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cousin_it comments on Open thread, Oct. 12 - Oct. 18, 2015 - Less Wrong
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Um, that's the opposite of how utility functions work. They don't have sacred components. You can and should trade off one component for a larger gain in another component. That's exactly what the super happies were offering.
What I'm saying is that humans aren't wrong in trading off some amount of comfort so they can have jokes, fiction, art and romantic love.
What why would this be true? Utility functions don't have to be linear, it could even be the case that I place no additional utility on happiness beyond a certain level.
The answer to this question is "No."
Some people could use more. Many others could use less.
The question you should ask first is whether being able to suffer is a good thing or a bad thing. You start with the assumption that it is bad, that suffering is bad. You do not sufficiently investigate what the alternative is; you do not sufficiently consider that experience is subjective, and subjectivity requires reference points. To eliminate, in perpetuity, that half of the axis below the current reference point, is to eliminate the axis entirely.
Do you have a proof for this? As far as I know, we have no universally agreed upon way to compare different ways of calculating utility.
There's no way of calculating utility, period. The issue is more substantively that suffering is relative, and that the elimination of suffering is also the elimination of happiness.
Please explain in more detail. The Buddhist part of my brain just had a spit-take upon reading that.
Happiness and suffering are the same thing - the experience of a divergence from the norm of your well-being, your ground state. They just differ in direction.
A long time ago, I experienced both. For most of my life, I experienced neither - you think pain is a negative experience, I found it to be an -interesting- experience, a diversion from the endless gray. Today, I experience... a very limited degree of both, as a result of gradually accepting that suffering is the cost paid to experience happiness.
Equanimity, as it transpires, isn't something you can experience only with regard to those things you don't want to directly experience.
True, the difference is the direction, but surely that counts for something? Pain and pleasure are chemically and neurologically different phenomena. A ground state of "endless gray" is not something you'd really want.
I'm guessing you may be a Roman Catholic. In case you're not, how did you come to see suffering as having exchange value?
I hope my comments are not taken as offensive. I know I sometimes tend to dramatize my degree of surprise. I genuinely wish to understand your position.
I still don't experience "pleasure", at least in sense where I can say, "Yes, that sensation is positive in a way other sensations are not". At best I can say I experience variety. Pain is just starting to be a negative thing; it's difficult to accept it as suffering when it was one of the few things that offered any variety at all to my experience for many years. Pain isn't pleasure, they're different flavors, but they're both spices.
This is very true.
I was raised, and remain, an atheist. And exchange value isn't quite the same thing; it's more they're the same variable, but different values. Living for more than a decade without either suffering or happiness, and only starting to experience happiness when I started to allow myself to experience suffering.
I regard suffering and happiness as sums, rather than independent variables; they're composite emotions, perhaps better modeled as waves, created by summing up one's current total mindstate. Each is the inverse of the other; being waves, rather than simple linear values, it's possible to both be suffering and be happy, if one area of one's life is going well and one area is going poorly. But they're both invariably tied to one's norm; if one has had a consistently good life, their life continually to be consistently good isn't going to provide any happiness, even though the same section of life, transplanted into somebody with a consistently bad life, would provide ecstasy. Likewise, a consistently bad life doesn't translate into suffering; it's the particularly bad parts of that life that are experienced as suffering, everything else is experienced as the norm.
This is backed up by studies of self-reported happiness, which tracks a norm, and only rarely [ETA: permanently] deviates from that norm. This norm, this base level of self-reported happiness (which I distinguish from experienced happiness), is the norm from which happiness and suffering are experienced as deviations.
Pain and suffering are not the same thing. One woman will suffer while giving birth while the next doesn't and enjoys the experience.