The Horror Of Unfathomable Pain

One of the most important insights in the world

Content warning: this article will discuss extreme agony. This is deliberate; I think it’s important to get a glimpse of the horror that fills the world and that you can do something about. I think this is one of my most important articles so I’d really appreciate if you could share and restack it!

The world is filled with extreme agony. We go through our daily life mostly ignoring its unfathomably shocking dreadfulness because if we didn’t, we could barely focus on anything else. But those going through it cannot ignore it.

Imagine that you were placed in a pot of water that was slowly brought to a boil until it boiled you to death. Take a moment to really imagine the scenario as fully as you can. Don’t just acknowledge at an intellectual level that it would be bad—really seriously think about just how bad it would be. Seriously think about how much you’d give up to stop it from happening.

Or perhaps imagine some other scenario where you experience unfathomable pain. Imagine having your hand taped to a frying pan, which is then placed over a flame. The frying pan slowly heats up until the pain is unbearable, and for minutes you must endure it. Vividly imagine just how awful it would be to be in this scenario—just how much you’d give up to avoid it, how much you’d give to be able to pull your hand away. I don’t know exactly how many months or years of happy life I’d give up to avoid a scenario like this, but potentially quite a lot.

One of the insights that I find to be most important in thinking about the world is just how bad extreme suffering is. I got this insight drilled into me by reading negative utilitarian blogs in high school. Seriously reflecting on just how bad extreme suffering is—how its intensity seems infinite to those experiencing it—should influence your judgments about a lot of things.

Because the world is filled with extreme suffering.

Many humans have been the victims of extreme suffering. Throughout history, torture has been common. There’s a kind of pain that makes people scream till their vocal chords go out, bite through their tongue, and wish for death. Tortures that I’d kill myself to never have to undergo have been inflicted on millions of people. Diseases that would make you cry out in pain and beg for death are routine.

But such things are far more common in the animal kingdom.

As we get lower and lower down the hierarchy of animals, we become less sure of what it’s like for them to suffer. But when other mammals suffer, it probably feels like it does when we suffer. The brain regions we have when we suffer are present in other mammals, and they produce behavior similar to how we behave when we suffer. When a pig is tortured, its brain lights up the way a human’s does when the human is tortured, and it acts exactly like we do when we are tortured.

Which makes it quite alarming that we’re torturing pigs, cows, and chickens by the billions.

Some researchers set out to categorize the intensity of different kinds of pain. The most painful experiences the typical person ever has in their life is disabling pain—the kind had during pregnancy, kidney stones, broken bones, and so on. The horrific thing the researchers discovered: on average egg laying hens undergo about 300 hours of disabling pain. They have around an hour a day of pain as bad as the worst pains most humans will ever experience. What we inflict on egg laying hens is about as bad as if we somehow forced a woman to give birth naturally every single day. The horror is truly beyond comprehension.

The supposedly humane way we kill pigs in the UK is we choke them to death on poison gas that burns their eyes and throat and nose and ears, that makes them gasp and choke to death. Like the Nazis, we commit mass murder by gassing. Unlike the Nazis, our victims number in the billions.

In the U.S., we often kill pigs by roasting them to death in 150 degree steam—so that they die of suffocation and overheating simultaneously. To a pig, this probably feels roughly like it would feel to you if you were roasted and suffocated to death with 150 degree steam. While they don’t have language to describe the horrors they undergo, this hurts them just as it would hurt you.

I recently burned myself on hot steam coming out of a kettle (I stupidly placed my hand over the opening when it was letting out steam). The hundreds of millions of pigs and chickens that we kill through ventilation shutdown feel this same horrific sensation all over their body for hours until it kills them. I wouldn’t be able to stand a minute of that torment—they undergo more cruelty than any of us could bear for the sake of a pizza topping and cheap eggs. As their skin melts off, it feels to them like it would feel to you if it happened to you. The only difference is that while you could speak about what was going on, their entire consciousness is filled with nothing but pain.

But your ability to speak and engage in higher order thought doesn’t much matter when you’re in extreme agony. When a person is tortured, they don’t compose eloquent Haikus or reflect about the nature of morality. Everything else is taken over by the pain.

And we have the audacity to call this humane—to claim we get to inflict these profound tortures on the meek and vulnerable because we, unlike them, are morally discerning.

As one travels further away from us down the tree of life, it becomes less and less clear what creatures experience. Chickens—we’re pretty sure they feel like we do when they’re hurt. Their experience may not be exactly the same, but it’s probably pretty similar.

So we can know with confidence that the experience had by the roughly million chickens we boil alive every year is one that you and I would do anything to avoid. It feels to them rather like it would feel to you if you were boiled alive. It’s an unspeakable horror, the kind that we only tolerate because we can’t see how bad it is when it goes on, the kind that stains the cosmos with its brutality, for which no words could ever be appropriate. The kind that a person wouldn’t be crazy for giving up eternal life to avoid. The kind that if you underwent it, you’d sell out your principles, give up the things that mattered to you just to make the pain stop.

The kind that the world is filled with.

People are surprised that I care a great deal about insects—that I think their suffering is the worst thing in the world. Now admittedly, I don’t know what it’s like to be an insect. Insects might not be conscious, and they might have a kind of very simple consciousness—wholly without any ability to experience intense pain.

