RobertDaoust
An institute for the science of suffering.
Your concern about doomsday projects is very welcome in this age of high existential risks. Suffering in particular plays a central role in that game. Religious fanatics, for instance, are waiting for the cessation of suffering through some kind of apocalypse. Many negative utilitarians or antinatalists, on another side, would like us to organize the end of the world in the coming years, a prospect that can only lead to absurd results. For the short term, doomsday end suffering projects can plan to eliminate life (or at least human life, because bacteria and other small creatures would be extremely hard to eliminate on this planet), but I doubt that they would want to have consideration for “the conditions for the evolution of life throughout the universe”, be it only because they are completely unable to do anything about that, or because they are anyway not rational at all in their endeavor. So, there is a race between us and the doomsday mongers: I think that bringing a solution to suffering is our only chance to win in time.
The solution to the problem of suffering cannot be to eliminate all life because lifeless evolution created life once and it could recreate it, and million years of pain would come along again before another intelligent species like ours re-appear with technical power and has a chance to resolve the problem of suffering by controlling that phenomenon through conscious rational efforts until the end of this universe.
“I’m not sure what I should do with this information. There is no cosmic justice in suffering on behalf of others, in living burdened by its unthinkable urgency. Yet there is something like cosmic justice in acting to reduce the worst suffering in our world. I do not even know where to start.”
We are numerous, since millennia, who want to do something about suffering. Why not work together in an enterprise for an optimal alleviation of suffering in the world? That is what the Algosphere Alliance is proposing: to organize the alleviation of suffering, steadily and sustainably.More directly addressing the point of your text, Aaron, I suggest that we use our thinking power to abstractly think the urgency of suffering so that as a consequence we can act theoretically within the framework of a science of suffering (algonomy) and practically within the framework of a concrete all-encompassing organization (algonomic alliance).
Congrats on your approach, Sanjay and Meg. The Algosphere Alliance is inviting people who are interested in the organized alleviation of suffering in the world to be “Partner in the business world” as you can see in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J9wOcCERPiegaPzfbDLfcjoH45GAgCPp2HeGE1s-5To/edit. That’s a beginning.
Yes, Ramiro, you may write to me at daoust514@gmail.com and I will transmit your demand to them.
I am all in favor of chronic pain being a cause area. In itself, that would be a good thing, but there is another, more important reason: this might help us to realize how exactly physical pain and most concerns in EA are related to the arch-cause of suffering. The very notion of EFFECTIVENESS is at stake in this matter. In my opinion, the whole field of pain research and management has not decisively advanced since the 1970s, when I first became interested in it. I believe progress is hindered by a fundamental problem in pain theory, as explained in https://www.academia.edu/7443845/The_Study_and_Management_of_Pain_Require_a_New_Discipline_about_Suffering. For those who’d like a TL;DR summary: simply starting a science of suffering should urgently be made a cause area.
How must we get systematically organized to alleviate suffering in the world?
“Impartiality or cause-neutrality means that in order to be more effective, one should only look at the top level in the hierarchical classification, i.e. consider the whole world (instead of a specific country), all beings (instead of members from a specific species), and all diseases (instead of a specific type of diseases such as cancers).” That is why a theoretical and practical organization based on a global systematic approach is required for optimizing the alleviation of suffering in the world.
Mental health is a prerequisite. Denis Drescher’s Dissociation for Altruists suggests great tips. If you work on suffering, you cannot deal with it as you do in normal life, because you have to hold the thing steadily in front of you, instead of embracing and dancing with it while you are naked. You have to look at it through a glass that does not let its too bright fire damage your eyes. I recommend goggles that let you see emotional negativity as a harmless abstract degree of unpleasantness/unwantedness: your cold reason will pretty quickly get used to the interpretation of the various shades. Likewise, take care to use gloves and even tongs when you handle suffering.
Protect yourself!
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“The argument against” is that a Thanos-ing all humanity would not save the lives of other sentient beings, it would just allow those lives to continue being, much too often, miserable: human animals are currently the only chance for all animals to escape the grips of excessive suffering. The problem here, “somethoughts”, is that you, like countless of us, value life so much more than the alleviation of suffering that you pose horribly absurd problems, and with such an unexamined value in the background lurks a nihilism that represents, to be frank, an existential risk.
Thank you for this work, Marius, it fits well into a systematic approach that should be developed, as suggested in Preparatory Notes for the Measurement of Suffering.
Hi Derek, just in case something in there would be useful to you: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OTCQlWE-GkY_V4V-OfJAr7Q-vJyIR8ZATpeMrLkmlAo/edit
It is very high-impact when survival is considered indispensable to have control over nature for preventing negative values from coming back after extinction.
You have this reference: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9001063/authors#authors where the first paragraph reads:
“In the last year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) released new ethical standards for professional conduct [1] and the IEEE released guidelines for the ethical design of autonomous and intelligent systems [2] demonstrating a shift among professional technology organizations toward prioritizing ethical impact. In parallel, thousands of technology professionals and social scientists have formed multidisciplinary committees to devise ethical principles for the design, development, and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies [3]. Moreover, many governments and international organizations have released sets of ethical principles, including the OECD Principles in 2019 [4], the Montreal Declaration in 2017 [5], the U.K. House of Lords report “AI in the U.K.: ready willing and able?” in 2018 [6], the European Commission High-Level Expert Group (HLEG) on AI in 2018 [7], and the Beijing AI Principles in 2019 [8]. Indeed, recent reports indicate that there are currently more than 70 publicly available sets of ethical principles or frameworks for AI, most of which have been released within the last five years [3], [9], [10].”
I am just wondering if your review would not be more complete by mentioning that kind of work. The IEEE for instance has this page: https://ethicsinaction.ieee.org/
We may sympathize in the face of such difficulties. Terminology is a big problem when speaking about suffering in the absence of a systematic discipline dealing with suffering itself. That’s another reason why the philosophy of well-being is fraught with traps and why I suggest the alleviation of suffering as the most effective first goal.
Okay, I realize that the relevance of neuroscience to the philosophy of well-being can hardly be made explicit in sufficient detail at the level of an introduction. That is unfortunate, if only for our mutual understanding because, with enough attention to details, the stubbing toe example that I used would not be understood as you do: if it is not unpleasant to stub your toe how can it be bad, pro tanto or otherwise?
Yes I know, thank you ADS, but I rather have in mind something like “Toward an Institute for the Science of Suffering” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cyDnDBxQKarKjeug2YJTv7XNTlVY-v9sQL45-Q2BFac/edit#