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After Zizians and the efilist bombing I have tried to pay more attention to the cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.
A Substack titled "Don't Eat Honey" was published. Inside, the argument is made that to buy or consume honey is an unethical act for insect suffering-at-scale reasons. According to the essay, bees, like livestock, suffer quite a lot at the hands of beekeepers. That's a lot of bees. Thus the title: don't eat honey.
This particular post is high on assumption and light on rigor. It received outrage. Another post on Bentham's blog on insect suffering I recall as higher quality material for understanding. Did you know that composting is an unethical abomination? I'd never considered it!
'Suffering' presents an incommensurable problem. Suffering is a social construct. Suffering is the number and intensity of firing pain receptors over time. Suffering is how many days in a row I experienced boredom as a teenager. Still, science attempts to define and quantify suffering. An equation works out the math: how conscious a cricket is in relation to man, a cricket's assumed capacity to feel pain, the length of time it spends feeling pain, and so on. My prediction is we will figure out the consciousness part of the equation with stable meaning before we ever do so for suffering.
We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering. Maybe starvation becomes a moral imperative. If the slope sounds too slippery, please consider people have already built a (relatively unpopular) scaffolding to accept and impose costs at the expense of human comfort, life, and survival. Admittedly, that suffering may present an incommensurable problem doesn't negate any imperative to reduce it. Find more suffering? Reduce that, too. It does give me reason to question the limitations and guard rails of the social technology.
According to Wikipedia, negative utilitarians (NU) are sometimes categorized as strong NUs and weak NUs. This differentiates what I'd call fundamentalists --- who follow suffering minimizer logic to whatever ends -- to the milder "weak" utilitarians. The fundamentalist may advocate for suffering reduction at a cost that includes death, your neighbor's dog, or the continued existence of Slovenia-- the honey bee capitol of the world. Our anti-honey, anti-suffering advocate has previously demonstrated he values some positive utility when it comes to natalism, but much of his commenting audience appears more in the fundamentalist category.
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future. That our great-grandchildren will look backwards and wonder how we ever stooped so low as to tolerate farming practice A or B. I don't doubt we'll find cost effective, technological solutions that will be accepted as moral improvements in the future. I am not opposed to those changes on principle. Increase shrimp welfare if you want, fine.
My vague concern is that this social technology doesn't appear limited to spawning technological or charitable solutions. With things like lab meat showing up more frequently in the culture war I'd expect the social technology to spread. So far, however, vegans remain a stable population in the US. Nerdy utilitarian bloggers are yet to impose their will on me. They just don't think I should eat honey.
This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me. I mean it makes sense coming from a person suffering clinical depression or otherwise deeply disordered. But suffering, by and large, is our biology's way of pointing the way to go. Only children think the world would be better off without suffering. Anyone who has ever seen a news segment or documentary about people literally born without the ability to feel pain understands what a nightmarish body horror that is. I'll never forget the one I saw. Turns out without pain, it's hard to keep an infant from clawing their own eyes out, chewing off their own tongue, fingers and toes, and other acts of senseless self mutilation. They won't cry when they need something, so the new parent, ignorant to the condition, first discovers something is amiss after the child, instead of crying to be fed in the middle of the night, lets their parents sleep peacefully while they remove their own eye with their curious searching fingers.
Suffering may seem pointless to the disordered mind, but every now and again we get a Twilight Zone like glimpse at a world without suffering, and it's a horror almost beyond belief. Like a hell out of Event Horizon or Hellraiser.
Point taken, but the transhumanists will reasonably interject how contingent so much suffering is. They're entirely correct to note that technological solutions (vaccines, cochlear implants, glasses etc.) have largely obviated forms of suffering which affected vast swathes of the population even a few generations ago, and that it is reasonable to expect this trend to continue. Pain as a stimulus warning you off doing something which will injure or kill you is a relatively elegant evolutionary mechanism, but the modern WEIRD context in which the rate of premature violent death has plummeted to negligible levels really brings home how much of a hack it is in absolute terms (e.g. people who are bedridden for years because of chronic idiopathic back pain). It's not much of a reach to imagine how these particular kinds of suffering could be wholly negated in the near future. Your example about children afflicted with chronic insensitivity to pain and inadvertently gnawing off their own fingers is entirely valid, but it isn't remotely difficult to imagine a future in which small children are given e.g. brain implants so that they intuitively understand that they oughtn't do this without needing the pain stimulus.
Ah yes, I can totally see how that will go. The screening for the disease will be more expensive than just getting the device and/or lobbyist will get the CDC to "recommend" that every child get the device, even ones that don't have the disease. Better safe than sorry. They can throw it in with the Hep B vaccine as soon as the baby is born. But then it turns out that when you offload vital cognitive function to this device, the brain never develops them itself, so now every child grows into an adult dependent on this device for life. Oh, and also you need a new one every 5-10 years. And when they break, now it's like pain insensitivity has been induced in you, and you get mightily banged up.
