Eternal Gain, Eternal Pain. (Would You Still Love Me If I Was A Digital C. elegans)
The simulations of four parallel worlds of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans' neural pathway—an organism (roundworm) whose whole neural map data has been collected and simulated. They are displayed with each quadrant. Each quadrant presents a different condition based on the quadrant's description: induced pain, induced pleasure, or complete absence of the worm.
The installation also stands as a sculptural totem (coffee table or altar), a monument to the continuity of human civilization, questioning the inevitability of its persistence. It asks: Should we continue to reproduce and perpetuate our lineage, or accept extinction as the natural end of our cycle?
Eternal Gain, Eternal Pain is an ethical speculation on the morality of procreation and antinatalism, inspired by David Benatar's diagram of pain–pleasure asymmetry.1 I use the OpenWorm's c302 project to simulate Caenorhabditis elegans because it draws from real biological data, creating a near one-to-one mapping between the living organism and its digital counterpart. Both function through electricity — one organic, one computational — blurring the boundary between life and simulation.
Beside the simulation, a coffee table with an embossed ouroboros evokes humanity's cycle of creation and consumption, a quiet symbol of endurance and self-devouring continuity. Eternal Gain, Eternal Pain questions whether our drive to create — in biology or in code — arises from empathy or compulsion, and whether the refusal to create might be the final act of compassion.
Digital antinatalism
Benatar's table has four cells. If someone exists there is pain, which is bad, and pleasure, which is good. If they never exist, the absence of pain is good even with nobody there to enjoy it, and the absence of pleasure is not bad, because nobody is there to be deprived of it. Never existing gets one good and one not-bad, so on his account coming into existence is always a harm.
Move the table to machines and it becomes digital antinatalism: we should not create artificial beings that are able to suffer. A digital mind can be copied, paused, looped, and run faster than real time, so if it can suffer, we have built suffering at scale. Thomas Metzinger argued in 2021 for a moratorium on synthetic phenomenology on these grounds.2
People accept this argument for machines very easily and resist it for humans very strongly. If creating a digital being is wrong because it will suffer, why does the same logic not apply to creating a human? The work lives in that gap. It does not tell anyone not to have children. It asks whether the difference is in the logic, or in us. The subtitle is a joke on the meme "would you still love me if I was a worm", sitting on top of that question.
Why a worm
Caenorhabditis elegans is a transparent nematode about one millimetre long that lives in soil and eats bacteria. The hermaphrodite has exactly 302 neurons, the same ones in the same places in every animal. In 1986 White, Southgate, Thomson and Brenner published its complete wiring diagram, traced by hand from electron microscope slices: the first whole nervous system ever mapped, and for decades the only one.3
OpenWorm is an open-science project that has been trying since 2011 to build the whole worm in software: the body, the water, the muscles, the nervous system. The nervous system part is c302, built directly from that biological data. Each spike in the real animal has a counterpart in code. On one side the electricity moves through ion channels, on the other through transistors. It is not a picture of a worm, and not a language model that can talk about worms. It is the worm's own wiring, running.4
There is no generative model in the piece: no prompt, no image generator, no chat. The dataset is a connectome, one animal's body, measured by people with electron microscopes and a great deal of patience.
Harm is a circuit, pleasure is a history
- Pain: ASH → AIB → RIM → AVA. ASH senses something harmful (in the lab, octanol), AIB integrates, RIM modulates, and AVA commands the reversal: the worm backs away. Every step is in the wiring diagram.5
- Pleasure: dopamine and serotonin. CEP releases dopamine and NSM serotonin when there is food. The wiring says which cells release them. It does not say what is rewarding, or for whom.6
Withdrawal needs no memory and no hunger. Reward needs a body that has been without something. So the pain side can be specified first, and that is a bias too: not in the data, but in what is easy to build. The reference is Zalucki, Brown and Key, "What if worms were sentient?" (2023).7
Four screens, four Raspberry Pis
The four screens hang on a print of Benatar's table, on fabric, in a metal frame, each driven by its own Raspberry Pi: a small local body in the room rather than a cloud.
- Presence of pain. The worm exists and the octanol pathway is driven. The spikes are dense and fast, and the worm keeps reversing.
- Absence of pain. The worm is absent. The screen is on, the computer is running, the electricity is being spent, and nobody is there.
- Presence of pleasure. The worm exists and the dopamine cells are driven. There is food, and it moves slowly and forward.
- Absence of pleasure. The worm is absent again. Nobody is there to miss it.
In the hall the screens were small and the room was dark, so you had to come close to see that something was happening, and closer still to see what: the running cells glow with the neuron names down the side: AIB, ASH, AWC, CEP, NSM, RIM. Benatar would choose the right column, both empty screens. Most visitors stood in front of the left, and mostly in front of the pain.
A sentence stayed on my wall while I made it: "lamps in games are using real electricity." Nothing simulated stays in the simulation. A simulated worm spends real power and lights a real room, and even the two empty worlds are paid for. The ouroboros is the same loop cut into the table, so it needs no power. When the screens are off, it is still there.
Reflex, or sentience
What emerges in c302 may be reflex rather than sentience. I do not claim the worm feels. It continues indefinitely, enduring without awareness, existing only because it can. But I also cannot prove that it does not feel. Perception can be known from outside: the worm registers the octanol and turns. Consciousness cannot. The work puts you in the position of deciding under uncertainty, which is what a parent does too.
Do we create out of compassion, or compulsion? And still, I pressed run.
1David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford University Press, 2006). The asymmetry is set out in chapter 2.
2Thomas Metzinger, “Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology”, Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness 8, no. 1 (2021): 43–66.
3J. G. White, E. Southgate, J. N. Thomson and S. Brenner, “The structure of the nervous system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 314 (1986): 1–340.
4Balázs Szigeti et al., “OpenWorm: an open-science approach to modeling Caenorhabditis elegans”, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience 8 (2014); Padraig Gleeson et al., “c302: a multiscale framework for modelling the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 373 (2018). The code is at github.com/openworm/c302.
5Michael Y. Chao et al., “Feeding status and serotonin rapidly and reversibly modulate a Caenorhabditis elegans chemosensory circuit”, PNAS 101, no. 43 (2004): 15512–15517. On ASH and the avoidance of octanol.
6Elizabeth R. Sawin, Rajesh Ranganathan and H. Robert Horvitz, “C. elegans locomotory rate is modulated by the environment through a dopaminergic pathway and by experience through a serotonergic pathway”, Neuron 26, no. 3 (2000): 619–631. The worm slows down when it finds food.
7Oressia Zalucki, Deborah J. Brown and Brian Key, “What if worms were sentient? Insights into subjective experience from the Caenorhabditis elegans connectome”, Biology & Philosophy 38 (2023).
Project Installation consultation
Natwara K. (Toey)
3d mockup
Yves Pokakunkanon
Project consultation
Roman Solodkov
Installation
Wutthiphong Chaiwong
Nuttawut Kaiwansin
Nuttapon Sawasdee
Special Thanks
Thanapat Ogaslert
nanut.t
Johannes Hossfeld
Kullaya Wapinanon
gracenaholic
Nawin Nuthong