Suffering as attention-allocational conflict

Trying to push away the message means it has not been properly addressed and acknowledged, meaning the subsystem has to continue repeating it.

Sounds familiar. When I have an idea or learn some fact of the kind that I would typically want to write down, it will gnaw on me and annoyingly take up attention until I do write it down (even if in this particular case, I don't need to), at which point it distinctly lets go. It's probably a good mechanism that makes sure the data doesn't get forgotten, but it's interesting how on one hand it knows the exact moment when to turn off, and on the other hand I can't just tell it to shut up without fulfilling the script.

(How typical is this?)

Still, my experience so far seems to suggest that this framework can be used to reduce any kind of suffering. To some extent, it seems to even work on physical pain and discomfort. While simply acknowledging physical pain doesn't make it go away, making a conscious decision to be curious about the pain seems to help. Instead of flinching away from the pain and trying to avoid it, I ask myself, ”what does this experience of pain feel like?” and direct my attention towards it. This usually at least diminishes the suffering, and sometimes makes it go away if the pain was mild enough.

The PRISM theory of consciousness seems relevant: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791

What’s the primitive, bare-bones, nuts-and-bolts thing that consciousness does once we’ve stripped away all the self-aggrandizing bombast? Morsella’s answer is delightfully mundane: it mediates conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles.

Morsella sees us as a series of systems, each with its own agenda: feeding, predator avoidance, injury prevention, and so on. Mostly these systems operate on their own, independently. We can’t voluntarily dilate our eyes, for example. We can’t consciously control our digestive processes, nor are we even generally aware of them — peristalsis, like the pupil reflex, is the purview of the smooth muscles (and no, gas production by gut bacteria is not the same thing). But when digestion is finished — when the rectum is full, and you’re ready to take the mother of all dumps, but you’re on the in-laws good living-room carpet and your incontinent uncle is hogging the toilet — then, sure as shit, you become conscious of the process. There’s a sphincter under voluntary control that’s just urging you to let go. There are other agendas suggesting that that would be a really bad idea. And I would challenge anyone who has ever been in that position to tell me that that situation is not one in which conscious awareness of one’s predicament is, to put it mildly, heightened.

Are you saying this is one potential source of suffering, or are you defining suffering as those things which fit this pattern?

It's interesting to note that it probably doesn't matter whether my analysis of the sources of the conflict is 100% accurate.

Have you pushed the limits of how flimsy they can be? Can you tell yourself in a serious mental tone of voice "My horoscope said I have to pick X" and have it go away?

Can you do the full analysis and have confident answer without getting it to go away?

My quick mental simulations say "yes" to both and that it's not so much 'having an explanation' as it is deliberately flipping the mental "dismiss alarm" button, which you do only when "you" are comfortable enough to.

But there's an important insight here, one which I originally picked up from PJ Eby. If a mental subsystem is trying to tell you something important, then it will persist in doing so until it's properly acknowledged. Trying to push away the message means it has not been properly addressed and acknowledged, meaning the subsystem has to continue repeating it.

Actually, on seeing your post title, I thought you were just rephrasing my saying that "suffering is a divided mind". ;-)

Interesting. I actually use this technique on pain fairly regularly, and have found it works well. I've always mentally modeled it after Dune: Feel the pain, acknowledge it, and let it flow past me.

I've also found synaesthesia useful, although I may be unusual in being able to induce and control it - modelling pain as colors, or converting it in to a pleasant sensation is quite useful, and I've found I get better with practice. My body will often have about the same involuntary reactions - flinching, yelling out - but the emotional experience is quite different, and I can take quite a lot of pain without feeling terribly bothered.

It might also help that I've had some extremely painful medical situations, and didn't have much choice but to learn to deal with it ^^;

While simply acknowledging physical pain doesn't make it go away, making a conscious decision to be curious about the pain seems to help. Instead of flinching away from the pain and trying to avoid it, I ask myself, ”what does this experience of pain feel like?” and direct my attention towards it. This usually at least diminishes the suffering, and sometimes makes it go away if the pain was mild enough.

Have you heard of MBSR? I'm doing a course in mindfulness meditation at the moment and what you said above seems to fit very well with the techniques thought to us in the course.

Great post!

• The Prior Obligation System responded with the message: ”You've already previously agreed to go somewhere else. You know it'll be fun, and besides, several people are expecting you to go. Not going bears an unacceptable social cost, not to mention screwing over the other people's plans.”

This is something I'm very familiar with. My Prior Obligation System is active in the extreme, perhaps overactive, to the point that I once cried for half an hour after sleeping through my alarm when I was supposed to cover a morning swim practice for the coach who was out of town. I feel awful when I have two conflicting commitments and have to choose between them. I'm pretty good at scheduling stuff so it doesn't conflict, which leads to me being ridiculously over-scheduled, because the long-term suffering of being exhausted a lot of the time is less than the short-term but much more intense suffering of giving something up. This is possibly something I'll have to address eventually, depending on whether I ever consider "my own happiness" a higher priority than "getting lots of stuff done and not disappointing anyone."