I guess mentioning the Twilight Zone is a bit dated of a reference. But if you've never seen one, a constant theme of the show was to heighten one aspect of the human condition to a point of terrifying absurdity. And while an autist or a particularly dim child might watch an episode and think "Ah yes, it would suck to literally wish for more time to read, and then be the only survivor of an apocalypse and have your glasses break", you are supposed to realize how foolish it is to have such a myopic focus in life in the first place.
So when I compared that medical condition to a Twilight Zone episode, I was implying there are lessons to be drawn from it beyond the literal "This condition sucks." I fully reject the notion that pain, physical or mental, is outdated in any modern context.
Funnily enough, I finally got around to reading The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich after reading Scott's review of it ~7 years ago. I'm only about 70 pages in, but Henrich has already clearly elucidated that this pattern you're describing (of humans becoming frail and atrophied in some domain because of our life-or-death dependence on technological interventions) is also known as "the history of the human species" or perhaps even "the very thing that makes us human"*. Apes and chimpanzees might scoff at us feeble humans: how we have to cook our food before eating it instead of consuming it raw, how we always lose against them in unarmed fights (even fights between a burly adult male human and a juvenile chimp). Who cares what they think? We took over the planet, not them. In the distant future, who's more likely to colonise the solar system: the humans who stubbornly insist on hanging on to their pain receptors in spite of the fact that they've never laid eyes on a rusty nail in their entire lives; or the humans who've outsourced that cognitive module to an external gadget, and can hence devote that extra processing power to optimising their local Dyson sphere? Trick question: the former group won't even exist, having been ruthlessly outcompeted by the latter, just as the proto-humans who weren't onboard with this whole "applying heat to raw meat before eating it" thing got outcompeted by those who were.
*Reading it is making me even more contemptuous of Luddites than I was before. If, as Ted Kacsynski would have us believe, the industrial revolution was a disaster for the human race, why stop at 1750? Technological developments and our reliance on increasingly complex tools have been changing who we are, at a cellular, neural level, for as long as the human race has existed.
Didn’t kaczynsci think that we should return to pre-civilisation?
Well, he specifically talks about the industrial revolution being a disaster for the human race. It's a few years since I read it, but my vague recollection is that he thought that the pre-industrial tech level was not so advanced as to be incompatible with authentic psychological flourishing. But I admit I could be mistaken.
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It is the latter group which won’t even exist. The choice of existence becomes rarer thé longer it has been a choice. Those transhumanists will produce few young, lose most of them to soma, and then burn out the few that remain with oriental bugman academic grinds. Keeping that civilization going requires a reserve supply of mark I humans to replenish it and modernity does not supply it.
Say what you will about the Amish and similar, they hang on. In 3000 AD there may not be a Silicon Valley but there will be Pennsylvania Dutch.
I do wonder how long they'll be tolerated by the wider culture, though, if it seems like they're growing enough to be more than token weirdos. I would not be surprised if, within the next ~40 years, there was a push to bring the Amish to heel, most likely with "child (sexual) abuse" as the casus belli.
Probably indefinitely. Northern European Protestant cultures cannot function in modernity without a Refugia to provide labor that makes up for their own low fertility rates; in the past these were mostly Catholic cultures that provided immigrants(Ireland as the ur-example, but that’s what Mexico was recently. Obviously, neither of these places are going to be exporting masses of young laborers they way they could in 1850 or 1990.), but that’s not an option anymore so the choice is between tolerating weirdos in your midst- provided they have six well behaved and hard working kids- or importing Africans. Germany may rather the latter, now that there’s no youth surplus in its Slavic near abroad, but America will almost certainly rather give the Amish more of the same special carve outs they have now.
If I were thé Hasidim, however, I’d be worried. Antisemitism is slowly becoming normalized on the left and the future right is unlikely to have much patience for groups that won’t even pretend to work.
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I'd say odds are high, and I'm somewhat surprised it hasn't happened yet. Look at the flurry of stories from the past few years involving Jehovah's Witnesses, which is a relatively small sect (but larger than the Amish). Washington's recent law removing clergy-penitent privilege specifically referenced them along with Catholics as the reason for needing to remove the privilege.
A law removing long-standing rights isn't likely to stand. I'm unsure how it works with JWs, but the practice of Catholic confessions (behind a screen in a dark room, anonymous option) nullifies testimony. Are sexual offenders going to testify that they confessed their sins and then the priest didn't provide testimony to the state? Will the state be bugging confessionals?
Should Washington state consider revoking other privileged positions? Why should spouse, lawyer and doctor be exempt?
Edit: Reading the text of the law there is more leagalise to parse through in regards to the responsibilities of medical personnel if understand it correctly https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Senate%20Passed%20Legislature/5375.PL.pdf#page=1
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Per Wikipedia, even the Amish are only 300 years and change old. We're talking about Harvard, not the Catholic Church.
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Great. Now imagine what happens when we not only become dependant on cooking, but we also lose our ability to cook. That's the issue being raised here. Do you think that's not happening? That it's impossible?
Well, I'm not bothered that we might lose our ability to cook, even though that's technically possible.
It was a hypothetical example.
