Reification and Suicide

Metaphysics and Epistemology
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I was thinking about this topic this morning, and to those who say that suicide is immoral regardless of circumstance (or almost, given that I understand an exception is sometimes made for those whose consciousness has been destroyed), I have a bit of a thought experiment:

When saying to a man, “It is yet moral that you live, despite a tortured existence.” I would ask, “What for?” Hopefully there is some good answer to this question. Hopefully it is some variant of pleasure and/or happiness that a man is supposed to expect through his existence, so that, though a man may be tortured he can also be imagined happy (even if I continue to insist that this is akin to imagining a squared circle, given what torture is, and what happiness is and what it requires, in reality). And if I were to compare the pains of torture (which I hold to be a “disvalue”) against the riches of whatever happiness would be available despite that torture, I would be told that I was wrongheaded in my calculation: that the pain should count as a “zero” (not a disvalue at all) and that only the happiness should be recognized or found meaningful. To commit suicide then means only to flush away the value of that happiness, and there is nothing to be gained through the elimination of the pain itself.

I find that stance ridiculous, as it does not take the reality of what pain is and how it functions into account, but all right. Let’s deal with that approach for a moment. Here is an example and a question, then. It is a highly contrived example, and not something I find remotely realistic (as opposed to those who today are dealing with crippling, unending pain; those people are quite real, and those who argue that suicide is necessarily immoral are doing them a great disservice)… but I hope it will be acceptable as a rhetorical device. Consider:

Suppose a man who can expect to live 100 years. The first 99 years, 11 months, and 29 days, we know will be nothing but unremitting, excruciating pain and emotional despair. Yet the final day of existence… will be quite nice, all things considered. There will, at the least, be a moment on that final day that will be joyful.

All right. Put us as the beginning of this journey. What would we say to this man? Knowing what we know, would we advise him that the only thing which matters – the only item worth taking into account – is the fact of momentary joy at the distant end of 100 years of misery? And that to bear 100 years of misery (or 1000, or 1,000,000) for a moment’s joy is necessarily “worth it,” and that to refuse such a journey would be sacrificial? Or would we rather say that it is rational to take both the expected pleasures and pains into account? For that is my position.

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I think it is a fine thought experiment. I think it frames two things. One is your main idea: How does one compare pain too suffering, or when does enduring pain become sacrifice? Your position is, seemingly, that unrelenting pain and torture is that point. Epist’s position is that at no point does enduring pain become sacrifice, as long as one has the capacity to think, i.e. live according to man’s nature - no matter how long it lasts. My position is Epist’s, as far as I understand it.

But then there’s another question to ask: what is excruciating pain and emotional despair? I’m lead to wonder what is excruciating pain is, because I suspect what is excruciating to you isn’t going to be as bad for me. I honestly have a high pain tolerance, and I doubt that level of pain exists without some error of thought or choosing to focus. For example, Buddhist monks, leaving aside any error about ethics this implies, are quite amazing at enduring pain most likely due to their meditation skills. It isn’t a matter of them embracing pain, or attempting to ignore the pain. Simply, they recognize it as present, and that’s it.

One way to think of this is that Buddhist monks want to erase value, thus nothing will be able to harm their values. This is nihilistic, and anti-life.  

Or, another way is that they recognize how pain is meaningless, a zero, and adopt some mental skills to manage what life throws at them. To them, 99 years of despair and suffering is due to the wrong frame of mind. This mirrors the Stoics. Pain and suffering, in the usual sense people mean it, is due to frame of mind. With proper practice and study, this pain is entirely bearable. If you have the skills, your thought experiment wouldn’t make sense. The real question is what pain is in the first place.

If the pain is a promise, he also knows it’s time to start acquiring the proper frame of mind.

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22 hours ago, DonAthos said:

It’s a good question, and the first thing it inspires in me is echoes of Randian quotes about not accepting “the almost,” “the halfway,” and so-forth. Maybe I’m mis-remembering. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

No, I think that is the central issue; I’m only postponing it because the epistemological part is both simpler and more fundamental. My primary argument (which I am still working up to) concerns precisely that.

