"Had the inventor of conscious suffering been a person, we could describe the overall process as extremely cruel. Above a certain level of complexity, evolution continuously instantiates an enormous number of frustrated preferences; it has brought an expanding and continuously deepening ocean of consciously experienced suffering into a region of the physical universe where nothing comparable existed before."

Quote Details

Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Added on April 10, 2026
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English

Sources

, Suffering (2017)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Philosophical_pessimism