Pain and death are two aspects of human life that most of us don’t appreciate very much … but we tend to put up with as gracefully as possible because we consider them inevitable.
Now it turns out that death is probably not so inevitable after all. Human superlongevity is most likely achievable — and as Tipler has pointed out in The Physics of Immortality, even the Big Crunch at the end of the current physical universe need not necessarily crunch us up if we carry out appropriate universe-scale re-engineering.
But what about pain? Common sense tells us that pain is necessary to signal us when there is danger to our physical or mental organisms — yet the existence of people with conditions like pain asymbolia gives one pause. These folks seem to exist OK in human society without ever feeling the bite of pain to any significant degree. So why do the rest of us have to?
Humanity would not have evolved without death clearing out earlier species, nor without pain working alongside pleasure to incentivize individual behavior that benefits the species. But from a transhumanist view, looking at how to engineer the next steps in human and posthuman evolution, there is no need to replicate or perpetuate the specific steps that got us where we are right now.
It’s clear that superhuman superminds won’t need to die, at least not on the sort of rapid-fire schedule typical for biological organisms, and maybe not ever. But it’s less obvious whether superhuman superminds will need to experience pain.
The major question regarding pain and post-Singularity superhuman superminds seems to be: In what sense is pain necessary or highly useful for the survival and flourishing of superhuman superminds?
Supposing it’s viable to engineer posthuman or upgraded-human mind/bodies that avoid pain in the way that folks with pain asymbolia do — or some other interestingly different way — is this actually a desirable thing to do? What gotchas may arise in such a pursuit?
For rational, reflectively self-conscious minds, is pain at all desirable? Is there something intrinsically important to be gained from feeling the bite of pain?
What would be the follow-on benefits of creating generally intelligent minds with no, or relatively minimal, pain experience? Would the absence of significant degrees of chronic or acute pain have other positive or negative psychological or social impacts?
Digging deep into the relationship between pain and various aspects of cognitive systems, one ultimately comes to some fairly optimistic conclusions: Superhuman superminds, if effectively architected, shouldn’t need to experience pain nearly so much as we do. Pain, like death, should be substantially even if not wholly eliminable for post-Singularity minds. While my life in human form is basically pretty good anyway, still, I’m definitely looking forward!
The first conclusion I’ll work toward in this lengthy post is relatively unadventurous from a Buddhist psychology perspective: If we create posthuman minds or AGI minds that display minimal “attachment” to their prior states, ideas, beliefs and experiences, these minds will also experience relatively little (even if not zero) suffering. And the suffering they do experience will likely be “not minded”, in the same way that a person who likes spicy food doesn’t mind the painful zing of the capsaicin on their mouth and tongue.
When we eat tasty spicy food, the pain of the spice is there but it’s an intrinsic part of an overall pleasurable and desirable experience. Of course if the spice level is upped too much then this integration of pain into enjoyment is lost — but the well-engineered supermind can self-tune its parameters not to experience real-world life-pains as “too much” in this sense, partly because of its ability to experience the joy in the whole systems encompassing the pains it encounters.
The next conclusion/suggestion I’ll wind and wend toward here is a little more adventurous ….
Minimization of attachment decreases fear of pain and suffering — because pain encountered isn’t going to be clung onto indefinitely via getting caught up in feedback loops of self-perpetuating self-infliction. This decrease of fear opens up minds to I-Thou experiences, in which they have full and intense Second Person experiences of the joys and sufferings of other minds. And here is where some mathe-magic occurs…
When a number of minds come together, via mutual Second Person experience, their diverse pains and joys come together into a decentralized and distributed but communally shared pool of feelings. And what often happens here is something amazing:
Why would this be the case? The crux is in Tolstoy’s inaccurate but evocative aphorism that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” The truth of the aphorism is that there are certain archetypal structures and patterns of joyous experience, which are strange attractors of individual and collective mental/physical/social/transpersonal activity. Joy experience consists in large part of the process of journeying into these attractors, often together with others and in the context of achieving a greater unity and wholeness via this collective convergence. Pain experience consists largely of the fracturing and fragmentation of an archetypal whole.