 

22 hours ago, DonAthos said:

When the philosopher then stands up to say, “Maybe so, but any pain must yet be borne… because morality demands it!” Well, against that I say phooey. I am here to enjoy life and that is all; you will not push upon me a painful existence because you believe I somehow owe it to the universe.

Well - yeah. Any morality that commands its adherents to suffer for the sake of suffering, itself, isn’t worth any further consideration. I don’t believe anyone has suggested that; even the strategy outlined in the OP was predicated on the (wrong) belief that it’d result in the happiness of the practitioner.

And to be clear, I’m not proposing that anybody owes it to the universe to survive. I’m proposing that they owe it to themselves.

 

22 hours ago, DonAthos said:

A person must do the best he can with the information he has available, in chess and in life.

As you pointed out, though, this is not to be taken lightly; it is, in fact, the weightiest matter anyone has or will ever consider. Nothing else even comes close.

 

In law, we recognize that we cannot sentence another human being to death unless we know them to be completely irredeemable, without any shadow of a reasonable doubt.

Shouldn’t we pass the verdicts of our own lives with much higher standards than we’d use for any random psychopath?

 

22 hours ago, DonAthos said:

… whether you think this essential to the argument or not, I continue to insist on certain degenerative diseases as being a worthy example – in part because this is a real life issue which inspires real life suicides …

I agree, wholeheartedly. Let’s delve into that.

If you can find any situation in which we could know someone to be doomed to permanent misery, regardless of their actions, I’ll concede the point. Since my point is that no such cases exist, a single example would suffice.

 

You mentioned Alzheimer’s, earlier. Let me brush up on the medical details and we can examine (probably in its own thread) whether or not it constitutes an unwinnable scenario.

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14 hours ago, DonAthos said:

Suppose a man who can expect to live 100 years. The first 99 years, 11 months, and 29 days, we know will be nothing but unremitting, excruciating pain and emotional despair.

How do we know he’ll be in despair?

 

I mean, 99 years of constant physical pain is one thing (and even that seems wide open to solution), but 99 years of nonstop despair is quite a claim to make.

What if he gets a hobby? What if he falls in love? What if he finds some really good drugs? What if, after the first year, he simply becomes accustomed to the pain and the despair - and they cease to actually impede him?

 

I know this is one of those scientific details, but it’s not actually possible to wire neurons up that way; if you keep stimulating one of them day and night, without rest, you’ll kill that synapse and numb it to your stimulation. And the fact that individual neurons cannot receive a certain stimulus constantly, in perpetuity, provides ample grounds to question whether an entire brain could.

I suspect you’d just stop caring about it, eventually.

 

But this is why I’d like to get into some real-world examples.

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1 hour ago, Harrison Danneskjold said:

If you can find any situation in which we could know someone to be doomed to permanent misery, regardless of their actions, I’ll concede the point. Since my point is that no such cases exist, a single example would suffice.

And to be excessively clear:

 

I do not believe there is any situation in which it’s impossible for someone to ever be happy again - regardless of their actions.

There certainly are situations which will not lead to happiness, if left unchecked or handled stupidly. There is no such thing as a Kobayashi Maru.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwED4C5FJuo

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21 hours ago, Eiuol said:

…when does enduring pain become sacrifice? Your position is, seemingly, that unrelenting pain and torture is that point.

I think that’s a point at which enduring pain becomes sacrificial, yes. There is sometimes value in enduring pain for the sake of something to be gained at the far end – that “something” must be increasingly valuable, depending on the pain involved.

There is certainly a question of how we weigh these, in any given circumstance, but the first point is that there is a calculation to be made; that pain is not “nothing,” not “zero,” but it counts as part of our decision making.

21 hours ago, Eiuol said:

But then there’s another question to ask: what is excruciating pain and emotional despair?

I’m sorry, Eiuol, but I can’t play these sorts of games anymore. If you truly don’t know what “excruciating pain” or “emotional despair” is, then you can find out on your own time.

13 hours ago, Harrison Danneskjold said:

And to be clear, I’m not proposing that anybody owes it to the universe to survive. I’m proposing that they owe it to themselves.

