I was in my mid-50s when I fully made the biggest intellectual change in my life. This is spelled out in the chapter “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” of Losing (p. 379 here).
Any summary will be necessarily incomplete, but in short:
The only thing that is morally relevant is an individual’s conscious experience.
- A rock (in and of itself) is morally irrelevant.
- A plant is morally irrelevant.
- A planet is morally irrelevant.
- A nematode is morally irrelevant.
- A four-week blastocyst is morally irrelevant.
- A severely brain-damaged human in an irreversible coma is morally irrelevant.
But what is important here is that the “sum of pain and pleasure” is also morally irrelevant.
There is no “sum of pain and pleasure.” This “sum” simply does not exist; it is a misleading illusion, a harmful fantasy.
(Again, this is the simplest summary; if you find the above absurd or too hard to swallow, please read or re-read “Biting the Philosophical Bullet.” You have my sympathy; it took me decades to finally accept it.)
What does exist is an individual’s suffering. An individual’s suffering is not an abstraction. It is not a term in an expected value competition; each individual’s consciousness is a universe unto itself.
An individual’s suffering is not a game. It is the most serious thing in existence.
As discussed in Part 1, the ability to suffer is not binary. The simplest conscious creature does not experience the same maximum suffering as the most complex conscious creature.
The individual experiencing the worst suffering is the most morally important. Their suffering is not superseded by some illusory “sum” of lesser-suffering individuals. There simply is no “sum of suffering.”
This doesn’t mean no one else’s suffering matters, just that an expected value calculation of small probabilities and big numbers is, at best, morally irrelevant compared to an actual suffering individual. (Also, we can’t know who is experiencing the worst suffering – we can’t know what another’s conscious experience is like, and there is no obvious way to “rank” suffering; more on that next week.)
As discussed in “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” (and Losing’s last chapter) this realization has led me to a great deal of doubt. But the doubt isn’t about questions like: Is it morally compelling to help someone suffering a cluster headache over a possibly-suffering sardine? Those questions are easy.
My doubt is whether I can have any real impact at all, and if so, where?
But what isn’t doubtful is how upsetting it is to me when smart people don’t take suffering seriously.
We have been programmed to stay alive at all costs by hundreds of millions of years of natural selection. Yet today, thousands of people will be suffering so much that they will kill themselves. Many more will want to kill themselves. And humans have built systems to force other creatures to exist in a state worse than death.
And yet, to put it bluntly, loads of very smart (and verbose) but non-worldly individuals will ignore actual suffering. Instead, they expend their significant talents trying to impress other smart individuals with their mad math skillz.
(A preview of Part 3, not by me: “even if there's a very, very, very small likelihood of us decreasing AI risk, that still trumps global poverty, because infinitesimally increasing the odds that 10^52 people in the future exist saves way more lives than poverty reduction ever could.”)
(There is a post here next week about the whole “save a life” scam, an expansion of this.)
I am having an ongoing discussion with the person whose feedback kicked off Part 1 of this series. Perhaps the most important topic we’re discussing is how to internalize the Serenity Mantra (“the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”). But I’ll tell you this: mathletes making a game of suffering is the biggest challenge to my serenity.
More (older): Consciousness, Fish, and Uncertainty over at Substack.
More on that in Part 3 on Friday. Warning: That piece is satirical, sarcastic, and self-indulgent (well, even more so than my average post, which is really saying something).
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| Not an existence worse than death; photo c/o my dad. |
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