NB: Some of the terminology and concepts I used here are incompatible with my more recent work because this was written before I formalized my philosophy, but is dangerously close enough to them that it may cause confusion. Caveat lector.

In the future, the world may be filled with creatures other than humans and animals. There may be ems, superintelligences, and other sorts of processes we’d recognize as alive, and it seems likely that there will be many orders of magnitude more of these living things in the future than at present. As a result there may be many orders of magnitude more future suffering. Depending on your moral stance, even if you’re an anti-realist like me and simply express a preference for the satisfaction of preferences of others, this means that the lives of these future creatures are of great concern.

Brian Tomasik and others with the Foundational Research Institute have been exploring the interaction between suffering-focused ethics and the far future for a few years now. Their work has included measuring suffering and happiness, formalizing ethical calculations, and understanding the benefits of compromise with other value systems, but of particular interest to me are Brian’s looks into issues around suffering of minimally conscious processes because his thoughts on consciousness resemble mine. Thus when I read FRI researcher Lukas Gloor’s recent piece on tranquilism I was primed to find myself wondering, rather alarmingly, is feedback suffering?

To understand why, recall that feedback is another name for the process by which a subject is phenomenologically conscious and experiences itself as object. Further, most feedback is either positive or negative, meaning it causes action towards or away from a state, respectively. As humans we experience positive and negative feedback as a desire that the world be in a state other than the one it is currently in, and tranquilism suggests that suffering arises from desire since not experiencing desire yields a state we call contentment. But if we can avoid suffering by not experiencing desire, which is to say positive and negative feedback, then it looks a lot like feedback is inherently painful and thus the source of suffering. That’s distressing because it implies most existence is pain and almost all physical processes suffer constantly, so it seems to me wor...