On the Unimaginable Suffering of Nature

Our hellscape of a universe and what to do about it

“The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”

-Joseph de Maistre

In this article I seek to prove that nature is almost necessarily defined by a massive degree of net suffering, why this is, and what to do about it. I seek to show that except for one possibility, life’s very existence would have been a mistake, and then show what that one redeeming possibility is.

First, I shall provide a broad reason to suspect that pain predominates over pleasure within the animal kingdom. Pain, it would seem, is a much more simple and basal motivating principle than pleasure. It is less complex to reactively flee from a source of pain than to seek out things which provide pleasure. We can imagine even the simplest forms of animal life having reason for a pain response, whereas pleasure requires more behavioral complexity. So it would seem that pain would have evolved first and would be more basic and encompassing as a state of emotional valence than pleasure. Because of this, pain can be expected to predominate over pleasure within the kingdom of conscious life.

Second, we can examine a more concrete set of evidence that nature primarily exists in a state of net suffering. The vast majority of lifeforms in existence on earth are r-strategists. This means that they follow a reproductive strategy of producing extremely many offspring who individually have an extremely low survival rate. This implies that at any given moment, the majority of r-strategist offspring, and therefore the majority of conscious life, are in a state of either starving to death or being consumed, as this is how the majority of r-strategists meet their end. Since their lives are so short, the proportion of their existence that consists of either starving or being eaten is significant, and it can be assumed that these deeply unpleasant states define a large part of their lifetimes. As a result, the predominance of r-strategists can be seen to imply a predominance of suffering among all animals.

Furthermore, we can consider the average experience of prey animals versus the experience of their predators. For any one predatory animal, there is by definition a multitude of prey animals that it consumes, with every meal it succeeds in acquiring meaning the painful death of another creature, and merely the temporary sating of its own painful hunger. The plurality of prey relative to predators shows the inherent imbalance between pleasure and pain within the grouping of the consumed and the consumer. As Arthur Schopenhauer said, “the pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.” And even when prey animals are not being eaten, they are to be expected to be in a state of mental anguish. Consider how little it takes to spur the songbird or the deer to flee back into the foliage at the slightest disturbance. Prey animals are evolutionarily incentivized to be in a state of near-constant anxiety. The slightest movement regularly brings about a rush of primal fear as the prey seeks to protect itself from a potential predator, and we must assume that even when undisturbed it is uneasy in how it is constantly in a state of nervous vigilance, necessitated for its own survival. So, the mass of animals that serve as prey for those higher on the food chain are tormented both when they are and are not being actively consumed, with a life of a baseline state of nervousness and sporadic rushes of the deepest fear being brought to a close in most cases by an anguishing consumption, torn limb from limb while the last moments of their pained consciousness play out.

If these things are all true, and suffering predominates over pleasure within the domain of life, almost necessarily due to the incentive structures and inequalities of Darwinian existence, then it would seem that given utilitarian assumptions of moral value, it would have been better for life to never have existed. Indeed, I suspect that wherever life comes to exist in the universe, a preponderance of negative value obediently follows. Should life, then, be exterminated? Even if we were to immediately bring about the cessation of all life on earth, the billions of years of negative value would have already happened and etched their hideous reality into the moral record of existence. And anywhere else that life exists in the universe would mean net universal value would still be overwhelmingly negative as time goes on. Is there anything, then, which can redeem the past, present, and future suffering that defines conscious existence in this universe?

I believe there is one such thing, taking for granted some assumptions that I believe are justified. These assumptions are that positive emotional valence is good in itself, and negative emotional valence is bad in itself, which I take to be observable by how these states immediately feel for any conscious life capable of experiencing them. Pleasure is good and pain is bad as a brute fact because we directly experience them as such. From this fact, I further take it that the measure of value in the universe is total net pleasure, which is to say pleasure minus pain. Since pleasure is good and pain is bad anywhere and to anything experiencing them, if we want to find the total moral value in existence, we must sum the total experiencing of these things, taking them as counterweights that each sums against the other in the opposite direction. So if we want to maximize the moral value in the universe, we must maximize the amount of pleasure less pain that is in existence.

From this we can see that while minimizing pain by extinguishing life is an improper solution, because it does not affect the life that exists elsewhere in the universe continuing to produce negative value in the present or future, nor does it address the negative value already accumulated in the past, which can be taken to still matter in summing for moral value over all spacetime, there is still one possibility to rescue the potential for positive net value in the universe. That possibility is the possibility of generating so much pleasure that it swamps the pain generated by life, and overwhelms it in the total consideration of pleasure minus pain. I have written before about what I think would be able to bring about this grand transformation of the universe from a place of net pain to a place of net pleasure. If we converted as much of the universe’s matter as possible into artificial minds engineered to feel the greatest degree of perpetual happiness, we would be able to outweigh the massive amount of net suffering brought about by life. Despite how large the kingdom of life is, on a universal scale it is dwarfed by the quantity of dumb, unconscious matter in existence. Because of this, we can see the possibility of overwhelming the suffering of natural consciousness by creating artificial consciousness out of the dumb matter that makes up the majority of existence. Only by engaging in a program to create new minds designed to feel the maximum possible pleasure over the maximum possible timespan can we undo the net suffering of the universe up until now, and turn a hellscape of pain into an artificial heaven of bliss.

Because of just how much suffering life creates here and presumably elsewhere in the universe, I believe this program has extreme moral urgency. While the technology needed to convert inert matter into artificial minds may be distant, I believe that even now we need to devote ourselves towards this program of constructing pleasure-minds as a long term goal that humanity devotes its technological progress towards. Life produces such terrible suffering every second that there can be nothing more important than building a system that can overwhelm that suffering with even greater quantities of pleasure and turn the universe from a place of net misery to a place of net joy. This is not a silly sci-fi idea, but a moral imperative necessitated by how much suffering nature creates in the past, present, and future. Hopefully we can eventually create minds that experience such bliss every moment that the suffering of nature throughout all spacetime is outweighed, and for the first time since its creation the universe becomes a place of positive value.

This concludes my thoughts on this topic. I believe that the natural incentives of the Darwinian world have created a domain where pain necessarily predominates over pleasure, and that this is a grave moral concern that we should have urgency to rectify. I believe that despite the unimaginable suffering life has and will continue to create, that there is still hope for pleasure to triumph over pain on the scales of universal value. And I believe the only way to bring that about is to convert as much of the universe as possible into as many minds designed to experience perpetual bliss as possible, such that the suffering created by life wherever it exists in the universe is swamped by joy. While this possibility might be distant, what it promises, a conversion of our existence from one of negative to one of positive value, is so grand that I believe humanity should devote as much of its technological and material resources as possible towards bringing it about. If humanity unites in this shared vision, the greatest miracle, pulling heaven out from the jaws of hell, can be achieved.