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| 1992 |
Song: Bob Geldof's Thinking Voyager 2 Type Things, from The Vegetarians of Love. Brilliant and profound. I wish I could produce something so lovely and meaningful.
tl;dr - If I could live my life over again, I would rather remove a few hours of my most intense suffering (the "Worsts" in Losing) than my constant daily pain.
This was written before my recent three-part series (1, 2, 3). It is a follow-up to this 2016 post.
Writing "Biting the Philosophical Bullet" chapter in Losing My Religions was a difficult process.
At that point in 2022, everything in my professional life to date, and most of my friendships, were based on pretty classical utilitarianism. Writing that chapter crystalized that was all based on an illusion. ("Please tell me where I am factually wrong. Seriously, I’m asking. My life would be much easier and happier if you did." p. 387)
Other than Anne, pretty much no one I know agrees with me. (One person comes kinda close.) After publishing, I discovered another person (who I've never met) whose writing indicated a similar thought process. But then I found out they had written extensively against my specific posts about insects. <sigh>
What is weird is that people who have known me for a long time, read this blog, and have read (and reviewed) Losing don't (always? sometimes?) seem to understand my position.
An example: I shared a recent draft post with a longtime friend and reader. In it, I mentioned cluster headaches as one area deserving of our concern. (Cluster headaches in context.) They objected that only 0.1% of the human population suffers from cluster headaches.
But the number of people suffering from something is irrelevant. What matters is the intensity of suffering an individual is experiencing. I would rather relieve one person's cluster headache than prevent a trillion people from stubbing their toe.
Or within myself: Every moment I am awake, parts of my body (my back, my left hand, etc.) are sending pain signals to my brain*. (Additionally, tinnitus isn't necessarily painful, but certainly an unpleasant signal.) This has been true for most of my adult life, and uniformly true since January 2021.
If I got to relive my life with one change, instead of taking away my daily chronic pain, I would rather erase any of my worst suffering; e.g., Day 30, starting on p. 527 (if you've not read it already, please just skip all of the Day 30 chapter; I now regret writing it as it is).
Suffering does not sum.
*Having constant pain doesn't mean I'm constantly suffering.
Different ways to interpret "summing": A single cluster headache for an hour might be more desirable than chronic pain for a year (or whatever the equivalent is of spreading it out over time) for the same person.
ReplyDeleteIf you can create a constant comparable variable then you might be able to sum effectively.
The double category difference between chronic cluster headaches, and stubbed toes (infinitely worse experience + chronic vs isolated), makes for an impossible calculus because they are so incomparable. You also introduce altruistic intuitions when you make the preferences between your experience and the experience of others, or the experience of an individual vs many (a third category shift).
But there are surely experiences that are comparable?
I think there are also threshold effects, where pain you can live with (stubbed toe), and pain you can't live with (cluster headaches), are also at play. Suffering might not sum linearly, but it might do so meaningfully if we take this into account.
Yeah, I used to think that. But writing "Biting the Philosophical Bullet" i Losing crystalized for me that this just doesn't work.
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