Suffering Is Not Pain

My point is that in English "experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain" would be considered an uncontroversial example of "suffering", not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added. I understand that in Buddhism there's a fine-grained distinction of some sort here, but it carries over poorly to English.

I expect that if you told a Buddhist-naive English-speaker "Buddhism teaches you how to never suffer ever again" they would assume you were claiming that this would include "never experiencing such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain." If this is not the case, I think they would be justified to feel they'd been played with a bit of a bait-and-switch dharma-wise.

However, I'm not sure I would make the claim that "pain causes aversion" in general, as it is quite possible for pain to occur without aversion then occurring.

There are counter-examples to the claim, for example people liking spicy food.

But if you e.g. stab someone with a knife, not many people are going to say "thank you" or remain indifferent about it. I think that in such situation, saying "pain caused aversion" is a fair description of what happened.

It is interesting to know that a level 100 Buddhist monk could get stabbed with a knife and say "anyway, pain and pleasure are merely sensations, I can choose to react on them or to ignore them, and I am choosing to ignore this one", but that is an exception rather than the rule. I feel it is wrong to focus on the 1 in a million case where X does not lead to Y, when in the remaining 999999 cases it does.

And it's kinda the point of why pain exists, that it is a signal to avoid something. So when people feel pain, and a desire to avoid that pain arises... that's the mechanism working as intended. It is good to know that a mechanism designed by evolution can be "hacked". But by default, it works.

It is expected from civilized people to exercise some self-control, including emotional, to improve their lives. Even small kids are told to stop screaming if they need to be vaccinated or have a blood sample taken. I am not avoiding an appointment with my dentist, even if I know that some pain is going to happen there. And yet, if I was given a choice between "pain" and "no pain" with everything else being equal, I would obviously choose "no pain".

It is easier for me to imagine a person who would choose "pain" instead (e.g. because they are curious about the experience) than a person who really has no preference whatsoever. How would a person with no preferences about pain survive in long term? Pain is often a signal of some damage to the body. So even if I could somehow become emotionally indifferent to pain, I would probably still want to avoid painful situations for rational reasons. (Not sure whether "avoiding painful situations for rational reasons" also counts as "aversion".)

We cannot realistically expect a significant part of population (let's say, 10%) to become advanced meditators to the level that they actually become indifferent to pain. So... for practical purposes, "pain causes aversion" describes the situation correctly, for a vast majority of people.

Good question! I picked it up from a friend at a LW meetup a decade ago, so it didn't come with all the extra baggage that vipassana meditation seems to usually carry. So this is just going to be the echo of it that works for me.

Step 1 is to stare at your index finger (a very sensitive part of your body) and gently, patiently try to notice that it's still producing a background level of sensory stimulus even when it's not touching anything. That attention to the background signal, focused on a small patch of your body, is what the body scan is based on.

Step 2 is learning how to "move" that awareness of the background signal slowly. Try to smoothly shift that awareness down your finger, knuckle by knuckle, keeping the area of awareness small by ceasing to focus on the original spot as you focus on a new spot. Then try moving that spot of awareness gradually to the base of your thumb, and noticing the muscle beneath the skin.

Use Case α is harnessing that kind of awareness to relax physical tension and even pain. The next time you have a paper cut or a small burn, once you've dealt with it in the obvious objective ways and now just have to handle the pain, focus your awareness right on that spot. The sensation will still be loud, but it won't be overwhelming when you're focusing on it rather than fleeing from it. Or the next time you notice a particularly tense muscle, focus your awareness there; for me, that usually loosens it at least a little.

Step 3 is the body scan itself: creating awareness for each part of your skin and muscles, gradually, bit by bit, starting from the crown of your head and slowly tracing out a path that covers everything. This is where a guided meditation could really help. I don't have one to recommend (after having the guided meditation at the meetup, I got as much of the idea as I needed), but hopefully some of the hundreds out there are as good as Random Meditating Rationalist #37 was.

And Use Case β, when you have a migraine, is to imagine moving that awareness inside your skull, to the place where the migraine pain feels like it's concentrated. (I recommend starting from a place where the migraine seems to "surface"—for me, the upper orbit of my left eye—if you have such a spot.)

There's something quite odd about how this works: your brain doesn't have pain receptors, so the pain from the migraine ends up in some phantom location on your body map, and it's (conveniently?) interpreted as being inside your head. By tracing your awareness inside your skull, you walk along that body map to the same phantom location as that pain, so it works out basically the same as if you were in Use Case α.

Hope this helps!

Even if attaining a total and forevermore cessation of suffering is substantially more difficult/attainable by substantially fewer people in one lifetime, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that most people could suffer at least 50 percent less with dedicated mindfulness practice. I'm curious as to what might feed an opposing intuition for you! I'd be quite excited about empirical research that investigates the tractability and scalability of meditation for reducing suffering, in either case.

My sense is that existing mindfulness studies don't show the sort of impressive results that we'd expect if this were a great solution.

Also, I think people who would benefit most from having less day-to-day suffering often struggle with having no "free room" available for meditation practice, and that seems like an issue that's hard to overcome even if meditation practice would indeed help them a lot.

