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Underlying almost everything I write is the idea that pain is very bad. What if I was wrong? What if the pain wasn’t so bad? What if the pain wasn’t so painful? Or at least, not so relevant? What if the pain wasn’t what it seems? Here I will briefly explore these ideas, which I call “suffering eliminativism,” mentioning the best arguments I can find.
But let’s start first with other more intuitive eliminativisms:
- Consciousness eliminativism: consciousness does not exist, or at least, it is not what it seems.
- Identity eliminativism: identity does not exist, or at least, it is not what it seems.
- Sentience eliminativism: sentience does not exist, or at least, it is not what it seems.
- Pleasure eliminativism: pleasure does not exist (strong version), or at least, it is not what it seems (weak version).
- Pain eliminativism / Suffering eliminativism: pain / suffering does not exist (strong or strict version), or at least, it is not what it seems (weak version), or at least, pain is not so painful (pain is not so bad), or it’s not that relevant.
The eliminativism of consciousness and identity are very reasonable, at least in their weak version.
The strong version can also be defended with some ease as long as the difference between “what it seems” and “what it is” is so great that it justifies saying simply “that does not exist”.
For example, a cloud in the sky may look like a dog, but there is such a big difference between what it looks like (a dog) and what it is (a cloud), that it may be more appropriate to say “that dog in the sky does not exist” than to say “that dog in the sky is not what it seems”. Perhaps the most accurate expression in this case was: “it seems like there is a dog in the sky but what is really happening is something totally different”. Analogously:
- Consciousness seems to exist, but what is really happening is something totally different.
- Identity seems to exist, but what is really happening is something totally different.
- Sentience seems to exist, but what is really happening is something totally different.
- Pleasure seems to exist, but what is really happening is something totally different.
- Pain seems to exist, but what is really happening is something totally different.
Identity eliminativism
Identity is not what it seems because surely closed individualism does not exist and instead open and empty individualism does exist.
Consciousness eliminativism
Maybe consciousness is nothing more than recursiveness, and what matters here is sentience: being able to feel positive or negative things. Pleasure and pain. Satisfaction and suffering. Let’s go with it!
Sentience eliminativism
Jacy Reese Anthis from Sentience Institute can be considered a sentience eliminativist. In his opinion, neither pleasure nor pain are what they seem.
Eliezer Yudkowsky mentions (somehow) that pigs don’t feel. I understand (translate) this idea as the idea that pigs do not have a sufficiently developed identity to feel pain beyond open individualism. That is, I understand that EY does not deny that there is suffering when a pig is castrated without anesthesia (as 77% of the pigs in the European Union), but rather it denies that the pig has an “I” that is linked to that platonic suffering or that typical of open individualism.
Pleasure eliminativism
There are authors who believe that pleasure does not exist, but that there is a wide range of different kind of pains (Jose Antonio Jauregui in “El ordenador Cerebral”).
I consider that pleasure does not exist, at least it is not what it seems, since it is not relevant. This is not a foundational, ontological assertion, but an empirical one. I do not believe that pleasure cannot exist and motivate, but rather that the sentient beings we know have been produced by evolution in such a way that pleasure is irrelevant or almost irrelevant. Suffering may also be motivationally irrelevant.
In my opinion, the eliminativism of pleasure does not impede the project of David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative, since pleasure is not limited by essential but circumstantial conditions. The absence of pleasure is not an ontological or foundational problem but an accidental one, a consequence of the current state of the dominant forces in our universe.
By the way, pleasure eliminativism can help us quit smoking.
Pain eliminativism as “Pain is not that important”
Positive Utilitarians and chronic optimists such as Giego Caleiro or Mati Roy, value the positive in positive experiences, but they do not value (barely) the negative in negative experiences. In a very similar way, the champions of immortality such as the aforementioned Mati Roy, José Cordeiro, David Wood and Anders Sandberg are perfectly aware that in an indefinite period of time the probability of suffering all types of negative experiences increases overwhelmingly and yet they face this expectation with the optimism of a positive utilitarian.
