We evolved pleasure and pain signals to guide behaviors that would increase our fitness. Pleasure normally indicates that things are good for us; pain normally indicates that things are bad for us.
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Even in a world with unhealthy pleasures like sugar, I still think there’s overall significant positive correlation between what feels good, what’s good for you, and what’s good for others. Most of the time.
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The Gom Jabbar engineers a situation where the exact opposite is true. You put your hand in a box that stimulates nerve pain. You have a poisoned needle at your neck. If you pull your hand out to relieve the pain, you die.
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The Gom Jabbar tests whether you have an *intent* to live, independent of the pain-and-pleasure *instinct* to live.
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The Bene Gesserit say that those who fail the test are “animals” and those who pass it are “human.”
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Animals, even very primitive ones like C. elegans, have something like pain and pleasure; at any rate you can use classical conditioning on them. But could any animals pass the Gom Jabbar test?
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(Come to think of it, that’s actually not a question with an obvious answer; prey animals like sheep can be unbelievably stoic, since noticeably injured sheep are targets to predators.)
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But going back to people. The question “if you could feel pure bliss and then die, or feel pure torture and then live, which would you choose?” is actually a tough one.
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I think evolution probably *has* selected for the ability to pass the Gom Jabbar test in humans. Iirc all modern humans passed through a drought-and-famine bottleneck. We may have needed to do counter-instinctual things to survive.
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It seems clear that in radically changing environments, individuals who can seek survival faster than evolution can change the reward function will have a fitness advantage.
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The Bene Gesserit, in Dune, were a response to technology. They thought developing this “survival intent” in people was necessary for humanity to cope with technological change.
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Unfortunately, Dune is fiction, not a how-to manual. We don’t know how to make humans who are all-round just better at being human. Would be cool though. Open problem.
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