I think smartphones/TikTok/AI are making us lose our attention, our ability to analyze and to think, and they don't offer anything in return (AI could in theory take over our thinking for us, but I doubt it will, and even if it did it raises the question of who's going to fix it if it breaks down). It's akin to becoming dependent on cooking, and losing our ability to do so, but it's not literally the same thing.
I agree with your overall reasoning. Our favorite current-day technologies could theoretically be used as the next step in the formation of homo technicus, tool-using man who outcompetes his more natural rivals because technology just makes him better at life, but right now those technologies are mostly used to hook into our path-of-least-resistence hedonism to maximize engagement and minimize agency. In the long run, we'll figure out how to use them more intelligently and efficiently for productive purposes, and how to protect ourselves from addiction and brain-addling engagement-maximization-schemes. Well, "we" - some will, some won't, and the former will make it further into the future than the latter before technology progress makes humans in general obsolete.
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I would posit that the smartphone has observably reduced the need to store specific data because it's much easier than it used to be to load it (I'm old enough to "search the Internet", the kids these days "ask AI") on the fly when necessary. Lots of encyclopedia facts are useful to know on rare day-to-day occasions ("Which rivers empty into the Aral Sea?"), but I think in practice things are "better" (for some definition of "better") where I can pull up that fact at hand, which maybe a generation ago sometimes required referencing my shelf of encyclopedias or a trip to the library. And maybe I can use that mental space that was previously holding the population of Iran or the specifics of red-black trees for something that is more useful to me today [1].
I recall hearing from a historian a while back that the most numerous book on US Navy ships in the 1980s was a dictionary: has ubiquitous spell checking (and sometimes-wrong autocorrect) lost us something of value other than the "character" built by having to thumb through the dictionary to spell right? That one feels similar as a technology question, but I'd bet you have fewer takers for "the good ol' days" before spell check.
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I don't think it's impossible, but the people who object to the process remind me of King Canute. Plant your stick in the ground and say you'll have no part in it if you must: the great tide of technological progress will sweep on just fine without you.
Perhaps in the far future there will be people who have been dependent on external software peripherals for so long (generations of them, in fact) that their native pain receptors have atrophied to the point of disuse, like the appendix. Maybe we'll find that the concept of "pain as a warning to avoid injury and death" has been wholly consigned to the dustheap of history. Would that be bad? Sure. But in a list of things that make me unnerved when thinking about fates that might befall humanity in the distant future, it wouldn't crack the top ten, probably not even the top fifty. I'm far more worried about e.g. humanity signing over our ability to feel anything for the sake of economic progress than merely our ability to feel pain, especially when the threats that pain evolved to protect us against (predators, fire, poisonous food etc.) are becoming increasingly irrelevant for humanity in general and for Westerners in particular.
I for one happen to think we can just choose to not commit collective suicide.
I don't know about pain receptors, but the general process we're talking about is already happening. Kids growing up with smartphones are getting their brains fried. ChatGPT will fry them even more. It's not going to be like cooking, with the ability to start a fire being passed down culturally. It's not even that they'll become dependant on ChatGPT, or whatever, and will have to outsource their thinking to it. ChatGPT will just suck their skills out, and but won't be able to offer an appropriate replacement.
I understand. My point is, every generation has always had this complaint about the one following it. Everyone's parochial about the technological level with which they're familiar, and suspicious about every one following. We can even acknowledge that some of the doomsaying predictions made about this or that new technology were right on the money, and yet that the technology in question was still a boon to the human species on net.
"Now that they're written down, no one's able to recite long passages of text from memory anymore!"
"Now that we have guns, no one knows how to hunt animals with a compound bow anymore!"
"Now that we have player pianos, our vocal cords will atrophy from disuse!"
"Now that we have internal combustion engines, everyone will become fat, slovenly and sedentary!"
"Now that we have cheap and reliable medicine, there's no incentive for people to live secularly healthful lives!"
"Now that we have
slide rulescalculators, no one can perform complex arithmetic calculations in their head anymore!""Now that Word automatically spellchecks your writing, no one can spell anymore!"
"Now that Google Maps navigates for you, no one can read an OS map or perform basic orienteering anymore!"
That's not to say that I'm not at all concerned about the impact of ChatGPT on literacy and logical thought, particularly on developing brains - if I had children, I wouldn't be giving them smartphones until they were of age.
But at the same time, I don't feel like I've lost out that much because I don't know how to hunt game, or that I can travel a few hundred kilometres in three hours rather than several days, or that I've outsourced the task of navigation to Google Maps. When it comes to ChatGPT, it's important to bear in mind that this technology is very new. We may soon find that having it at our disposal affords us the ability to perform intellectual tasks we couldn't do otherwise, or frees up our time which would otherwise be wasted on time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks. Or maybe it'll turn all our brains to mush. At this point I think it's too soon to say, and I'm not yet at the point of wanting to wage Butlerian jihad.
And to return to my previous point: the advent of weaponry did result in us becoming physically weaker than chimpanzees. But I kind of - don't care? Doesn't seem like that big a deal in the scheme of things.
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