The Asymmetry of Pain and Pleasure

Jeffery Jay Lowder at the Secular Outpost blogged an excellent piece last year detailing 25 lines of evidence against theism. I think all of them bear consideration, and, if I remember correctly, one or two more lines of evidence against theism popped up in the comments.

I would like to add another modest line to this list, or maybe just an adjunct to his No.8: The Biological Role (and Moral Randomness) of Pain and Pleasure, following Paul Draper. It is prompted by a trivial injustice that surely everyone experiences on a daily basis, but that perhaps points to a bigger issue. The minor injustice is this: the fact that the more one experiences a pleasure the less it satisfies and, indeed, it can turn to pain, while the more one experiences a pain it is not relieved, and it never turns into a pleasure.

Now, for the purposes of this discussion, I am taking a pretty simple view of pain and pleasure as things that are, in order, fundamentally bad and good. I will not consider the paradoxes of people seeking out pain for pleasure, for example, although, granted, this does suggest we have a complicated relationship with pain and pleasure. I think it's also true to say that one can become numbed to further pain to a degree. But this numbing doesn't seem as effective as the numbing of pleasure. Note too that people who feel chronic pain report it as a bad thing, while people who feel chronic pleasure also report it as a bad thing.

These things are pretty understandable on, and consistent with, Naturalism; we are the products of a natural selection that favours survival and reproduction over all else, so pain and pleasure are regulating systems that have evolved to help bring about gene persistence through that survival and reproduction. The particular fate of the gene vehicles is not so important as the gene persistence, so, as we see in nature, any number of strategies to achieve this persistence is possible, including ones which serve up pain and pleasure to the gene vehicles unequally (are there any animals that experience an asymmetry of pleasure over pain, I wonder?*). On an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent account of theism, these pose a problem; why would an omnibenevolent god allow an asymmetry of pain and pleasure, leading to more pain than pleasure?

What these observations lead to relates somewhat to our attitudes to death. I wrote recently defending Bernard Williams's thoughts on eternal life, that it would end up become meaningless because categorical desires would be exhausted. I recently heard Shelly Kagan expressing a similar opinion on Philosophy Bites:

I do think that eventually life would grow excruciatingly dreadful, boring, tedious no matter what it was filled with, but for all that it would still have been true that during the initial satisfying, richly rewarding 100 years, 500 years, or however long it would take before it got boring, those initial 500 years will still have been worth living, they were still good. To give a humdrum, everyday analogy: if you offer me a piece of chocolate, I love chocolate, thank you, thank you, thank you; if you give me a second piece of chocolate, I love chocolate; you offer me a third piece of chocolate, I say thank you thank you thank you. Now there must be some number...of pieces of chocolate at which I would say: no more. Chocolate is no longer a good thing for me at this point, I'm not enjoying it.

He goes on to claim that the initial period before the boredom is worth living, and I think that's right. But what is going on here? Why do some of us think that these pleasures will stop? Pleasures derive from the satisfaction of desires. But once a desire is satisfied the pleasure stops. I guess that means that, in the Bernard Williams scenario, we are saying that over time all our desires will be satisfied. So no more pleasure will be possible.

Conversely, we could say that pain derives from the imposition of 'undesires'. But there is an imbalance: there is an effectively never-ending supply of 'undesires', while there is no never-ending supply of desires. So pain is inevitable in a way that pleasure is not.

This perhaps derives from our nature: we need a fine balance to maintain our health - nutrition, warmth, water - so evolution has shaped us to maintain that fine balance. If the pleasure was never turned off we would soon over-indulge and do ourselves serious harm. Chronic pain does not pose the same immediate risk to our health, (although, granted, it can lead to damage in some circumstances), so stopping pain is simply not as important or pressing as stopping pleasure. *Perhaps this answers my question in parenthesis above.

So I think the asymmetry can be expressed simply as:

Satisfaction of desires is inevitable, so pleasure must end, but relief from undesires is not, so pain never will (end).

I think this is clear evidence for naturalism over an omnibenevolent god. Not a knock-out blow, to be sure, just another strike against God. Further, I think this asymmetry is inevitable given our nature. God need not have given us a nature that results in this asymmetry, so it's more likely we are not products of such a divine being, but of indifferent Nature.

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Concluding Comments - 2014 Greer-Heard Forum

A panel discussion concluding the Greer-Heard Forum.

Excellent response by Tim Maudlin to William Lane Craig's assertion that moral objectivity requires theism, @ c30mins, who also makes a good point about blind luck in his concluding comments.

"Let a thousand flowers bloom", Craig says in his concluding comments, which I tend to agree with, although theism does not have a good record on that score!

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If not Phlogiston, is this Supernatural?

Image via Wikipedia

The natural/supernatural debate rumbles on.

Chris Schoen responds to Coyne, Blackford, Boudry et al whilst sort of agreeing with Steve Zara, PZ et al, but also gets it wrong, in my opinion:

But I'll allow that just as it's a tautology to say "if we define the supernatural as that which science can't examine, then science can't examine it," so too is it a tautology to say that "if we include the supernatural among that which science can examine, then science can examine it." 