But these kinds of sentiments always leave out the “for what purpose.” You’re proposing that a man in constant pain (and please remember that epistemologue framed the kind of pain we’re discussing as “torture,” etc.; we’re not talking about a hangnail that won’t heal) owes it to himself to survive… for what purpose? In order to endure yet more pain? What precisely does he stand to gain by continuing on?

If you believe that a person can be in constant torture and be happy simultaneously (because he continues to think thoughts… or something), then you have a mistaken understanding of how man achieves happiness, and the vital relationship between what we actually experience in the world (importantly including pleasure/pain) and our conscious and emotional well-being. What we do matters, and what happens to us matters, too. Earthly happiness is not some infinitely malleable thing, and if, for instance, you’re Prometheus bound to the rocks with your guts eaten away for eternity, you are not going to enjoy yourself. That’s the point to torture.

In fact, it might be instructive to consider that “torture” is related to “torment,” and the defining characteristic of “hell” is that it involves constant torment. In hell, you don’t have to worry about survival – you’re not going anywhere – but that’s not a selling feature. So why not be in hell, undergo torment forever, and yet be happy? Because that’s not how happiness works.

12 hours ago, Harrison Danneskjold said:

I mean, 99 years of constant physical pain is one thing (and even that seems wide open to solution), but 99 years of nonstop despair is quite a claim to make.

What if he gets a hobby? What if he falls in love? What if he finds some really good drugs? What if, after the first year, he simply becomes accustomed to the pain and the despair - and they cease to actually impede him?

If the thought experiment does not work for you for whatever reason, it does not, but the terms of the thought experiment are that we know those things will not happen. (What if Rand’s Robot turns out to have a weakness, and it’s not immortal anymore? Then it ceases to be the thought experiment that it is.)

12 hours ago, Harrison Danneskjold said:

There certainly are situations which will not lead to happiness, if left unchecked or handled stupidly. There is no such thing as a Kobayashi Maru.

As much as I love Star Trek, I think that the Kobayashi Maru analogy is not serving so much as confusing you.

I would agree with you that there’s no such thing as a “no win scenario,” as such. But. In context, there might very well be points at which a person cannot achieve some objective, including his own survival, or, I would argue, his own happiness. This is because both survival and happiness are real things; they have identity; they have a nature; and they cannot be satisfied without respect to the reality of the context in which a person finds himself.

Take the moment before a nuclear strike, and you stand at ground zero. If we roll time back sufficiently, perhaps we could argue that things didn’t have to be as they are, that other choices could have been made (by you, by others), but when you find yourself standing at ground zero… well, that might be the end of your journey. Game over.

Could you construct some sci-fi scenario to extricate yourself? Perhaps. Maybe you’re Indiana Jones and you hide in the world’s sturdiest refrigerator – I’ve seen that happen. But there are people who live in the world who get into situations that they cannot extricate themselves from, whether through their faults, the faults of others, or happenstance. Again: this is not to propose that there are unwinnable scenarios, as such, but only that there are scenarios which, in context (given a particular time, place, and person), are unwinnable. When you’re reduced to your King in chess, you’re not going to mate your opponent.

When my grandfather got Alzheimer’s, he was not going to overcome it. This is not to say that Alzheimer’s will never be solved – that there is no way out, forever – but it was not going to happen for my grandfather, and it was moreover reasonable to believe that at the time. Had he wanted to spare himself that descent into night (along with sparing others the same, which can certainly be of value), it would have been reasonable for him to commit suicide. That’s the same calculation my father makes, when he insists that he would rather me help him die than suffer what my grandfather endured. And it is a rational, moral calculation to make.

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I think it’s easier to say that suicide is always wrong when you are not in terrible pain. This is one of my issues with Stoicism - the Stoic implicitly argues “I can practice virtue now, so I could practice virtue under any circumstances, even in terrible pain.” In practice, this is not the case, because there is no mind body dichotomy. When the body is subjected to terrible pain over a long period of time, the mind is unable to continue to function rationally and gradually becomes more and more detached from reality.

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56 minutes ago, DonAthos said:

I’m sorry, Eiuol, but I can’t play these sorts of games anymore. If you truly don’t know what “excruciating pain” or “emotional despair” is, then you can find out on your own time.

