Investigating the life of the priest and proto-rationalist Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, who heard the confessions of accused witches, I looked up some of the instruments that had been used to produce confessions. There is no ordinary way to make a human being feel as good as those instruments would make you hurt. I'm not sure even drugs would do it, though my experience of drugs is as nonexistent as my experience of torture.
There's something imbalanced about that.
It seems to me that suffering is easier to produce than eudaimonia (I prefer that to the pallid notions of "happiness" or "pleasure") for the same reason that to be wrong is easier than to be right. Truth and eudaimonia are small targets in their respective seas of possibilities. They cannot be achieved without striving and are easy to miss. With the wrong methods, you may be systematically led away from them. Though small, they are deep: progress opens up new vistas you never imagined.
Is suffering any larger a target than eudaimonia? It seems to me like they'd be the same size, just in opposite directions. The only reason suffering is easier to hit is that humans are all built facing that direction.
There are people today who "suffer" from congenital analgesia—a total absence of pain.
They can't feel a certain sensation. They can still suffer.
Could you delete pain and replace it with an urge not to do certain things that lacked the intolerable subjective quality of pain?
Considering addicting things can replace joy with an urge to do certain things that lacked the intolerable subjective quality of joy, I would expect the reverse to be possible. I strongly suspect that the only reason we know more about addiction is that people tend to keep doing addicting things, so they're more noticeable.
Can you prevent the pain of a dust speck irritating your eye from being the new torture, if you've literally never experienced anything worse than a dust speck irritating your eye?
That one's easy. You have no way of telling what happened to you. You have memory, but having a memory of being tortured does not have the subjective quality of pain that past!you would feel had you actually been tortured. That's probably not the best way to do it, but it shows there is a way.
Today's post, Serious Stories was originally published on 08 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Emotional Involvement, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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