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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Replying to @s_r_constantin
The Bene Gesserit do it by breeding. Dune explores ways of being human, not being humanist. Being human in the Bene Gesserit sense (or the Fremen sense) is abhorrent to us. From the perspective of the Bene Gesserit, we are only half human, from our perspective, they are fascist.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
My view of fascism is the creation of a scalable group that fully subscribes to a totalitarian ideology that serves evolutionary goals, and defines the value of the individual as its contribution to the group (if the net value is negative, the individual is eliminated).
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Replying to @Plinz @s_r_constantin
Both your line of thinking and Sarah's can contribute by a review of the paradoxes Baudelaire, Bataille and Lacan wrote about as it pertained to pleasure and pain. They rightly understood that in their limit pain and pleasure lose their categories and become indistinct.
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