My prediction is that if humanity survives, it will cling onto suffering in each context only until its meaning and profundity is sufficiently recreated by other means.
Intense pain will go first, then annoying and inconvenient pain, then distracting pain, and gradually people will adjust to higher valence landscapes until the whole spectrum is above our current default line.
In fact, it might not be that difficult a transition. Even today many people spend hours a day browsing social media, watching YouTube videos, playing video games, or meditating, all in the pursuit of higher valence. Legal prohibitions might turn out to be the main force slowing down the eradication of suffering from daily life.
Q: How to cope with the possibility of immense suffering?
I want to address the psychological aspect first, because at the start you say “I've been stuck on s-risks for over a month now. My life has been turned upside down since I first learned about this subject.”
The most helpful emotional state for thinking about this is calm, sober, lucid, and patient. If you rush to conclusions based on anxiety, you’ll probably get the wrong answer.
Although immense suffering is possible, your body is reacting to that possibility as if it were a physical threat in your immediate environment. Your heart rate increases, your breathing gets faster, and your muscles tense. This topic requires careful thinking, so that physiological response is totally unhelpful. You can work with the problem more effectively if you're in an emotional state conducive to high quality thinking.
To calm down you can breathe more slowly, take a break from things that trigger anxiety, and observe the physical sensations of anxiety with a neutral attitude.
Q: Is suicide justified by subjective s-risk?
We don’t know enough to answer this question. There’s too much we don’t understand. The s-risk part of the equation is a complete mystery, which means the ordinary reasons against suicide take precedence. There’s no reason to sacrifice your life and the wellbeing of the people around you when the expected value is a question mark (meaning total cluelessness, not just error bars).
If you say death is oblivion and therefore reduces subjective s-risk, I would ask why you think you know that.
To take one example (that’s not quantum immortality), consider that before you were born, nothing in the universe was “you”. Then “you” came into existence. After you die, nothing in the universe will be “you”. If there’s no information in reality to identify “you” because you no longer exist, then that’s the same situation as before you were born. In other words, you’ll be in a situation that once preceded your coming into existence. Nonexistence isn’t an experience, so the subjective duration between dying and coming into existence would be zero.
In other words, the zero-information oblivion that produced you once can produce you again, maybe in a different form.
In that case, death is not subjective oblivion, but a rolling of the cosmic dice. I have no idea what experiences would follow, but I don’t see why they would predictably include less suffering.
If you say that our current universe has unusually high s-risk so the dice roll is worth it, again I ask why you think you know that. Maybe most minds exist in simulations run by unaligned AGI. Maybe our slightly pre-AGI world has unusually low s-risk.
Maybe we’re in a simulation that punishes suicide because it harms others and is therefore a defection against the common good.
When you’re in such a state of extreme uncertainty, going around sacrificing things you value, like your life, doesn’t magically help. The best thing you can do is relax, because psychological stability is conducive to clear thinking.
Do you have any advice on how to avoid triggering a psychotic episode? My understanding is that long hours of meditation, drugs, and sleep deprivation all make psychosis more likely.
You're asking for flaws in the idea, but more often posts are downvoted for being confusing, boring, or just not particularly helpful for people who use this site.
If you go to “all posts” and sort by top weekly, you can see the kind of posts that get the most upvotes and the kind that get the most downvotes. It’s something you build up a sense for over time.
Also, I hope you won’t worry about it too much. People were downvoting the post, not you as a person. You can always analyze more top posts and try again.
Some feedback on this post:
Here's Scott Alexander's advice on making blog posts easy to read.
I think the standard messages are actually more energy efficient. Bad things happen, usually people are fine, but sometimes they need support and these messages signal that support is available. If you’re fine, they’re slightly annoying, but if you’re not fine, they’re helpful.
Your suggested approach actually requires more effort from both people in a typical case. If I were fine, I would rather receive “If you need to talk to someone, I’m here for you” than “What’s that like?” because I could answer the first message with an easy cliche, but I would have to think to answer the second.
(This is assuming you don’t know the person well. For close friends you can customize to their personality, but not everyone is a stoic rationalist.)
In his method, I think the happiness of the first few Jhanas is not caused by prediction error directly, but rather indirectly through the activation of the reward circuitry. So while the method involves creating some amount of prediction error, the ultimate result is less overall prediction error, because the reward neurotransmitters bring the experiential world closer to the ideal.
After the first three Jhanas, the reward circuitry is less relevant and you start to reduce overall prediction error through other means, by allowing attention to let go of aspects of the world model. In the ninth Jhana / nirodha samapatti that he mentions, attention lets go of everything and there’s no prediction error.
By comparison with higher Jhanas that are less attention grabbing, you can see the subtle discomfort present in the first few Jhanas, and I think that’s the remaining prediction error.