You’re better then this, Don! One must always define their terms. Pain isn’t simply a physical sensation, there are mental aspects, too. So when you say “excruciating pain”, I know what you mean, but what I don’t know anything at all about the pain. I know enough to say it is so vaguely defined that we can’t reason about it well. Pain is a subjective thing - we would, for example disagree with Schopenhauer that there’s pain and suffering all over, and so on. Perhaps being ALIVE is excruciating to him. So, presumably  your experiment is a rational person. Yet my position is what could possibly make it in fact unbearable? He’d need to be in the wrong mental state as far as -ending- his life and this eternal pain, and thus irrational or immoral. 

It’s like asking what Judas should do in the 9th circle of hell. His torture is literally his own fault. Should he kill himself? It hardly matters. Forget that he’s already dead - imagine his soul carried on. His excruciating pain is failing to be moral, it isn’t only his physical dilemma.

Like with Prometheus, there is some kind of hope to become free somehow. Why should he believe Zeus that it is eternal pain? Point is, the long-lasting pain experiment applies to these myths, too.

Pain only counts insofar as you need to figure out how to deal with it and diminish it. It is essentially a zero, not that we act as if it is not there.

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1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

You’re better then this, Don! One must always define their terms…

Perhaps you’re right, but a few questions first:

What do you mean by “you’re”? What do you mean by “better”? What do you mean by “then”? What do you mean by “this”? What do you mean by “Don”? What do you mean by “one”? What do you mean by “must”? What do you mean by “always”? What do you mean by “define”? What do you mean by “their”? What do you mean by “terms”?

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…when you say “excruciating pain”, I know what you mean…

All right.

Quote

…but what I don’t know anything at all about the pain.

Do you know what “pain” is, Eiuol, or do you not?

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3 hours ago, DonAthos said:

Perhaps you’re right, but a few questions first:

I don’t know why it bothers you that I’m asking to qualify it better. It’s vague. I don’t know about the pain, as in to talk about pain, mental state info matters. Pain isn’t something you just have like cancer - cancer is not something impacted by thought. Thought experiments are to provoke thought, so I’m getting you to question the nature of pain. I’m suggesting that either answer is pointless, the person already is at fault (failing to find ways to deal with adversity), or the person’s rational capacity is already ruined (e.g. installing your brain in a vat to feel only pain for 99 years and pleasure for 1 minute denies you of employing rationality).

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3 hours ago, Eiuol said:

I don’t know why it bothers you that I’m asking to qualify it better. It’s vague.

I don’t know why you believe anything bothers me; I’m only asking you to explain the meaning of the words you’re using so I know exactly what you’re asking me to do. Why does it bother you that I’m asking you to clarify yourself?

Speaking of: what do you mean by “vague”? That word seems a little indistinct and inspecific to me…

3 hours ago, Eiuol said:

…I’m getting you to question the nature of pain.

And indeed you have (in part because I now have a headache). In my search for deeper meaning – what is this “pain” thing others speak of…? – I stumbled upon an old thread also dealing with suicide (one of several, as you might guess). In it I found this quote, which seems to come close to my own sentiment:

On 12/12/2004 at 9:29 AM, stephen_speicher said:

It is obviously an extremely serious choice, but if circumstances are such that happiness is not possible, if the pain of living overwhelms the desire for life, than suicide can be both a rational and moral act. The obvious example of this extreme act is a person who is so physically ill with a terminal disease, so racked with excruciating pain and so debilitated that living is no longer a positive value.

I say “seems to come close to my own sentiment,” because unfortunately stephen_speicher uses the inscrutable term “excruciating pain,” and I cannot make either heads or tails of what he means by it. Do you have any idea?

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On 11/19/2016 at 5:11 PM, itsjames said:

epistemologue, could you state your basic thesis in just a few sentences perhaps?

Sure, this is my basic point:

Suicide is a contradiction to the fundamental moral philosophy of Objectivism. It is the sacrifice of life for death; the sacrifice of the good for the sake of a zero. Even in the example of someone who is suffering extreme loss or torture, the achievement of values and happiness is still possible, life is still worth living, and suicide is still an irrational self-sacrifice.

