no amount of effort can rescue one from an aversive stimulus, then one tends to sink into a lethargic stupor. This syndrome of "learned helplessness" may persist even when the opportunity to escape from the nasty stimulus subsequently arises.

Contemporary fatalism about the "inevitability" of suffering is analogous to this dysfunctional passivity (cf. the behavioural syndrome associated with the religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent). Yet passive acceptance of the dark side of life is no longer useful to contemporary humans now we've unravelled the genetic code. Species-wide hedonic engineering offers the prospect of eliminating all the vile types of experience we hate most; but even though it has become technically feasible to escape their clutches, a lot of us still aren't energetically striving to get rid of them. Unlike tortured lab-rats and monkeys, we can verbally rationalise our perceived helplessness in the face of psychological trauma or malaise. Suffering, we say, is "natural", "inevitable", "the way of the world", "Life", etc. By contrast, our eternally youthful, psychologically super-fit descendants won't need such coping-mechanisms. They are likely to be fired up with indomitable will-power. Their resourcefulness and zest for living should make them far better equipped to deal with life's practical inconveniences. Potential problems will be viewed as tremendously exciting challenges to be overcome. But in any case, future generations of post-humans are destined to enjoy god-like powers unknown to the mythical Olympians - both inside their virtual reality software-suites and out. They may inded be ecstatically happy. But we would be rash to patronise them. For we're the ones who need help.

The argument that our descendants might become functional wireheads, too happy to reproduce, isn't compelling either. Happy people tend to want more sex, not less. Not everyone may opt for erotic modes of pleasure. But amongst sensualists who do, then gene-coded hyper-dopaminergic well-being is likely to promote, not celibacy, but heightened sexuality. This isn't simply a recipe for loveless orgies. Enriched serotonergic, phenylethylamine, oxcytocin and opiate function will allow us to care much more for each other and our dependants than selfish DNA normally allows today. Just how many newly-minted young ecstatics the world can ecologically accommodate, on the other hand, is uncertain. The elimination of functional pathologies like the ageing process is likely to make curbing rampant reproduction rather than promoting it a priority."

- taken from the "objections" section of the Hedonistic Imperative

The Hedonistic Imperative : Objections

well thats a much better answer, and as far as that goes im down with that

it still sounds pretty wild to me and im still pretty skeptical about the idea that the solution to the problem of suffering can be found in the lab. why not whip up a batch of eternal youth while youre at it, you kno what i mean?

but im not just making fun, it really is a noble goal and worthy cause and to me goes along with the Bodhisattva Vow, and any pursuit undertaken for the benefit of all sentient beings sounds good to me
i dont kno that i can judge if any pursuit will benefit all sentient beings, but i guess thats another matter

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20050215/D88929TO1.html

Study: Lobsters Unlikely to Feel Pain

Feb 15, 11:35 AM (ET)

By CLARKE CANFIELD

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) - A new study out of Norway concludes it's unlikely lobsters feel pain, stirring up a long-simmering debate over whether Maine's most valuable seafood suffers when it's being cooked.

Animal activists for years have claimed that lobsters are in agony when being cooked, and that dropping one in a pot of boiling water is tantamount to torture.

The study, funded by the Norwegian government and written by a scientist at the University of Oslo, suggests lobsters and other invertebrates such as crabs, snails and worms probably don't suffer even if lobsters do tend to thrash in boiling water.

"Lobsters and crabs have some capacity of learning, but it is unlikely that they can feel pain," concluded the 39-page report, aimed at determining if creatures without backbones should be subject to animal welfare legislation as Norway revises its animal welfare law.

Lobster biologists in Maine have maintained for years that the lobster's primitive nervous system and underdeveloped brain are similar to that of an insect. While lobsters react to different stimuli, such as boiling water, the reactions are escape mechanisms, not a conscious response or an indication of pain, they say.

"It's a semantic thing: No brain, no pain," said Mike Loughlin, who studied the matter when he was a University of Maine graduate student and is now a biologist at the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission.

The Norwegian report also reinforces what people in the lobster industry have always contended, said Bob Bayer, executive director of the Lobster Institute, a research and education organization in Orono.

