quartz/content/notes/094-a-look-at-suffering.md

title	aliases	tags
094-a-look-at-suffering		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 (this seemed unrealistic to earlier humans)
• why not limit all pain and place ourselves in an eternal state of bliss
• we are the last of a dying breed
• the last to exist in the "darwinian pathology of conciousness"

This idea has a lot of implications:

• if we cant feel any pain, will we still be able to experience pleasure? will life become numb?
  • 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 make things better) to create new things, experiement, improve our condition etc
• "mental strength" (e.g., stoicism, buddism) might be unnecesary
• future generation will look at us the way we looked at e.g., plato (how different their world is)
• we base a lot of judgements (eg., what is progress) on limiting suffering
• deeper more complex emotions (pleasure)?

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