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On 11/19/2016 at 7:06 PM, itsjames said:

In extreme cases, clear thinking might not be possible, even if you are still conscious. There is a scene from the movie “Fury” that comes to mind, where a soldier is burning alive, and without a second’s thought he pulls out his pistol and shoots himself in the head. I’m not an expert on Objectivism’s views on morality, but in my view, calling what that soldier did a “moral” issue is quite silly. There was no planning or thinking there, he just did it. Does that make him “immoral”? Does morality even apply in such a crazy situation? I don’t see how it could.

Pulling out a pistol and shooting yourself in the head is not an unconscious bodily function, it’s a volitionally chosen act.

Morality does apply in such a situation. I haven’t seen that particular movie or that scene, but taking the example where you are on fire, the moral thing to do is to essentially stop, drop, and roll - i.e. to attempt to put the fire out and prevent further injury. 

Morality applies to all situations in which one is capable of volitional action. Among the volitional actions available to you (whether they are mental, such as thinking, remembering, imagining, creating, deducing, etc., or physical, such as speaking, moving your body, etc.), some of these actions will be irrational and some will be rational, some actions will work against your life and happiness, and some will work for it, and some will work for it better than others. The moral ideal is to choose the actions which will advance your life and happiness the _most _of them all, the optimal actions - to deliberately choose lesser actions instead, are irrational, immoral self-sacrifices in comparison.

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On 11/20/2016 at 1:51 PM, MisterSwig said:

But it’s hard to fault a former athlete for wanting to die because he has no use of his legs or arms, or both. I mostly wanted to stress the importance of treating these cases on an individual basis.

In psychology, what Eiuol and I have described is called resilience. It’s the ability to live a good life despite tremendous suffering or loss. 

Resilience is the ability to adjust your expectations and your goals according to your circumstances - even in the face of a dramatic change of your circumstances, as in the case of devastating loss or suffering. It’s the ability to stay optimistic and look on the positive side - to seek and to find good things that are within your range.

Eiuol used the example of Christopher Reeves:

On 11/19/2016 at 7:45 PM, Eiuol said:

If you give up life because you were once a famous actor and are now a quadripalegic is plainly cowardly and foolish. Christopher Reeves still led a worthwhile life - that’s who I am referring to. To give up as soon as life is a bit tough or needing to alter what -usually- makes you happiest. Changing course isn’t the end.

If Reeves committed suicide he would have achieved less than he was capable of - it would have been self-sacrificial. And yet if Reeves held himself to the same standard of being an able-bodied Superman actor, something more than what he was capable of, he would have achieved nothing but failure - and would not have achieved the things he could, which would be equally self-destructive and self-sacrificial.

So the fault you would find with a former athlete or actor who decides to commit suicide because they can no longer pursue their previous career, is that they lack resilience (incidentally, watch the movie Me Before You for a dramatization of exactly this issue).

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On 11/21/2016 at 11:52 AM, MisterSwig said:

So, I ask you, if the football player with CTE or the soldier with dangerous psychological problems cannot sustain even a minimum, safe level of rationality, how can they be expected to operate on the premise of life? They were once a sort of superhuman, but now they’ve been reduced to the subhuman level, where a proper human existence is not available to them.

Are you just asking about a football player who has lost the ability to pursue the career he loves? My answer to that is that he ought to have resilience, he should find other values in life that make it worth living.

But that seems distinct from this other idea, that someone is damaged in such a way that the ability to think rationally is limited, which you also add the assumption that they are “dangerous”. My answer to that is to seek treatment, even physically restrain one’s self to prevent uncontrollable outbursts, take whatever actions are necessary in the context in which they now find themselves in order to seek out the positive achievements that are still possible to them.

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23 minutes ago, epistemologue said:

So the fault you would find with a former athlete or actor who decides to commit suicide because they can no longer pursue their previous career, is that they lack resilience

Is it “resilience” to so thoroughly depend upon the assistance of able-bodied people in order to simply survive? Or to be able to breathe even? If I’m totally paralyzed, it’s not resilience that keeps me alive and going. It’s my willingness to live as a fully dependent entity. I must be willing to burden others with my prolonged desire to live. These are the sorts of details you miss and don’t consider when you make living a kind of duty. When you decide that life itself is valuable, regardless of the kind of life it is.

