---
title: "094-a-look-at-suffering"
aliases: 
tags: 
- podcast/philosophizethis
---

niel degrasse tyson said two things to live your life by
- know more today than you did yesterday
- limit the suffering of others

Is the second one something we should all do?

fyodor dostoyevsky says suffering is a necessary part of human life.

How do we define human progress?

Transhumanism/hedonistic imperative
- we limit physical pain by drugs
- why not limit all pain and place ourselves in an eternal state of bliss

This idea has a lot of implications: 
- if we cant feel any pain, will we still be able to experience pleasure
	- one arugment is that yes we will since people who are in almost constant pain still know they are in pain
- Will we still be motivated to create new things, experiement, improve our condition etc


Dream thought experiment
- if every time you slept and had a dream you lived a ful 75 year lifetime in that dream
- at first you would live a perfect life, you would have everything you wanted: money, sex, etc
- but eventually this would get boring and you'd introduce variance and things out of your control
- then after some time, you'd want to not know you were even dreaming at all
- at this point, you are just living in real life