Different ways to prevent or reduce suffering

Versión en Español

In this text I try to schematically conceptualize all possible possible ways to prevent or reduce suffering. In what follows, “suffering”, “pain” and “negative experience” will be considered synonymous.

Abstractly, we can avoid or minimize negative experiences in the following ways:

1. Under an approach that takes into account specific cases (one or more individuals who suffer)

• Avoiding the external cause of the pain (for example, taking your finger off the fire)
• Avoid the internal cause of pain.
  • Anesthesia (avoid all sensitivity).
  • Analgesia (reduce sensitivity to pain)
  • Memory management (Delete the memory of that loved one, delete the memory of that day that will never be repeated).
  • Logic management (Change the way we think, the rules that define our thinking) and Emotion management (Change the way we interpret events and generate subjective experiences)
    • Give pain purpose or compensate for the relevance of pain. (“It hurts me but it prevents a greater evil” – for negative utilitarians, and “It hurts me but it leads to a greater good” – for classic utilitarians).
    • Avoid the relevance of pain (“It hurts but I don’t care”).
    • Expectation management: expect greater pain than the real one, so that the pain experienced, compared to the expected one, is even a relief.
    • Attitude management (it is very similar to the previous case but has some interesting nuances). For example, using the roller coaster technique: once on a roller coaster, if dizzying falls make us panic, it is much worse to back down the body trying to avoid the inevitable. The correct posture while going down a roller coaster at full speed is leaning forward, as if we wanted to go even faster.

2. Addressing the problem of suffering globally, as a phenomenon

• Reducing and preventing suffering in an efficiency-focused approach (Effective Altruism).
• Modifying our universe, making pain disappear or establishing metaphysical limits (reasonable if we think that our universe can be a simulation).
• Modifying not only the present, but also the past and the future.
• On rescue missions to other universes.