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On 11/28/2016 at 1:04 PM, Eiuol said:

the pain ITSELF has at least more value than a zero by making yourself stronger.

This isn’t what I meant. I’m not saying that pain as such is a positive value, but rather experience as such is a positive value, and so the experience of pain is a value as an experience - although because it’s a _painful _experience, that means it’s not the fullest, most positive experience that you could be having otherwise.

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33 minutes ago, epistemologue said:

Are you just asking about a football player who has lost the ability to pursue the career he loves?

No. Watch the movie Concussion.

I think you should study real examples of people who kill themselves for extraordinary reasons, before expecting resilience from such people. There are cases where these people were likely ten times more resilient than you or I could ever be. We’re talking about people who went into battle as a career, either on the football field or in an actual war. And here you are pontificating on a philosophy forum, generally suggesting that they were cowards for committing suicide when they suffered from crippling diseases. 

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14 minutes ago, epistemologue said:

I’m not saying that pain as such is a positive value, but rather experience as such is a positive value, and so the experience of pain is a value as an experience - although because it’s a _painful _experience, that means it’s not the fullest, most positive experience that you could be having otherwise.

Ah, a painful experience is a positive value (because all experience is a positive value)… just not the most positive value possible. Having your arm cut off is good (qua experience), just not so good as eating ice cream. Makes perfect sense.

If a person were slated to spend the rest of his life in a literal torture chamber, slowly having body parts cut off until he dies, he’d surely want to stick around for all of that – hang on as long as possible – for that sweet, sweet experience.

I think I’m a convert!

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1 hour ago, MisterSwig said:

Is it “resilience” to so thoroughly depend upon the assistance of able-bodied people in order to simply survive? Or to be able to breathe even? If I’m totally paralyzed, it’s not resilience that keeps me alive and going. It’s my willingness to live as a fully dependent entity. I must be willing to burden others with my prolonged desire to live. These are the sorts of details you miss and don’t consider when you make living a kind of duty. When you decide that life itself is valuable, regardless of the kind of life it is.

To “depend upon the assistance of able-bodied people” is not in itself a problem. You’re not “a burden to others” or “living as a fully dependent entity”, that’s ridiculously disrespectful and inaccurate. There is no force involved, these people are helping because you’re a value to them, they either personally want to keep you alive, or are being paid by you or people who value you to do so.

You’re not forcing or defrauding them, you’re getting out of them what you have earned, whether materially or spiritually.

Your virtue is still what you’re surviving on, if you’re in a wheelchair or in a coma or whatever the current situation is. To need help is not a black mark, as long as you’re able to get it voluntarily.

“Me Before You” did that really well, they showed that the idea of suicide for the sake of your loved ones is a total lie, everyone else in the movie was completely against it. It devastated everyone else. It’s up to the people in your life whether they choose to help you when you’re debilitated or not. If you opt for suicide sacrificially, for their sake, that’s not you being beneficent, that’s you taking their choice away. I don’t normally have to explain to Objectivists that sacrificing yourself for the sake of others is a bad way to go.

 

37 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

No. Watch the movie Concussion.

I think you should study real examples of people who kill themselves for extraordinary reasons, before expecting resilience from such people. There are cases where these people were likely ten times more resilient than you or I could ever be. We’re talking about people who went into battle as a career, either on the football field or in an actual war. And here you are pontificating on a philosophy forum, generally suggesting that they are cowards for committing suicide when they suffered from crippling diseases. 

I’m not accusing anyone of being cowardly necessarily. The real difficulty with resilience is being able to adjust to a dramatically different context in life. This is not an easy step to make mentally or emotionally. Thinking that you have no values left in the world after a devastating loss can be an easy mistake to make. Realizing that you are still alive and conscious, and that it is a truly priceless opportunity, despite everything else having gone horribly wrong, is not always an obvious conclusion. I can be both empathetic with people and have the dignity to judge them morally. To drop your moral standards because someone is suffering is not doing them a service.

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