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Comment by cosmicvoyager on The mystery of pain and pleasure · 2015-06-23T12:13:36.813Z · LW · GW

I am very surprised and pleased to find thinking that so closely parallels my own.

I typed this is Google: "what makes a particular arrangement of matter in the brain pain or pleasure"

This is what I have been thinking. The universe contains consciousness. Matter and energy (at least arranged in the form of a brain) are conscious. There are states of consciousness that feel good and states of consciousness that feel bad. What is the difference between the arrangements of matter (or the processes) in the brain that make some feel good and some feel bad? I think it would be extremely helpful and lead to answers if we actually knew exactly what these arrangements are and studied them, studied the physics of what is going on. Do we know yet? How much do we know?

Reasons I want to know

1 - curiosity 2 - increasing happiness and decreasing suffering in biological beings 3 - creating synthetic intelligence that is happy 4 - minimizing suffering in the universe and maximizing pleasure in the universe. it just occurred to me a few days ago that all the matter in the universe could be converted to whatever state is the most pleasure, convert the universe into bliss. hmm...many minds or one giant mind?