The scientific version of good and bad

[Pyrrho]

---

Your idea of "rewarding experience" reminds me of David Hume's ethical theory, which can be found in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.

A very condensed discussion is at these links:

#17

#35

There is more discussion of it in that thread.


However, you might find it easier to start with Epicurus instead, though his position is less rigorous.  But it has the advantage of being easier to understand.

http://www.epicurus.net



As for suicide, here are three essays on the topic that I think are worth reading:


ESSAY IX: OF SUICIDE1

Letter 70

Letter 77


Regarding your idea of bringing back people from the dead and drugging them to feel high (which is what "eternal bliss" would be), that is rather fanciful.  I doubt we are going to be raising the dead.  Of course, it somewhat depends on what, exactly, one means by "dead," as one's heart can stop beating and it can sometimes be restarted, so if you were to imagine that "dead" just means that one's heart stopped beating, then one could raise the "dead" at least occasionally.  But if they are well and truly dead, rotted in the grave, then no, it is just a fictional fantasy.



As an aside, you might want to work on your essay writing skills, as much of the reaction you are getting seems due to that rather than the actual content of your post.

---

Well, I have two questions here:

1.)  Has it ever been tested whether there is a scientific version of good and bad (what I've explained above)?

What you appear to be discussing is metaethics, about the definitions of "good" and "bad."  After one has settled on a definition of the terms, then one can set about answering the question of what can and cannot be properly verified.  In practice, of course, people go back and forth on this in order to refine their definitions to fit their particular purposes.  Clearly, people can and do investigate the question of what does give people pleasure and what gives them pain.  Those things can be investigated scientifically.  Some things are generally true of most people for pleasure and pain, some are more variable.  But certainly, there is an underlying structure to humans that makes these things as they are in each individual, and are generally very similar from one person to the next.  The same is true of feelings generally.  But it is partly a definitional matter whether one wishes to equate certain types of emotions with good and bad.

 If not, then it's no wonder there is no supporting evidence for my theory.  If my theory could be tested, then there just might be supporting evidence for it.

2.)  I'm thinking there might be a way to resurrect people back to life after they have completely died and rotted away.  All of their atoms and particles that made them alive in the first place are all still there.  They are all just scattered about across the world in different locations.  So what we would need to do here is to create a supercomputer that has a connection to all atoms and particles of this world.  From there, we would create a template of a human life form that can combine all atoms and particles in all possible ways to create all possible different types of people.  We would then initiate this program which would create all possible different types of people and would bring people such as me back to life.

In order to be able to do that, one would have to first map all of the atoms in a particular person.  Otherwise, one would never know if one recreated that particular person or not.  And you are being quite optimistic that there will ever be the technology to arrange atoms so precisely.  We are certainly not going to have such technology any time soon, if ever.  You will be long dead, and there will be no record for how your atoms are exactly arranged at any point in your life.  So you can forget about you being recreated that way.  You are going to be dead and never come back.  Just like me and every other person alive today.


Also, there is not enough matter in the universe to create every possible combination of atoms that would be a person.  Just think about it for a moment.  You at this precise moment are arranged a bit differently from how you were arranged a millisecond ago.  If one memory of yours were changed, that would involve a different arrangement of atoms.  And, of course, there are all sorts of genetic combinations that have not been tried, which would involve incalculably many different possibilities.  Imagine, for example, the humans that would be created if one man were to mate with every woman who ever lived.  All of those, with all of the possible variants (remember, the children of two people are not all identical, not even "identical" twins are identical on the atomic level), and for every possible combination of every other man mating with every other woman who ever lived.  And then one would have to create all of the humans that would be possible from those artificially created humans mating with every other human ('natural' or artificial), with all possible variants for each, and then one would have to create what would be the offspring of those mated with every other human, etc., etc.  

In addition to that, one would also have to imagine each and every one of those humans with every possible diet, making different ones for the different diets, and imagine every possible life experience for each and every one of those variants, as each of these will make differences on the arrangements of the atoms.

In other words, there are likely infinite possible variations for humans, so trying to create all of them would be impossible due to a lack of resources; i.e., not enough matter in the universe, not to mention whatever energy would be needed for this magical atom arranging machine.