There are a number of comments here equating hedonium with the supposed bliss of nonattachment.
Hedonium is a fictional concept and its nature is not fully pinned down. But there are a few potential differences.
Nonattachment is usually described as relief from mental causes of pain, not from pain as such. This passes for bliss because so much human suffering is psychological.
It is an interesting question, the extent to which even the negative valence of physical pain can be attenuated or removed by purely psychological means.
Wikipedia has a “list of political self-immolations”. We could compare the Buddhist monks who did it during the Vietnam war, to the political protestors who did it during the Gaza war. If I compare Aaron Bushnell (Gaza) with Thích Quảng Đức (Vietnam), Bushnell seems to have done it much more as an effort of passion and will, whereas Quảng Đức was more disciplined. We could ask whether the latter’s training in nonattachment actually made the pain less painful, or whether his relative discipline came from other sources like culture and a life spent preparing to die, or whether these other sources in themselves changed the feeling of the pain.
A less horrifying example is provided by Celia Green’s experiment, in her twenties, of going to the dentist to get two teeth removed, and having it done without anesthetic, in order to test her theory that the painful sensations could be rendered neutral so long as one did not oppose them with the will. In other words, affirm the sensation, and there is no conflict with the will (wanting it to stop), and the painfulness as such goes away.
Whether or not even these are examples of bliss according to nonattachment theory, I don’t think this is how people think of hedonium normally. They think of it in terms of pleasure, a kind of maximum possible pleasure that is prevented from diminishing (let alone being replaced by pain) by special engineering, e.g. design of the material substrate according to presently unknown psychophysical principles.
Since the nature of hedonium is underspecified and the true psychophysics is unknown, you could assert that universal nonattachment really is the closest thing to hedonium that our reality allows. But usually people have something more like, differences in the nerves so that pain signals just don’t get sent. In real life we have the phenomenon of “congenital insensitivity to pain”, the people who jam their hand in a door and don’t feel pain, for example. Again, it would be interesting to know if the neurological difference here has any element of nonattachment to it, i.e. whether these are phenotypes with an inbuilt disposition towards nonattachment, or if it is just that they lack certain receptors and so they are pain-blind just as someone can be color-blind—the relevant qualia just don’t happen.
One more observation about this story: like many readers, I had assumed that all the humans, including the child narrator, were going to die when the “shockwave” reaches them, rather than being uplifted into ecstasy. Whether or not this is what the author intends, I would like to know if the commenters who advocate for hedonium shared this assumption.
Some forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I had to have two teeth out. Because I seriously disliked the idea of having my consciousness invaded, even by the sensations of injection and anaesthetised extraction, I thought about the psychology of pain. As a result, I had the two teeth out with anaesthesia and without any unpleasantness to myself.
People who wish to relate this to something already know about and hence of no interest for further research often suggest that this was self-hypnosis. Actually it was not. In the case of the extractions it would be possible to maintain that I had been giving the matter so much thought that some sort of self-hypnosis had resulted, but several years later, with no preparation of any sort, the technique worked just as well when I had several holes drilled for fillings.
On this later occasion, the dentist (a new one) said afterwards, ‘Well, do you feel pain or don’t you?’ He said that he could usually tell when he was drilling on a nerve by the salivation, but he could not in my case. This illustrates the fact that this technique, or techniques that might be developed from it, eliminates some of the physiological side effects of pain and may eliminate the shock reaction associated with severe injury or major operations.
I don’t believe there has been any independent corroboration of this claim, so make of it what you will.
My model of how the human minds works predicts hypnosis (which can enable one to not experience pain as aversive or rob banks or various other things) and also the model of the mind also predicts “things not labeled as hypnosis (but which reminds people of hypnosis)”… but it often requires a certain “mental orienting” process, and I wondered if her way of orienting also works. Thanks for finding the quote! <3
It occurs to me that if you want to experiment with Celia Green’s pain idea, a less extreme version than dentistry without anesthetic might be waiting until you have an itch and then seeing if you can attend to the sensation with equanimity instead of scratching it.
