Biases on Sentience
Empathetic verbal feedback from others has been shown to alleviate the intensity of experimental pain on an experiment on pain perception and empathy in humans.
In the experiment they created a dedicated setup mimicking a medical environment where people enduring painful stimuli received empathetic or unempathetic comments from others. Positive (empathetic) feedback was able to reduce pain intensity perception, in agreement with previous theoretical models and experimental studies, while negative (unempathetic) feedback did not induce consistent changes in pain intensity reports.
Placebos are so effective that placebo placebos work: A pain cream with no active ingredients worked even when not used by the patient. Just owning the cream was enough to reduce pain.
There are two very related questions: “Is there a symmetry between suffering and enjoyment?” and “Can suffering be compensated with enjoyment?”
Investigating the way in which we respond to these questions is very relevant, since we may have biases or blindness that are encouraging to make bad decisions, such as the survivorship bias. By better understanding and evaluating suffering and enjoyment we can more easily minimize suffering and maximize enjoyment, as well as compensate for bad experiences, if such a thing were possible.
This is a list of some fallacies used to deceive oneself. They are similar to cognitive biases or argumentative fallacies but of greater importance and more difficult to prove. Probably they have an evolutionary component and anthropic as well.
About Life and death:
– I’ve always existed.
– I will never die.
– Not existing would be horrible, terrible. It’s the worst thing that can happen to me.
One person suggests that past experience with suffering is “a reason to avoid fighting suffering. Your own experiences have biased you about how bad suffering is. It’s like someone who keeps a year of food in his basement because he had to go without food at times when he was a kid, or checking where your keys are 20 times a day because you once forgot your keys.” I replied: “Some of the life experiences that make us unique we choose to keep as intrinsic moral values, while others we disregard. If we didn’t keep any of the ‘biases’ that our development instilled in us, we might be paperclip maximizers instead. My moral biases are what make me me.”