I used to think so too. Then I learned about Jo Cameron:
My other disagreement with neurodiversity advocates is that they insist no neurotype is better than any other. This is, as they say, a postmodernist lie. The best neurotype belongs to a 76 year old Scottish woman named Jo Cameron.
Cameron’s condition was discovered ten years ago, when her anaesthesiologist noticed she needed no pain medication after a difficult surgery. He checked her records and found she had never asked for pain medication, and moreover, that she described giving birth as basically painless. He got intrigued and recommended she talk to a team at University College London researching pain-related disorders.
The London team interviewed her and (let’s be frank) tortured her for several days, then reported their results. Cameron appeared to be incapable of any form of suffering. She could not feel pain. She had never been anxious or depressed. She described her feelings after her first husband’s suicide (from bipolar disorder) as:
“I looked at the state he was in, and I thought, Maybe it’s good,” she said. Cameron was back at work the day after the funeral. “It sounds cold. But you say to people, ‘I’m not being cold! Look, horrible things happen.’ I’m not in airy-fairy land. Horrible things are going to happen. You have to cope with it. You have to say to yourself, ‘I can’t help that person.’ You help them as much as you can, but when you can’t help them anymore, then you have to help everyone else.”
The most interesting feature of Cameron’s condition is her total normality. One might worry that a person who couldn’t suffer would be cold and psychopathic, but in fact Cameron was a special education teacher known for her kindness and patience with extremely tough students. One might worry that she might lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement, but in fact she has strong political opinions (she doesn’t like Boris Johnson) and attends protests. One might worry that she would be unable to relate to regular humans, but she’s been married twice and has two children, who she’s on great terms with. One might worry that she would lack the full range of artistic appreciation, but she reports crying at sad movies just like everyone else.
Cameron seems to be somewhere between pain insensitivity and asymbolia; she’s had some very mild stove-related accidents, but always seems to figure out the situation in time. She hasn’t lost the ability to sweat. She hasn’t lost the ability to smell. The only Special Bonus Side Effect the London team was able to find is that apparently her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars.
She is, as far as anyone can tell, totally fine and normal. She just doesn’t suffer.
For centuries, philosophers have praised suffering as a necessary part of the human condition. Without suffering, we couldn’t learn, couldn’t empathize, couldn’t be fully human. Jo Cameron forces us to ask: is that just cope?
If you step over enough disfigured corpses and look only at seemingly normal people, eventually you’ll find one who through some combination of luck and incomplete impairment seems to have made it work.
Some of this applies to me. The only time I’ve ever asked a doctor for “pain drugs” was to see if they could give me something to make injuries more painful so I was less likely to ignore the signs. The other day I noticed that I had cut myself because I saw bleeding, and I have no idea how or when it happened. If I play up this side of things, I could make a case for suffering being unnecessary and make some valid points.
At the same time, when I’ve faced similar loss/threat of loss, it hurt. And that hurt motivated quite significant changes to who I am as a person that definitely would not have happened if I were numb to it. On a brief overview like that, the difference isn’t gonna show up. Sure, my wife hasn’t killed herself, but that’s normal and I don’t have any reason to believe she would have otherwise. But if there were a missing corpse walking around living somewhere… who’d know?
There has to be some ability to detect harm, and motivation to correct it, or it won’t happen. At the same time, sensitive systems saturate easily, and saturated controllers don’t control well. Turning down the gain can be useful if you have reason to believe saturation is worse than insensitivity in the context in question, but avoiding one failure mode invites the other. It’s a discrimination problem, and not a trivial one. Ideally you train capacity and have both.
I sympathize with you having gone through all those experiences, and empathize with the hurt of loss since I’ve had no bigger motivation myself to make changes to my own life. That said, I don’t understand why you’re dismissing the example of Jo, who’s a clear counterexample to your last paragraph’s generalizations, and the reason I was bummed the Far Out Initiative didn’t pan out.
Because she’s not a counterexample at all. She’s a demonstration that you can get what superficially appears to be passable results while giving less fucks about things. The rule are the rules, and knowing the rules helps to highlight what’s really going on because you know where to look to find the “missing” downsides.
If I were as unmotivated as she was by the loss of her husband, there’s someone who might be dead right now. If she were as motivated as I was, her husband might be alive. The only reason “Her husband killed himself” doesn’t come off as completely damning to her way of going through life is because the narratives we tell about such things are designed to numb us of these things already. “She did what she could! It’s not her fault!”. Did she really? Do everything she could? Would he likely have killed himself if she grew up suffering more? Sure. Would it be bad to blame people too readily for their spouses’ suicides? Sure.
But what probability of saving your spouses life does it take to justify enduring suffering for a couple years as it tears you apart and allows you to rebuild into something that might have made the difference? Can you actually justify that the chance of making the difference is lower than this number? For her too? Confidently?