But they might be able to feel the kind of pain that you or I would feel if we were boiled alive. The kind that’s too horrible to think about, the kind that people experience during particularly intense torture, the kind that you’d go bankrupt to avoid experiencing a few minutes of. When I see an insect writhing on the ground for hours before succumbing to a slow death, I don’t know what it feels like to be them, but it might just be a horror of a kind I could only scarcely imagine.

It might be intense suffering. Certainly there’s quite robust evolutionary reason for these creatures to experience intense pain upon death—it leads to them avoiding lethal experiences. The blind Darwinian evolutionary process cares nothing for our pain, it cares only for us reproducing.

For reasons I’ve given before at length, I think there’s a sizeable probability that organisms, even simple ones, feel very intense pain. And there are ~10^18 of these creatures. Billions of insects die every second—it may be that the thing they experience before they die is something I’d do anything not to experience.

The example of being boiled alive isn’t just an abstract hypothetical: it’s what we do to millions of birds and billions of lobsters. As the lobsters thrash around in the pot, trying desperately to escape the scorching heat until it melts their skin, I don’t know what it’s like to be them. When I look into their eyes, I see a strange alien creature very unlike me.

But I see a creature who is acting like I would if I were boiled in a pot. A creature trying to get away, trying to escape the scorching heat, doing everything it can to flee from the heat. Showing every sign it’s in torment—every sign it’s in agony of a sort I can scarcely fathom. For minutes on end until their exterior melts off.

When I think about what it’s like to be a shrimp being crushed to death or suffocating, once again, I don’t really know. But whatever it’s like, there’s a sizeable chance it’s a fucking horror of a sort that can scarcely be fathomed. It acts like I would if someone drowned me. When I think about the fact that every dollar I donate can prevent thousands of shrimp from experiencing this fate, doing so seems like a complete no-brainer. Just as I’d want people to spend a dollar making it so that I and my thousand closest acquaintances don’t boil alive, I’d do the same for thousands of these creatures. In a heartbeat.

It’s not an intellectual game. It’s not a fancy display in clever word tricks where you trap people into seeing their view has absurd consequences. Extreme suffering sometimes feels like the only real thing there is—the only thing that really matters, where everything else feels like merely shifting deck chairs around on the titanic. Compared to it, all of our other experiences are a pale shadow. Brian Tomasik articulated the intuition well:

Perhaps others don't understand what it's like to be me. Morality is not an abstract, intellectual game, where I pick a viewpoint that seems comely and elegant to my sensibilities. Morality for me is about crying out at the horrors of the universe and pleading for them to stop. Sure, I enjoy intellectual debates, interesting ideas, and harmonious resolutions of conflicting intuitions, and I realize that if you're serious about reducing suffering, you do need to get into a lot of deep, recondite topics. But fundamentally it has to come back to suffering or else it's just brain masturbation while others are being tortured.

Now ultimately I don’t go as far as Tomasik. I think that goods and bads are comparable—that there’s some amount of good that can outweigh even the worst forms of torture. But if you don’t feel at least some sympathy for Tomasik’s position when you think seriously about extreme suffering, I think you’re going about the whole enterprise wrong. I think you’re blind to just how bad it can get.

People are also surprised about my confidence that most animals live bad lives. But I think once you get—on a deep level—the sheer horror of really extreme suffering, this should be obvious. When you realize that most conscious creatures live extremely short lives of about a week before dying a painful death, that they mostly undergo extreme suffering before they die and have only a few weeks of struggle as recompence, it seems like just about the most obvious thing in the world.

The word extreme suffering doesn’t capture it. The only way to even get an inkling of its horror is to vividly imagine yourself in scenarios of extreme suffering: being drowned, boiled alive, or having your limbs slowly roasted over a fire.

The deaths most creatures have—starving to death, dying of thirst, being eaten alive, being crushed to death—are much worse than merely having one’s hand glued to a hot stove for minutes. And certainly I’d give up a week of happy life to avoid having my hand be roasted on a stove for minutes. When one witnesses a fly twitching for hours before she eventually dies, it’s as clear as anything could be that her month of life wasn’t worth it—wasn’t worth this.

Ultimately, I think the horror of suffering is one of life’s most important insights. There are experiences too horrific to fathom, too horrific to bear, and these are common. These are how most organisms die. Many have to bear this pain for hours or days. The worst thing about our world is the fact that it is filled with this extreme agony. If you can look upon creatures who have even a remote possibility of being in agony of this depth without taking them seriously, either that is a profound failure of empathy or a failure to reckon with the unimaginable horror of extreme suffering.

The reason I do all that I can for the lobster boiled in the pot or the shrimp suffocated to death over the course of minutes or hours is because I can get a brief glimpse of what it’s like to experience extreme suffering. There is a realistic possibility that when the lobster gets boiled, when its exterior flakes off from the heat, it feels something like the way it would if it was done to me. That is a possibility too significant and too horrific to ignore.

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If you want to do something about extreme suffering, I think the best places to give to are the shrimp welfare project (for reasons I explain here), Givewell (for reasons I explain here), as well as to here and here. Each of these can prevent in expectation thousands of creatures from experiencing extreme suffering per dollar. Standard offer goes—if you give at least 30 dollars a month to any of them, you can have a free paid subscription.