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MichaelAnissimov comments on Rationality Quotes: October 2009 - Less Wrong
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Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 239–251
Awesome! I didn't know you could think away chronic pain!
You can. Just think about the details of the pain rather than the pain itself. Rest your attention on what the pain draws your attention towards and the pain goes away.
I am interested enough in this suggestion to start tentatively practicing it. How many years have you been practicing it, Mike? Has anyone else with whom you have a personal relationship been practicing it for more than a year? Have you ever tried it on unwanted feeling states other than pain?
Does this free up your attention for other things, or does the pain keep coming back?
It stops coming back if its minor pain. You have to try a few times and it isn't totally effective when you aren't concentrating for more serious pain.
You need to study your Mary Baker Eddy.
Well, if you could show us some chronic pain in the absence of any thinking...
the quote refers to thinking it good or bad, not thinking simpliciter
Then it is saying nothing about 'thinking away' the chronic pain. Pick which interpretation: either it's that thinking in general precedes pain, or that it precedes any assessment of goodness; neither supports your dismissal. (It may help your attempted criticism to switch from Shakespeare's ambiguous old English to a similar statement from the Stoics or Epicureans.)
I don't have much choice in whether to consider pain good.
*Sigh*, do we have another candidate for experiencing real physical pain before these blithe dismissals?
I assume you do this every time you exercise. Again, good doesn't mean not-painful; a change in beliefs will flip some given from 'good' to 'bad'. A searing pain is bad if you have no reason to endure; it's good if you think the alternative is the gom jabbar. (Is this really so difficult or controversial a point?)
No, it's just that to shore up your position, you have to diminish the point of the quote into triviality.
You can consider the long term effects of the pain to be good. You can be trained to get a dopamine release during a certain kind of pain. You cannot deem the pain itself good. A belief that the pain is good does not change the pain, and only exists through self-deception.
And please burn every copy of Dune you have. ;-)
Pain is just pain; it's neither good nor bad. Good and bad are only judgments, which are thoughts, and as such are determined by one's mind & beliefs. I think this is a profound truth unappreciated by many, and by no means trivial.
Over my dry dessicated remains!
Pain is the raw "quale" of badness. You can deem some future goal to be good, and worth the pain, but you can't judge pain good, except in an abstract, meaningless sense, disconnected from any implications for your actions.
The non-masochist also said:
I don't know if you were joking, but masochists only enjoy a very narrow kind of pain. It's a misconception that masochists enjoy all, or even many kinds of pain.
What's this supposed to mean, in context?
Fuller quote (lines 243-251):
It doesn't seem especially deep to me...