Pain eliminativism in the form “Pain is not what it seems”
Robert Anson Heinlein proposes in one of his novels (Time Enough for Love?) an anesthesia that does not eliminate pain, but the memory of pain. Could it always be like this in some way? Is pain always the memory of pain?
Paneudaimonia is the idea that the whole universe is absolute pleasure, except in the domain of what we know as sentient beings, in which all experiences imply different types of suffering.
The following is surely the best argument to defend the eliminativism of suffering:
The most original and brilliant argument to defend the eliminativism of suffering that I know was written by Facundo Cesa who wrote (I quote from memory): If you take away […] (and here he mentioned, as I remember, among others, preferences and the impulse to survive)” the pain does not “hurt.”
I have to ask him if he remembers the quote or can he explain the idea again. What I remember was an explanation that said something like the following (I’m referring to the underlying idea, not the words or examples): Pain is a motivation mechanism in the face of the risk of losing a useful or essential functionality for survival. of the individual and reproduction. If you removed all those evolutionarily negative components from the pain of an event, if all the negative future considerations for that individual did not exist, the pain does not “hurt.” In fact, it can be the other way around: a small “pain” (like a needle prick) or even a big pain (being crushed to death) can be interpreted in the most positive – evolutionary – way possible, for example, the injection with the very expensive and very exclusive medicine that will save our lives, or die crushed protecting our children knowing that thanks to our sacrifice, they will surely save their lives. These two events can be interpreted as pleasant.
Pain eliminativism as “Pain is not so bad”
The following testimonies refer to intense painful experiences. In all of them, functionality with evolutionary criteria is prioritized before pain relief.
- When I ruptured my eardrum jumping into the pool, my obsession was not to relieve the terrible pain, but to get out of the water as soon as possible, lest the intense pain would cause me to faint and drown.
- When I suffered testicular torsion while driving, I only thought about getting to the hospital as soon as possible, not to relieve the pain, but to fix it. If they had simply offered me an anesthetic, I would have refused it. With or without anesthesia, what I wanted was to solve that problem.
- When I said that “the back pain was so unbearable that I couldn’t move” I wasn’t referring to my pain as an experience being especially intense, but rather that the pain made it impossible for me to make that specific movement. I tried to make the movement, but then a whiplash of pain came, the pain dominated my will, and the movement was inhibited.
Pain without risk to survival or reproduction?
It is difficult to find examples of situations in which there is pain or suffering in general, and that does not pose a risk to integrity and, ultimately, to survival or reproduction. Possibly because pain is a mechanism closely associated with maximizing survival and reproduction. As Facundo Cesa mentions in “Why does pain hurt so much?“:
“Our genes do not care about us. They do not want us to be happy, because we are not machines of happiness but machines of replicating genes (the same applies to the acquisition of precise and reliable knowledge, and that is why we need the Scientific Method to be able to acquire knowledge DESPITE the fact that we are irrational monkeys who fall in love with their ideas and don’t want to let go of them even when they don’t fit the facts.) That’s why we are capable of suffering from loneliness, from lack of sex, from lack of status, or from anything that in our evolutionary past was a causal antecedent of reproductive difficulties (in other words, each form of suffering is functional for the replication of the genes that program that form of suffering, since it results in its copy). The same goes for pain (which is a type of suffering, such as sadness, disgust, shame, etc.): it signals things that in our evolutionary past were causal antecedents of reproductive difficulties. For example, ignoring what hurts us (or the wounds themselves) used to be a causal antecedent of fatal infections, and it turns out that dying is generally a serious impediment to reproduction. In this functional light of pain, the reason for the magnitude of the pain caused by a blow to the testicles is very clear.”
Other eliminativisms
- Eliminativism of objective reality: objective reality (out there) does not exist, or at least, it is not what it seems.
- Eliminativism of moral reality or moral realism: moral reality (out there) does not exist, or at least, it is not what it seems.
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