Rating my pain
Whenever I go to a physician or dentist I am asked to rate my pain on a 1-10 scale. They do this because they are mathematically and philosophically challenged. I always tell them I won’t play this game. From now on, I will hand them a card or sheet of paper that gives a few examples of my pains and pleasures. It will read as follows:
Dear Doctor, as you probably want to know the degree of pain my condition is causing me, I have prepared a table for your edification.
10 degrees of pain – Living eternally in heaven with God.
9.943303 – Having a long nail driven into my eyeball.
Same score for having a blowtorch applied to my testicles for three or more seconds.
9. 0208 - Field expediency amputation of a leg without anesthetic.
7.95 – Final throes of whatever is the most painful cancer.
6.2 – Being with a person who does not know the meaning of “edification.”
5.5. Being asked to rate my pain.
3.9 – Attending a rock concert
1.2 Unsatisfactory sex with Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones
1.0 - Having satisfactory sex with Paris Hilton or Brittany Spears.
Not everything that happens to me is painful. Here are some positive utilities
3.5 Reading a novel written by a Nobel Laureate
3.9 – Having a sexual encounter with the wife of a Nobel Laureate
5.9 – Eating the very best Chinese food in the very best Chinese restaurant.
7.332303 – Being cured of whatever condition has brought me to see you.
8.0111 – Having your staff address me as “Dr. Gendin” instead of as “Sidney.”
9.6655 – Learning that no animal will ever again be hunted for pure sport.
10 - Being alive 13 years from now so that I can attend the high school graduation of my granddaughter, Anika. (9.8 for all my other grandchildren.)
You have not mentioned on the positive experiences a slice of double cheese pizza, or a pastrami sandwich with a really good sour pickle. How come ? Sy
On the other hand, my sexual encounters with Angelina Jolie have been so satisfactory and so frequent that I’ve had to buy a fresh magazine.
Sy, as you may know, the real numbers form a nondenumerable set so that between any two numbers [for example, between 2.1 and 2.2] there is a nondenumerable infinity of others. Hence, the real numbers cannot be counted for they exceed the natural numbers and cannot be put in 1-1 correspondence to them. To each point we can assign a painful or pleasant experience. But they cannot be rank-ordered with finality. Inevitably, we will have left out an infinity of others above that one we just ranked above it. Say, I give a certain miserable experience, X, a negative score of 5.005 but something else a score of 5.071105. What my dimwitted physician fails to realize is that, had I the time and inclination, I could have ticked off ten billion worse experiences than than 5.005 but not as bad as the 5.071105. Moreover, he learns nothing useful to him concerning how my pain ranked at 5.005 compares to your pain given the same numerical assignment because we run smack up against the insolubility of “the classical difficulty of interpersonal comparisons of utility.” The problem for ranking pleasures is symmetrical. Thus, between a good pastrami sandwich with a real good pickle on the one hand, and anything else you happen to think of on the spur of the moment that strikes you as the merest fraction less good, you can, if you are so inclined, come up very quickly with 500 billion other things that really fit between them. Got it? I’m sure you do. So rest assured that a hot pastrami sandwich has its place in the Grand Scheme of Things and accept my apologies for omitting it for there are, after all, more pleasant and painful experiences than we count. I believe the world class expert in number theory, Billy Shakespeare tried to explain all this to his student Horatio. Remember? I am sure you do.
As for Al, those of you who do not know him do not know that his wit yields 9.4 on my scale of pleasures.