I’m a bit skeptical that conscious wildlife has more episodes of pain than pleasure. One issue here is salience. We remember painful events much more vividly than pleasurable events (think of how when you’re having fun, time flies by so fast, but the inverse is true for painful moments).
Also, if you’ve ever been depressed then you have an experience of what it’s like to live in a state of anhedonia, where the smallest pleasures of life are taken away from you. Everything you do, from scrolling your phone, to getting out of bed, probably elicits at least some very small dopamine rush, otherwise you wouldn’t be incentivized to do these things.
This is driven home very vividly when you get depressed and realize how you took for granted the smallest of things, and that fulfilling such activities is actually quite difficult when you don’t get even the remotest pleasure from them. Since most wildlife is behaviorally active, anhedonia doesn’t seem to be the default state of animals in nature.
Also, you have to take into account adaptability. We set our mental expectation relative to our environment, and this seems to be a universal rule for all animals. If you’re an average person who witnessed a gruesome murder in person, you might be severely traumatized. And if you experienced these events recurrently, you might indeed be in a state of constant anxiety at first. But people eventually adapt, if you’re a Roman soldier who is on campaign, such things are par for the course, I doubt they would even register that negatively besides eliciting a brief thought “ooh that’s screwed up…. anyways”
It’s like being in prison. Mentally excruciating for the first few months, but eventually most people will settle into a comfortable routine. I think most wildlife are mentally well adjusted to their environment, since they have to be in an evolutionary sense. Just because you would suffer tremendously from anxiety and pain when put in an environment similar to what a deer might experience, doesn’t mean that the deer feels the same way (on a side note, constant anxiety comes with issues like weight loss, so I doubt they would be incentivized to feel this way).
Of course there are just really bad events that most wildlife will experience (e.g. being eaten alive), but it’s not clear that such episodes outweigh the pleasurable states (or just plain contentment) throughout an animals lifetime.
I think this just proves that utilitarian assumptions are wrong. If there is one thing that makes perfect intuitive sense, it is that life is good. It is the very definition of good itself. Not the absence of suffering is good, but life.
I don't think I need to prove it, because at some level you need unprovable axioms. What would be more pleasant to look at, an alien planet teeming with life, or a barren rock like Mars? You seem unprovable axioms at some point, or truly terminal terminal goals that are by necessity unproven and non-rational, and I think the immediately obvious one is that interesting things are good.
I also believe there has to be a set of unquestionable terminal values, but I take those values to be the goodness of positive emotional states and the badness of negative emotional states. Notice that even in your example of a planet teeming with life versus Mars, you are judging it based on how the presence of life there makes you feel. So I would argue that it isn’t the presence of life, but the emotional apprehension of the presence of life that is what value derives from in this case.
Remove the nervous system and suffering will cease to exist. Bacteria and plants do not have a nervous system. Removing animal life (with the possible exception of insects) would end suffering.
"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." -- that sounds very much like wanting to wipe out all, or nearly all, life on earth. Count me out.
Pain is a signal for an organisms cognition to modify priors in a Markov blanket of Bayesian inference about local conditions, or maintaining organism integrity becomes energetically infeasible (see Friston Free Energy). The existence of such negative feedback loops is a feature of all homeostatic systems, which inevitably arise as a result of local spontaneous entropy reduction, which may be sustained. “pain” is as natural as the number π (Pi), and is an emergent property of any system which is subject to entropy. Complaining about it is like worrying about the existence of polarized light, or the third law of thermodynamics. Pain seems besides the point compared to the non-existence of everything. You cannot have a system subject to entropy which will never have emergent entropy minimizations which are sustained. Is positive feedback also a worry?
I like the insight into how horrifying nature is, but the whole gooning singularity thing sounds a bit dystopian to me. I usually have more deontological intuitions though so it would.
I’m a bit skeptical that conscious wildlife has more episodes of pain than pleasure. One issue here is salience. We remember painful events much more vividly than pleasurable events (think of how when you’re having fun, time flies by so fast, but the inverse is true for painful moments).
Also, if you’ve ever been depressed then you have an experience of what it’s like to live in a state of anhedonia, where the smallest pleasures of life are taken away from you. Everything you do, from scrolling your phone, to getting out of bed, probably elicits at least some very small dopamine rush, otherwise you wouldn’t be incentivized to do these things.
This is driven home very vividly when you get depressed and realize how you took for granted the smallest of things, and that fulfilling such activities is actually quite difficult when you don’t get even the remotest pleasure from them. Since most wildlife is behaviorally active, anhedonia doesn’t seem to be the default state of animals in nature.
Also, you have to take into account adaptability. We set our mental expectation relative to our environment, and this seems to be a universal rule for all animals. If you’re an average person who witnessed a gruesome murder in person, you might be severely traumatized. And if you experienced these events recurrently, you might indeed be in a state of constant anxiety at first. But people eventually adapt, if you’re a Roman soldier who is on campaign, such things are par for the course, I doubt they would even register that negatively besides eliciting a brief thought “ooh that’s screwed up…. anyways”
It’s like being in prison. Mentally excruciating for the first few months, but eventually most people will settle into a comfortable routine. I think most wildlife are mentally well adjusted to their environment, since they have to be in an evolutionary sense. Just because you would suffer tremendously from anxiety and pain when put in an environment similar to what a deer might experience, doesn’t mean that the deer feels the same way (on a side note, constant anxiety comes with issues like weight loss, so I doubt they would be incentivized to feel this way).
Of course there are just really bad events that most wildlife will experience (e.g. being eaten alive), but it’s not clear that such episodes outweigh the pleasurable states (or just plain contentment) throughout an animals lifetime.
I think this just proves that utilitarian assumptions are wrong. If there is one thing that makes perfect intuitive sense, it is that life is good. It is the very definition of good itself. Not the absence of suffering is good, but life.
I don't think I need to prove it, because at some level you need unprovable axioms. What would be more pleasant to look at, an alien planet teeming with life, or a barren rock like Mars? You seem unprovable axioms at some point, or truly terminal terminal goals that are by necessity unproven and non-rational, and I think the immediately obvious one is that interesting things are good.
I also believe there has to be a set of unquestionable terminal values, but I take those values to be the goodness of positive emotional states and the badness of negative emotional states. Notice that even in your example of a planet teeming with life versus Mars, you are judging it based on how the presence of life there makes you feel. So I would argue that it isn’t the presence of life, but the emotional apprehension of the presence of life that is what value derives from in this case.
Remove the nervous system and suffering will cease to exist. Bacteria and plants do not have a nervous system. Removing animal life (with the possible exception of insects) would end suffering.
"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." -- that sounds very much like wanting to wipe out all, or nearly all, life on earth. Count me out.
Pain is a signal for an organisms cognition to modify priors in a Markov blanket of Bayesian inference about local conditions, or maintaining organism integrity becomes energetically infeasible (see Friston Free Energy). The existence of such negative feedback loops is a feature of all homeostatic systems, which inevitably arise as a result of local spontaneous entropy reduction, which may be sustained. “pain” is as natural as the number π (Pi), and is an emergent property of any system which is subject to entropy. Complaining about it is like worrying about the existence of polarized light, or the third law of thermodynamics. Pain seems besides the point compared to the non-existence of everything. You cannot have a system subject to entropy which will never have emergent entropy minimizations which are sustained. Is positive feedback also a worry?
I like the insight into how horrifying nature is, but the whole gooning singularity thing sounds a bit dystopian to me. I usually have more deontological intuitions though so it would.