I would say the warm shower causes less prediction error than the cold shower because it’s less shocking to the body, but there’s still a very subtle amount of discomfort which is hidden under all the positive feelings. The level of discomfort I’m talking about is very slight, but you would notice it if there was nothing else occupying your attention. I don’t mean to say it causes negative emotions. It’s more like the discomfort of imagining an unsatisfying shape, or watching a video at slightly lower resolution. If you compare any activity to deep sleep or unconsciousness, you can find sensations that grab your attention by being slightly irritating. As long as it’s noticeable I think it causes slight negative valence. But this is often outweighed by other aspects of the activity that increase valence.
Sitting at home doing nothing might involve the negative sensations of boredom, restlessness, and impatience, all of which disappear when we go for a walk, so any discomfort is hard to notice underneath the obvious increase in valence.
Thank you for writing this! I’ve been curious about this exact intersection of topics, so I’m glad to see such a clear analysis.
My understanding of your framework is that Vipassana reduces suffering by training the mind to observe sensations without craving or aversion, which is to say it reduces unnecessary prediction error by training the mind not to compare reality to what is not the case. An accomplished meditator can therefore quickly dissipate stress by letting go of priors that would otherwise cause continued prediction error. I think this is a really valuable mapping of Vipassana to Active Inference.
At one point you write “suffering is fundamentally about experiencing prediction error” but then later you write that suffering is “the state which arises from updating one’s model to include fewer positive experiences in future or more negative experiences”. I think the first formulation is actually already sufficient. To me, it seems like suffering happens in the moment of discrepancy between prediction and sensation. For example, when I hear a sour note in a musical performance, I immediately experience distress. The sensation of the sour note clashes with my prediction, and that clash is unpleasant. So I would support the formulation where prediction error always contains an element of suffering.
You use the lottery winner as an example of positive prediction error, but I think even in that case the prediction error itself actually contains a faint discomfort which is hard to detect next to the joy and excitement. The actual happiness is not in the prediction error, but rather in the positive emotions the news brings. An analogy might be the high pitch noise a microwave makes. The noise itself is irritating, but the news that the food is ready is pleasant and usually outweighs the irritation.
Nice, these are interesting descriptions!
The inertia metaphor for depression is interesting because dopamine is associated with both mood and movement. So you see dopamine deficiency in mood disorders like depression and movement disorders like Parkinson's disease or restless leg syndrome. When you’re depressed and it takes enormous effort to move each muscle, that might be your brain searching for sources of dopamine because the usual sources aren’t working.
I’ve personally had the experience of lying motionless on my bed because I felt like I had exhausted all my options and I couldn’t see anything beneficial to do about my situation. It almost feels like the energy that would let me get up has been sucked out, and my body is just limp. I think in times like these, my brain isn’t able to find a promising action to take, and so it can’t find a source of dopamine to generate movement.
If Scott Alexander is right that depression is a “trapped prior on low mood”, maybe the brain rejects options that would produce dopamine because that would disrupt the expected low mood, which would be surprising and uncomfortable. So we actually maintain the conditions for low mood because our brain thinks it’s necessary in some way.
If there’s a non-chemical way to combat this, I think it’s by finding the cause of that prior and working with it until the brain is convinced it no longer has to maintain the low mood. I think that’s what therapy, meditation, or lifestyle changes are actually doing when they work. The brain gets enough evidence that the low mood is unnecessary, and it stops expecting it.
In my case I noticed that I was punishing myself with negative emotions because I had high expectations that I wasn’t meeting, and I felt like I could transform myself into that ideal if I just felt sad enough. Over time I gradually convinced my body that this didn’t help, and that I was more productive when I let myself relax into a kind of neutral, default state. This involved going back and forth many times between a low baseline and a neutral baseline until my body decided the neutral baseline was better. When my brain wasn’t automatically rejecting every plan I came up with, then I found I had plenty of energy and motivation.
But that’s just my model of how it happened, and I don’t expect my experience to replicate for everyone else.
Many people think of the jhanas as states of high energy absorption into an object of concentration, but I think of them in kind of the opposite way. I see the jhanas as the mental processes that make up conscious experience quieting down and settling into inactivity.
In the first jhana, the heavy sensations of stress and emotional burden relax into the lighter sensations of excitement and joy. (You can imagine rocks breaking up into pebbles, which then break up into sand.) The intensity of the first jhana varies depending on how heavy the emotional burden of ordinary consciousness is, sort of like how taking off a tight shoe is more of a relief than taking off a loose shoe. By the fourth jhana, the emotional system has relaxed into neutrality. Then in the fifth jhana through cessation, the world model relaxes into lower information states ending in unconsciousness.
This process happens because the mind is relaxed and still. Mental activity gradually diminishes because we’re not giving it any fuel. Nonreactivity is how we settle into relaxation and stillness, because when we react to sensations we disturb our field of experience.
So nonreactivity is the condition that allows the jhanas to happen naturally and on their own.