quartz/content/notes/094-a-look-at-suffering.md
2022-07-25 11:48:27 +12:00

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---
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