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The Gom Jabbar, in Dune, is a deeper metaphor than I realized.
We evolved pleasure and pain signals to guide behaviors that would increase our fitness. Pleasure normally indicates that things are good for us; pain normally indicates that things are bad for us.
Even in a world with unhealthy pleasures like sugar, I still think there’s overall significant positive correlation between what feels good, what’s good for you, and what’s good for others. Most of the time.
The Gom Jabbar engineers a situation where the exact opposite is true. You put your hand in a box that stimulates nerve pain. You have a poisoned needle at your neck. If you pull your hand out to relieve the pain, you die.
The Gom Jabbar tests whether you have an *intent* to live, independent of the pain-and-pleasure *instinct* to live.
The Bene Gesserit say that those who fail the test are “animals” and those who pass it are “human.”
Animals, even very primitive ones like C. elegans, have something like pain and pleasure; at any rate you can use classical conditioning on them. But could any animals pass the Gom Jabbar test?
(Come to think of it, that’s actually not a question with an obvious answer; prey animals like sheep can be unbelievably stoic, since noticeably injured sheep are targets to predators.)
But going back to people. The question “if you could feel pure bliss and then die, or feel pure torture and then live, which would you choose?” is actually a tough one.
I think evolution probably *has* selected for the ability to pass the Gom Jabbar test in humans. Iirc all modern humans passed through a drought-and-famine bottleneck. We may have needed to do counter-instinctual things to survive.
It seems clear that in radically changing environments, individuals who can seek survival faster than evolution can change the reward function will have a fitness advantage.
The Bene Gesserit, in Dune, were a response to technology. They thought developing this “survival intent” in people was necessary for humanity to cope with technological change.
Unfortunately, Dune is fiction, not a how-to manual. We don’t know how to make humans who are all-round just better at being human. Would be cool though. Open problem.