I believe other people who want to do simple home experiments related to pain tolerance often use ice water. You can either stick your hand in it or even immerse your whole body, if you like, and see how long you can endure it or train yourself to “accept” the pain or other mental techniques for pain tolerance. It’s easy to do, and as long as you don’t stay in long enough to give yourself hypothermia or frostbite, completely harmless—it may even be good for you though the jury still seems to be out on that.
There are a number of comments here equating hedonium with the supposed bliss of nonattachment.
Hedonium is a fictional concept and its nature is not fully pinned down. But there are a few potential differences.
Nonattachment is usually described as relief from mental causes of pain, not from pain as such. This passes for bliss because so much human suffering is psychological.
It is an interesting question, the extent to which even the negative valence of physical pain can be attenuated or removed by purely psychological means.
Wikipedia has a “list of political self-immolations”. We could compare the Buddhist monks who did it during the Vietnam war, to the political protestors who did it during the Gaza war. If I compare Aaron Bushnell (Gaza) with Thích Quảng Đức (Vietnam), Bushnell seems to have done it much more as an effort of passion and will, whereas Quảng Đức was more disciplined. We could ask whether the latter’s training in nonattachment actually made the pain less painful, or whether his relative discipline came from other sources like culture and a life spent preparing to die, or whether these other sources in themselves changed the feeling of the pain.
A less horrifying example is provided by Celia Green’s experiment, in her twenties, of going to the dentist to get two teeth removed, and having it done without anesthetic, in order to test her theory that the painful sensations could be rendered neutral so long as one did not oppose them with the will. In other words, affirm the sensation, and there is no conflict with the will (wanting it to stop), and the painfulness as such goes away.
Whether or not even these are examples of bliss according to nonattachment theory, I don’t think this is how people think of hedonium normally. They think of it in terms of pleasure, a kind of maximum possible pleasure that is prevented from diminishing (let alone being replaced by pain) by special engineering, e.g. design of the material substrate according to presently unknown psychophysical principles.
Since the nature of hedonium is underspecified and the true psychophysics is unknown, you could assert that universal nonattachment really is the closest thing to hedonium that our reality allows. But usually people have something more like, differences in the nerves so that pain signals just don’t get sent. In real life we have the phenomenon of “congenital insensitivity to pain”, the people who jam their hand in a door and don’t feel pain, for example. Again, it would be interesting to know if the neurological difference here has any element of nonattachment to it, i.e. whether these are phenotypes with an inbuilt disposition towards nonattachment, or if it is just that they lack certain receptors and so they are pain-blind just as someone can be color-blind—the relevant qualia just don’t happen.
One more observation about this story: like many readers, I had assumed that all the humans, including the child narrator, were going to die when the “shockwave” reaches them, rather than being uplifted into ecstasy. Whether or not this is what the author intends, I would like to know if the commenters who advocate for hedonium shared this assumption.
Out of curiosity… How did Celia Green’s experiment go?
On her website she wrote:
I don’t believe there has been any independent corroboration of this claim, so make of it what you will.
My model of how the human minds works predicts hypnosis (which can enable one to not experience pain as aversive or rob banks or various other things) and also the model of the mind also predicts “things not labeled as hypnosis (but which reminds people of hypnosis)”… but it often requires a certain “mental orienting” process, and I wondered if her way of orienting also works. Thanks for finding the quote! <3
I wrote about it here. The full details are in her book Advice to Clever Children if anyone wants to see the original.
It occurs to me that if you want to experiment with Celia Green’s pain idea, a less extreme version than dentistry without anesthetic might be waiting until you have an itch and then seeing if you can attend to the sensation with equanimity instead of scratching it.
I believe other people who want to do simple home experiments related to pain tolerance often use ice water. You can either stick your hand in it or even immerse your whole body, if you like, and see how long you can endure it or train yourself to “accept” the pain or other mental techniques for pain tolerance. It’s easy to do, and as long as you don’t stay in long enough to give yourself hypothermia or frostbite, completely harmless—it may even be good for you though the jury still seems to be out on that.