"We've maintained all along that the lobster doesn't have the ability to process pain," Bayer said.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights organization based in Norfolk, Va., has made lobster pain part of its Fish Empathy Project, putting out stickers and pamphlets with slogans such as "Being Boiled Hurts. Let Lobsters Live." Group supporters regularly demonstrate at the Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland.

PETA's Karin Robertson called the Norwegian study biased, saying the government doesn't want to hurt the country's fishing industry.

"This is exactly like the tobacco industry claiming that smoking doesn't cause cancer," she said.

Robertson said many scientists believe lobsters do feel pain. For instance, a zoologist with The Humane Society of the United States made a written declaration that lobsters can feel pain after a chef dismembered and sauteed a live lobster to prepare a Lobster Fra Diavolo dish on NBC's "Today" show in 1994.

It's debatable whether the debate will ever be resolved.

The Norwegian study, even while saying it's unlikely that crustaceans feel pain, also cautioned that more research is needed because there is a scarcity of scientific knowledge on the subject.

And, many consumers will always hesitate at placing lobsters in boiling pots of water.

New Englanders may feel comfortable cooking their lobsters, but people outside the region often feel uneasy about boiling a live creature, said Kristen Millar, executive director of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council.

"Consumers don't generally greet and meet an animal before they eat it," she said.

---

On the Net:

Lobster Institute: www.lobsterinstitute.org

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: www.peta.org

I wonder how many PETA people drive their cars through swarms of bugs, committing mass insecticide

It's ethical so long as their deaths are quick, painless, and unavoidable.

You know how you can kill a fish by hitting it on the head? I thought I would be helpful and kill a lobster before boiling it. Wrong! Lobsters have distributed nervous systems. I had this bashed in head lobster walking around my kitchen floor in obvious pain. The quickest way to put it out of its misery was to throw it in the pot of boiling water. They stop struggling in about five seconds.

I watched a large catfish being skinned alive once. There is no way anyone will convince me that the writhing of that catfish, hanging by a cord around its tail, was not an agony that I wouldn't wish on anyone but evildoers.

The idea that it has to be "a vertebrate" or "have a centralized brain" in order to suffer is callous and obviously motivated by the lobster industry. All animals have nervous systems that have the same neural-chemical bases as ours and the appearance of reaction to pain is accompanied by actual pain, regardless of phylum, order, or species.

(fixed a typo)

that's a good anti-abortion argument, Rick

Not really.

1. The argument is about pain and suffering, not killing. One could anesthetize lobsters before boiling them and there would be no argument about eating them, assuming one has no ethical objections to eating animal protein.

2. In all cases, fetuses can be anesthetized before aborting them. In most cases in practice, fetuses are aborted before nervous systems have even developed.

3. If the argument is about the ethics of murder, a fetus is not a human being, so aborting one is not murder.

4. If the argument is about killing fetuses, the the superior rights of human beings (pregnant women) comes into play. Given the choice of harming a woman or harming her fetus, the the decision is for the woman to make.

It's simple Rick

A fetus up to the point of having a 'mind' is a chunk of cells that can be scraped off with no guilt (...by a thinking human. A fundamentalist christian human might imagine some kind of 'spirit' that exists in the zygote and therefore declare all embryonic stem cells as having feelings. I disagree with this). However, a fetus with a 'mind' is an embryonic 'human being'. If we say that this mind is not 'enough' to be worth granting human rights to, then so be it. ...so long as we recognize the actual distinction we are making (teeny mind=sub-human and abortable), instead of inventing all sorts of hyperbole to bury the fact. The fact being, different levels of 'mind' equal different 'human' value and thus a way to evaluate when killing is appropriate.

I think it will also be agreed that it's a good idea to respect animal rights against unnecessary suffering, but that similarly to the case with fetuses, there are occasions when it's justified to sacrifice animal rights for overriding human rights.

indeed

And further, that it is the possession of conscious minds by animals that give them superior rights over other lifeforms such as plants. And still further, that possessing an unconscious mind, as does a computer in some cases in which it is running an AI program, does not confer rights.

Hence, we see that consciousness is key.