These are hard questions to answer affirmatively, and you don’t get the answer right except by luck if you’re running on defaults. And coming up with convincing answers to this does chip away at the suffering, to the extent that we actually find them convincing. The woman I know who lost her husband to suicide would probably say something similar to Jo, but I know it hurt. I know she cared. The reason she was able to get back on her feet relatively quickly and successfully is that she actively threaded that needle between the courage to change what she could and the serenity to accept what she can’t.
Jo’s story is of finding motivation to stop touching hot stoves somehow, leaving the “somehow” unspecified. And of failing big where it matters most. In a way that we give her a pass for because the rest of us are prone to fail there too. Potentially even more often, given how common and debilitating saturation can be around serious issues like that. Her story demonstrates that it’s possible to get by alright if we turn down our sensitivities a good bit, and blame luck for the bad things like her husband’s suicide more than we credit it with the good things like “not dying on the stove”.
It doesn’t demonstrate that it’s better, either in expectation or in her exact case. Or that the rules somehow don’t apply to her. Just that we generally have so little clue of what we’re doing that it’s easy to spin that way.
(I like beauty, and I do lean towards Tomas’ take on Chiang’s story.)
Tangent:
I used to think so too. Then I learned about Jo Cameron:
If you step over enough disfigured corpses and look only at seemingly normal people, eventually you’ll find one who through some combination of luck and incomplete impairment seems to have made it work.
Some of this applies to me. The only time I’ve ever asked a doctor for “pain drugs” was to see if they could give me something to make injuries more painful so I was less likely to ignore the signs. The other day I noticed that I had cut myself because I saw bleeding, and I have no idea how or when it happened. If I play up this side of things, I could make a case for suffering being unnecessary and make some valid points.
At the same time, when I’ve faced similar loss/threat of loss, it hurt. And that hurt motivated quite significant changes to who I am as a person that definitely would not have happened if I were numb to it. On a brief overview like that, the difference isn’t gonna show up. Sure, my wife hasn’t killed herself, but that’s normal and I don’t have any reason to believe she would have otherwise. But if there were a missing corpse walking around living somewhere… who’d know?
There has to be some ability to detect harm, and motivation to correct it, or it won’t happen. At the same time, sensitive systems saturate easily, and saturated controllers don’t control well. Turning down the gain can be useful if you have reason to believe saturation is worse than insensitivity in the context in question, but avoiding one failure mode invites the other. It’s a discrimination problem, and not a trivial one. Ideally you train capacity and have both.
I sympathize with you having gone through all those experiences, and empathize with the hurt of loss since I’ve had no bigger motivation myself to make changes to my own life. That said, I don’t understand why you’re dismissing the example of Jo, who’s a clear counterexample to your last paragraph’s generalizations, and the reason I was bummed the Far Out Initiative didn’t pan out.
Because she’s not a counterexample at all. She’s a demonstration that you can get what superficially appears to be passable results while giving less fucks about things. The rule are the rules, and knowing the rules helps to highlight what’s really going on because you know where to look to find the “missing” downsides.
If I were as unmotivated as she was by the loss of her husband, there’s someone who might be dead right now. If she were as motivated as I was, her husband might be alive. The only reason “Her husband killed himself” doesn’t come off as completely damning to her way of going through life is because the narratives we tell about such things are designed to numb us of these things already. “She did what she could! It’s not her fault!”. Did she really? Do everything she could? Would he likely have killed himself if she grew up suffering more? Sure. Would it be bad to blame people too readily for their spouses’ suicides? Sure.
But what probability of saving your spouses life does it take to justify enduring suffering for a couple years as it tears you apart and allows you to rebuild into something that might have made the difference? Can you actually justify that the chance of making the difference is lower than this number? For her too? Confidently?
These are hard questions to answer affirmatively, and you don’t get the answer right except by luck if you’re running on defaults. And coming up with convincing answers to this does chip away at the suffering, to the extent that we actually find them convincing. The woman I know who lost her husband to suicide would probably say something similar to Jo, but I know it hurt. I know she cared. The reason she was able to get back on her feet relatively quickly and successfully is that she actively threaded that needle between the courage to change what she could and the serenity to accept what she can’t.
Jo’s story is of finding motivation to stop touching hot stoves somehow, leaving the “somehow” unspecified. And of failing big where it matters most. In a way that we give her a pass for because the rest of us are prone to fail there too. Potentially even more often, given how common and debilitating saturation can be around serious issues like that. Her story demonstrates that it’s possible to get by alright if we turn down our sensitivities a good bit, and blame luck for the bad things like her husband’s suicide more than we credit it with the good things like “not dying on the stove”.
It doesn’t demonstrate that it’s better, either in expectation or in her exact case. Or that the rules somehow don’t apply to her. Just that we generally have so little clue of what we’re doing that it’s easy to spin that way.