GRGR (15): Good & Evil: Utilitarianism

[David Morris]

>From: "Seb Thirlway
>Reminds me of Spectro's
>"filing cabinet of pain", and this bit from Pointy
>
>"when we find it, we'll have shown again the stone determinacy of
>every soul.  There will be precious little room for any hope at
>all..  You can see how important a discovery like that could be."
>(p86)
>[snip]
>Utilitarianism implies commensurability of happiness, knowledge
>of every other's scale of happiness, implies surveillance as a
>necessary condition, implies the wonderful, Holy Grail (to Them)
>possibility of control.  Gives Them a wonderful ambiguity - well,
>isn't efficiency a good thing?  "we're not evil control-freaks,
>we're just nice utilitarians, and why shouldn't we control to a
>good end?  Come on, chin up young man, there's a war on you
>know".

This also ties in with the U.S. "10-year-plan" mentioned when Wimpe & 
Tchitcherine meet:  Kill pain w/o addiction (the messy uncontrolled 
side-effect), called by Tchitcherine "trafficing in pain."  With 
Tchitcherine, we seem to have a character (like Slothrop & all the other 
"fringers") who's embraced the unsanctioned utility of drugs: recreational 
escape, though it's unclear if this is ultimately also to Their benefit.

>[snip] ultra-paradoxical (and I've
>never worked out the implications of this "ultra-paradoxical"
>business - is it authentic Pavlov, or TRP's own invention?).

It seems to be legit Pavlov, from the little I've scrounged from a 
web-search:

http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/reviews/battle-for-the-mind/

"The relevant part of Pavlov's work was his experiments in inducing neuroses 
in his dogs, inspired in large part by his observations on what happened to 
some of them when they were very nearly drowned during the great floods in 
Leningrad in 1924. The results, roughly, are this: Dogs respond to stress in 
characteristic ways, which Pavlov identified with the four temperaments of 
Hippocrates (how fancifully, I am not competent to say), thus: ``weak 
inhibitory'' = melancholic, ``strong inhibitory'' or ``calm imperturbable'' 
= phlegmatic, ``strong excitatory'' = choleric and ``lively'' = sanguine. 
Strong-inhibitory or phlegmatic dogs remained calm and un-upset by danger; 
strongly excitatory or choleric dogs acted in a vigorous if random and 
ineffectual manner; and so on. Past a certain point, all dogs are unable to 
deal with stress, and break-down; these are said to be stimulated 
``transmarginally,'' and their responses are, in general, inhibited. They 
may go into a complete inhibitory collapse, followed by a suppression of 
many conditioned behaviors; or into a state compared with hypnosis or 
hysteria in humans; or pass through a series of three phases (the 
equivalent, in which response is indifferent to the strength of stimuli; the 
paradoxical, in which weak stimuli lead to larger responses than strong 
ones; and the ultra-paradoxical, in which behavior patterns flip from 
positive to negative, so that dogs might attack attendants of whom they had 
previously been fond, and favor those they had avoided). Changes effected in 
these states, in which the dogs were particularly susceptible to 
conditioning, tended to be quite long-lasting. "
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