In the state of suspended animation, you will have no thoughts and no feelings, except you will have a sensation of sucking on a rather disappointing but not altogether bad cough drop.
Firstly remove the words “rather disappointing”. Remember there is nothing bad in this world and terms like that don’t help people put themselves in the situation.
You won’t feel pain or boredom.
I for one find this very difficult to imagine, and perhaps counterproductive to the RC. A buddhist might say not feeling pain or boredom is akin to living an enlightened life which is of the highest possible quality. It’s for this reason that I personally don’t find this thought experiment very helpful—it’s just way too difficult to imagine what such a cough drop life would be like.
EDIT: I regret implying you should “remove” something from your comment which I don’t literally mean. What I should have said is I think the words led to an unhelpful characterisation
There is a challenge here in making the thought experiment specific, conceivable, and still compelling for the majority of people. I think a marginally positive experience like sucking on a cough drop is easy to imagine (even if it is hard to really picture doing it for 40,000 years) and intuitively just slightly better than non-existence minute by minute.
Someone might disagree. There are some who think that existence is intrinsically valuable, so simply having no negative experiences might be enough to have a life well worth living. But it is hard to paint a clear picture of a life that is definitely barely worth living and involves some mix of ups and downs, because you then have to make sure that the ups and downs balance each other out, and this is more difficult to imagine and harder to gauge.
Firstly remove the words “rather disappointing”. Remember there is nothing bad in this world and terms like that don’t help people put themselves in the situation.
I for one find this very difficult to imagine, and perhaps counterproductive to the RC. A buddhist might say not feeling pain or boredom is akin to living an enlightened life which is of the highest possible quality. It’s for this reason that I personally don’t find this thought experiment very helpful—it’s just way too difficult to imagine what such a cough drop life would be like.
EDIT: I regret implying you should “remove” something from your comment which I don’t literally mean. What I should have said is I think the words led to an unhelpful characterisation
There is a challenge here in making the thought experiment specific, conceivable, and still compelling for the majority of people. I think a marginally positive experience like sucking on a cough drop is easy to imagine (even if it is hard to really picture doing it for 40,000 years) and intuitively just slightly better than non-existence minute by minute.
Someone might disagree. There are some who think that existence is intrinsically valuable, so simply having no negative experiences might be enough to have a life well worth living. But it is hard to paint a clear picture of a life that is definitely barely worth living and involves some mix of ups and downs, because you then have to make sure that the ups and downs balance each other out, and this is more difficult to imagine and harder to gauge.