Pain

I’m sorry, what exactly has been resolved again? Please help us poor laymen out there.

This claim suggests we’re talking about two different things. This sounds closer to what I mean when I say “damage”. “Pain”, by contrast, is a quale, which is subjective by definition. (I think this also goes to Ecmandu and MM’s discussion of ‘psychological pain’: ‘pain’ covers a range of negative qualia; a phantom limb and a real limb can both be painful).

This is a clever point, and I regret that my response is somewhat hand-wavey: society as a whole is made more entropic by e.g. imprisonment. The local affects of chaining a person to the ground may be to reduce entropy, but globally you will see the deterioration of a the larger complex system of society. It is therefore immoral.

Which is perhaps a way of conceding that the relationship is not direct, but indirect and nonetheless real.

Prismatic, isn’t the point of the Four Noble Truths to show that suffering is an illusion and we should not cling to it? Been a while since I’ve read much about Buddhism.

My point here is basically to disagree with this. I’m arguing that pain is morally neutral. It is seen as immoral because it is associated with damage (evolved as a way to promote survival), but it is only a proxy for damage. Your point here is similar Mill’s, Singer’s and … Ryder’s points.

I don’t understand your post </me addressing your post>

And so no real evolution. The mind may change but, the body is hindered.

For the mind, but , our bodies have stagnated due to lack of pain.

The body and all objects are always making decisions (in a metaphorical sense). The bodies would simply atrophy … deciding on the lack of need.

This "need-deciding-system“ can also be called "program“.

Don’t believe the life - school bullshit…

This is not a school in any sense of the word…

This is a torture chamber

I am VERY familiar with the philosophy of Buddhism and your points above are way off from Buddhism proper.

More BS. You really should try listening more carefully before spouting so boastfully.

According to Buddhism, ‘suffering’ is both a reality and an illusion depending on which sense and perspective one is viewing suffering.
To view ‘suffering’ as ‘absolutely’ illusory would be wrong. ‘Suffering’ must be dealt with accordingly within the right perspective and conditions.
The effective approach to deal with sufferings in accordance to the 4th NT is the Middle-Way, i.e. not be bothered by sufferings to the extreme but deal with suffering effectively and optimally.

Pain [especially psychological pain and sufferings] is one of the major ground of Buddhist morality. This is why one of the major strategy of Buddhist morality is the imperative of empathy and compassion to all human beings and others.

Incidentally the Buddhist concept of morality [pain being one ground] is parallel to that of Kant’s Framework and System of Morality and Ethics. Note Kant’s morality is not pure Deontology as interpreted by most philosophers and others.

If you want to ignore basic human physiology…
If you want to ignore that we know objectively that certain actions cause pain …
Go ahead.

You have more problems with a morality based on damage than pain :

Let’s say that you are contemplating the morality of hitting someone on the arm with a baseball bat. You know objectively that it’s going to cause pain. You don’t know how much damage it will cause. You don’t have any measure of the force of the blow. And even it you had calculated/controlled a standard impact force at a standard location on the body … that force may break the arm of a person with brittle bones and it may not break the arm of a strong healthy person. The moral calculus of damage is extremely difficult.

That hand-waving indicates that there is no way to calculate entropy for such a complex situation. You can use entropy for relatively small physical systems where the measurements of heat, energy, pressure, work, etc. are clearly defined and straightforward but it’s not something that can be used for human society.

I actually don’t think this is completely at odds with what I’m saying. If pain is a fact of life, inescapable, and due to our attachment to the self etc., it’s connection to morality is not straightforward.

This question will sound facetious, but I promise it isn’t: Is it immoral to punch the Buddha? My point being, if the Buddha has achieved enlightenment, has overcome his sense of self and his attachment to the world, his pain isn’t significant to him. If it is immoral, that would be a strange outcome; compare to inflicting pain with someone’s consent: if the person doesn’t care, and we know he doesn’t care, why would it be wrong?

This overstates our understanding of human physiology. There are people who appear physiologically normal who actually don’t feel pain. We can appeal to “actions [we know to] cause pain”, but for those people, those actions don’t. If the actions are still wrong, it’s not because of pain.

This line of argument seems strange. Yes, force and damage are difficult to quantify in real-world situations, but at least we can quantify them in some contexts: we can absolutely measure the force of a hit with a baseball bat, and we can test damage on ballistic gel and crash test dummies. Pain, by contrast, is not measurable by anyone who doesn’t experience it, and as such can’t be quantified or directly compared. Putting hot peppers in my meal will make me happy, in someone else’s it may be so painful as to give them PTSD. The moral calculus of pain is MUCH more difficult.

I think this could be right, but it may be wrong. One way that we can measure the entropy of society is through a mechanism like a market economy: the market processes information, we can quantify information processing, and entropy is the inverse of information. So it seems there may be a way to translate from market activity to societal entropy, and thereby measure entropy in a system as complex as society.

But to turn the argument against you, isn’t pain at least as hard to calculate for a complex system? How do we measure the pain caused by current drug laws? Or by the curtailment of rights? It seems as thought the best we could do is stack anecdotes that can’t be made greater than the sum of their parts.

On another point: if it’s true that pain is subjective (and I know you reject this, but just for the sake of getting at our intuitions), and it’s true that damage is objective, what bearing does that have on choosing either as the basis of morality? I’m tempted to say that the objective criterion is better even if it is only a proxy for the true moral atoms. My argument in this thread has been that damage is a better moral atom, but in this paragraph I’m suggesting that objectiveness alone would (again, assuming it’s true) make it more useful in our moral calculus. What are your thoughts on that?

If you’ve ever met people with phantom limb syndrome, you’d know that it would be a moral good to alleviate their suffering even though there is no physical damage associated with the pain. Or at least, pain can be a source of damage in itself.

No physical damage?? THey got an entire limb chopped off for gadzuks!!

By saying that "pain belongs to life“ and "life … tries to reduce or overcome pain“ I was referring to your statement that "pain is needed for evolution“ (=>). I mean: reducing or overcoming pain belongs to life as well as pain itself does. So reducing or overcoming pain belongs to culture as well as to evolution. It is similar to the fact that humans try to reduce and overcome natural environment.

Compare:

=>

=>

On a higher level yet concerning the same thing: Internet of Things and MEMS.

Those construct the bridge between where you are and the complete lack of human existence … and possibly of all organic life.

Unfortunately, most humans are not interested or/and do not understand the technological development and its consequences. Most humans only begin with a little interest in technical things, if they can use it for themselves.

Arminius, I understand what you are saying.
Let me expand mine.
We use medicine rather than allow adaptations. We save lives at the expense of evolution of our bodies and species. We do not allow humans to adapt to disease yet we can see that in animals adaptations occur. We know that line reeding harms the animal bodies , yet we linebred humans. Not like we used to but still there is prejudice against mixbreeding humans. This harms the species and slows evolution of the body and the mind.

Evolution is not THE LAW, but only one hand. Place everything in only that one hand, and lose it all at once. And that is exactly what is taking place. Man being too clever for his own good.

The Law can only be guessed at this point. Science has a ways to go. We first must get off this mudball and get to other planets and out of this planet system. The law here still hides.
Our emotional attachments brings us forward and holds us back.