I tend to treat anger and frustration as resulting from my map not matching the terrain somewhere. I suspect that your frustration is rooted in inaccurate mapping concerning the prior commitment that prevented you from meeting Patri. My guess is that you correctly assumed that there would be a small chance that something “better” than your commitment would pop-up that you would have to miss; but, you failed to properly assess the emotional impact this unlikely scenario would have on you. Now you can update your priors, do some re-mapping and be better prepared emotionally to deal with low-probability/high-annoyingness events.

Also, how similar is the present Patri-hysteria in Finland to the Beatles-hysteria in the 60's?

I'm sure the neurophysiology of pain has some insight to offer as to whether or not this hypothesis is correct, but I haven't read enough to know. Bud Craig is one of the major researchers in this area. His paper on pain as a homeostatic emotion is here, but it's kinda old now (2003).

Suffering happens all too readily IMHO (or am I misjudging this?) for evolution to not have taken chronic attention-allocational conflict into account and come up with a fix.

To take an example for comparison, is the ratio of chronic to acute pain roughly equal to the ratio of chronic to acute attention-allocational conflict? My intuitions fail me here, but I seem to personally experience more chronic suffering than chronic pain. But then again I was diagnosed with mild depression before and hence not typical.

Data point: This characterization of suffering agrees with my experience, and I've eliminated a lot of suffering from my life my resolving the associated attentional conflicts. I also share the experience that it is applicable to many different kinds of suffering, including both mental and physical.

I've also been thinking about how to resolve 2 conflicting systems, as of late.

Seems like there are 2 paths to this:

1. Alternation: Take turns, each half gets it's fair share of time. Speed up or slow down frequency of alternation as best suited to teach situation. Digital.

2. Synthesis: Hegelian Dialectic. Put the 2 together, and break them into parts/colors/spectrum. Find the matching contextual patterns in both, and use that to form a new greater thing. Leave the individual content patterns alone. Turn the black and white into a grayscale gradient, some individuality, some shared. Analog.

Also, as for actual physical pain, I've been playing with this:

• If your back hurts, imagine and feel pleasure on your front (sternum).
• If your neck hurts on the left, invert it, and imagine/feel pleasure on the right. In general: Invert it. Flip the bits entirely. Same thing (contextually), but different thing (contentually).

I get the feeling I'm not just completing a full application of the definition here, but where does this apply to serious, terrible, "let's just imagine they threw you in hell for a few days" suffering. Sure, one can say that it's mostly pain being imagined, and the massive overload of a sensor not designed for such environments is really what we're bothered by, but is there a way that the part of this we usually talk about as 'suffering' fits into the attention-allocation narrative? Or are we talking about two different things here?

All the same, I find this fascinating and am going to experiment with it in my daily life. Looking forward to the non-content focused post.

And here I thought using this as a pain management technique only worked because I'm masochistic! It actually is genuinely fascinating to learn this is common to people who don't share that trait. Though, actually, come to think of it, you never explicitly said whether you do or not. If it's not prying, are you?

Genuinely committing to do something does help; pretending to commit to something and then forgetting about it does not.

I often find myself failing to follow through on things that I've told people that I've committed myself to doing. I don't like having broken a declared commitment, so as a result I've become reluctant to declare myself committed to doing anything. This seems like the wrong solution to the problem. Any advice? (Note: Regardless of how good the advice is, I suspect I won't take it.)

Whoever wrote this apparently has never actually SUFFERED. They've never been in chronic pain, or watched a family member die of disease. If they had, they couldn't possibly think that suffering is just a matter of attention. The examples given of "suffering" are so trivial as to be outright insulting: Really? You think having to decide which event to go to is a good example of suffering?

(You might have a better argument if you were saying that meditation techniques, which are often at least partly attention-based, can be used to raise your hedonic set point so that even things like starvation don't feel like pain anymore. But that's not because starvation is an attentional conflict; in fact it's really a bug in human nature that we'd expect to get selected out. A being that can meditate itself to ecstasy is a being that never does anything useful and may as well just die.)

Something like "frustration" or "dilemma" might have to do with attention. But no, the agony of a full-blown migraine, or of weeks without food, or of feeling cancer eat you alive; no, that simply has nothing whatsoever to do with attention. You can focus on the pain all you want, and it will still hurt. You can try to focus on something else instead; it won't work, because your brain will keep pulling you back to the pain. That feeling of hopelessness isn't a result of what you're focusing on; it's a result of the fact that you've searched for solutions to this overwhelming problem and none of your attempts have worked. The pain isn't going to go away until the problem itself is fixed.

And maybe it can't be fixed: Sometimes suffering is the last thing you experience before the evolutionary "game over" of death.

The evolutionary causes of suffering are actually fairly transparent: Suffering is the constant threat your body holds over you for failing to meet crucial fitness objectives. The threat wouldn't be credible unless it were sometimes actually carried out. It's an interesting question as to why evolution spends more time motivating us through pain avoidance than through pleasure seeking---the pain of starvation is about a thousand times more intense than the joy of a good meal---but that doesn't change the basic principle that suffering is what our evolution uses to motivate us.