Both of these are word games. The question is whether there is a category of phenomena (empty or otherwise) which science is not equipped to study, and the obvious answer to this is yes.

But surely that's just a word game as well, because a 'category' is just a human construct, so he's defining the problem into existence too, and begging the question. Steve is much closer to this, I think, by insisting science investigates reality; the rest is arbitrary categorising. We cannot know a priori what exists, or if "a category of phenomena (empty or otherwise) which science is not equipped to study" exists. That our mind is capable of imagining such a category is no more proof of its existence than it is of Guanilo's Island. It just means our minds are capable of imagining the non-existent. And this is backed by cognitive and other studies of supernatural thinking (see Boyer's Religion Explained, for example). Of course, if in fact science cannot investigate something, we have no other way to investigate it either.

Science can't study what it can't define, quantify and observe.

Which just defines the problem into existence, which he mentioned earlier.

Since it is predicated on revealing laws, science cannot study that which is lawless ("capricious," in Russell's words.)

Well, surely it can; it can study anything that has an effect in reality. We may not be able to draw conclusions from those studies, however, and in particular I don't think we can conclude in favour of, or even prefer, a supernatural explanation.

I've often said, in response to theists who question how science has any jurisdiction over God, that it is so because theists say their God makes a difference in the world. That *difference* can be studied (and so far dismissed, as it happens). So science has historically dismissed claimed 'differences', and the vast number of these debunkings suggests that it's *reasonable* to infer that it will always be so. Not that it *will* always be so, but that it's a reasonable inference that it will always be so.

Realising their claims have been debunked, theists then look around and find some phenomenon that science has yet to explain and re-attach their theology to that phenomenon (consciousness, for example). And this will continue ad nauseam, since there will no doubt always be unexplained phenomena.

The claim that supernatural explanations cannot be accepted fundamentally derives from the simple observation that the phrase supernatural explanation is an oxymoron, and I don't see a way past that. 

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Rant!

Response to Dianelos Georgoudis comment on RD.NET:

So you think naturalists can't possibly believe in even *more* absurd things than theists can. That there are physical universes out there where you and I exist and where the Statue of Liberty every morning swims around Manhattan and then climbs back to her pedestal and quotes from the Bible in a booming voice - would you say that's *less* absurd than theistic beliefs? That there are universes out there where you and I will bodily rise after being dead for three days - that's also *less* absurd than theistic beliefs you think? Should I go on?

No, you shouldn't, since you are only betraying the flaws in your arguments. Listing a lot of strange *possible* scenarios for reality isn't going to help your case when speaking to *most* people (they've seen Jason and the Argonauts, you know!). *Your* proposition is that the reality we've uncovered by science is being maintained (for some reason) by a god, who is a person who is as perfect in all attributes as we can imagine, which means he must be perfectly stupid, perfectly red, perfectly epicene, since anyone can imagine that, who (for some reason) has given us a *material* universe to inhabit, in his mind (how?), rather than create us in his supernatural reality (whatever that is). This material universe he started, in his mind, 14 billion years ago, although he's timeless, so that's not a problem for him (but why bother with the time thing anyway, if being is possible without it? But how is it? Buggered if I know. But if he's timeless how does he interact with the temporal? Answers on a postcard, please); 10 billion or so years later the Earth is formed in a tiny corner of this vast (why? Is his mind mostly empty?) universe he's created. After much faffing around he creates life (? Or is the material universe responsible for abiogenesis? I presume you know DG, you think you know it all) and millions of species come and go on this pale blue dot (Why? Testing? Perhaps *conscious* life creator is not one of his perfect abilities?) until 200000 or 100000 years ago he finally cracks it and homo sapiens appears and then homo sapiens sapiens. He kills off other homo sapiens in case the *special* one thinks he's not so special, with his much coveted consciousness after all, and remember it's the consciousness that proves, err, that consciousness is fundamental reality (how again??). Millions of these special ones live short, horrid lives, full of fear and disease and ignorant of the one true god (Why? Surely their consciousness proves his existence - how again???). After thousands of years of this, the special ones have finally figured out farming and myth-making; one small tribe has even gone and decided that there is one true god (at f'ing last, he must have thought, how many more clues do they want? They're in my mind after all) but they are still screwing up good and proper, so he thinks: 'Christ knows why they can't figure out my perfect goodness, they seem to be just doing what *they* think is good, the heathens, my absolute perfection is obvious, I even put it on a stone and all - didn't mention stem cell research though, wasn't enough room - aha! That's it, Christ knows!' So he sends his son (who's him) down to put the record straight (still doesn't mention stem cell research) and to die (not really) for our sins (why?) and then be resurrected (but god can't die, can he?). And for good measure he does this in a primitive, backward part of the world, well away from scholars who could record the events as they happened, from different viewpoints and cultures, so there could be no dispute about the facts of the matter; this event is *so* important for the future of mankind that it's important to make sure that it's pretty damn hard to believe. Duh! And all for some vague need your god has for having lots of consciousnesses around who agree with him that he's the bee's knees (Why is that again?); so he's perfectly vain, too! And when all is said and done, you still haven’t got an explanation, because you have just magicked an uncaused being out of thin air to supposedly provide your explanation. Err, should I go on?

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