It's already sign of having a decently good life when you're able to start dedicating time for something like meditation, which I think requires a bit more mental energy than just watching series or scrolling through the internet. A lot of people have leisure time, but it's a privilege to be mentally well off enough to do purposeful activities during your leisure time. The people who have a lot of this purposeful time probably (usually) aren't among the ones that suffer most (whereas the people who don't have it will struggle sticking to regular meditation practice, for good reasons).

For instance, if someone has a chronic illness with frequent pain and nearly constant fatigue, I can see how it might be good for them to practice meditation for pain management, but higher up on their priority list are probably things like "how do I manage to do daily chores despite low energy levels?" or "how do I not get let go at work?."

Similarly, for other things people may struggle with (addictions, financial worries, anxieties of various sorts; other mental health issues), meditation is often something that would probably help, but it doesn't feel like priority number one for people with problem-ridden, difficult lives. It's pretty hard to keep up motivation for training something that you're not fully convinced of it being your top priority, especially if you're struggling with other things.

I see meditation as similar to things like "eat healthier, exercise more, go to sleep on time and don't consume distracting content or too much light in the late evenings, etc." And these things have great benefits, but they're also hard, so there are no low-hanging fruit and interventions in this space will have limited effectiveness (or at least limited cost-effectiveness; you could probably get quite far if you gifted people their private nutritionist cook, fitness trainer and motivator, house cleaner and personal assistant, meditation coach, give them enough money for financial independence, etc.).

And then the people who would have enough "free room" to meditate may be well off enough to not feel like they need it? In some ways, the suffering of a person who is kind of well off in life isn't that bad and instead of devoting 1h per day for meditation practice to reduce the little suffering that they have, maybe the well-off person would rather take Spanish lessons, or train for a marathon, etc.

(By the way, would it be alright if I ping you privately to set up a meeting? I've been a fan of your writing since becoming familiar with you during my time at CLR and would love a chance to pick your brain about SFE stuff and hear about what you've been up to lately!)

I'll send you a DM!

I'm not sure I understand this distinction. Say I have a strong desire to eat pizza, but only a weak craving. I have a hard time imagining what that would be like. Or a strong craving but a weak desire. Or even this: I have a strong desire not to eat pizza, but also a strong craving to eat pizza. Are perhaps desires, in this picture, more intellectual somehow, or purely instrumental, while cravings are ... animalistic urges? One example I can think of in these terms would be addiction, where someone has a strong desire not to smoke and a strong craving to smoke. Or, another example, someone has a strong craving to laugh and a strong desire to instead keep composure.

Does then craving (rather than desire) frustration, or aversion realization, constitute suffering? This is perhaps more plausible. But still, it seems to make sense to say I have an aversion to pain because I suffer from it, which wouldn't make sense if suffering was the same as an aversion being realized.

It's more fair to say that there are practices by which, with much time and effort, one can partly untrain the habit of craving/aversion.

The assumption that these can be completely dropping the habit is entirely theoretical. The historical Buddha's abilities are lost to history. Modern meditators can perform immense feats of pain tolerance, but I personally haven't heard one claim to have completely eradicated the habit of suffering.

Therefore suffering is optional in the sense that poverty is optional. If you've got the time and energy to do a ton of work, you can reduce it.

This is not super helpful when a broke person is asking you for money.

Suffering isn't optional in the usual sense of the word. You can't just switch it off. You can reduce it with tons of work. (which, BTW, animals can't even comprehend the possibility of - and most humans haven't).

As I said, your inverse point, suffering without pain, is much more valid and valuable.

I see. You may be interested in a contrary(?) take from the Welfare Footprint Project's researchers; in their FAQ they write

4. Why don't you use the term 'suffering', instead of 'pain'?

We prefer not to use the term suffering for various reasons. First, our analyses are concerned with “any” negative affective state (including mild ones), whereas the term suffering is often used to denote more severe states that are accompanied by concurrent negative feelings such as the perception of lack of control, fear, anxiety, the impossibility to enjoy pleasant activities or even a threat to one’s sense of self. Additionally, it is not yet possible to determine objectively when an unpleasant state becomes suffering. This is so far a value judgement, which we leave open to users of our estimates. The term ‘pain’ (both physical and psychological), in turn, is associated with negative affective experiences of a wide range of intensities.

They define their terms further here. To be fair, they focus on non-human animal welfare; I suppose your suffering vs joy distinction is more currently actionable in human-focused contexts e.g. CBT interventions.

no anyone can visit! we have guests all the time. feel free to DM me if you want to ask more. or you can just go on the website and schedule a visit. 

Alex Flint is still here too, altho he lives on neighboring land now. 

'directly addressing suffering' is a good description of what we're up to? 

Thanks for the reply.

Regarding your disagreement with my point #2 - perhaps I should’ve been more precise in my wording. Let me try again, with words added in bold: “Although pain doesn't directly cause suffering, there would be no suffering if there were no such thing as pain…” What that means is you don’t need to be experiencing pain in the moment that you initiate suffering, but you do need the mental imprint of having experienced some kind of pain in your lifetime. If you have no memory of experiencing pain, then you have nothing to avert. And without pain, I don’t believe you can have pleasure, so nothing to crave either.

Further, if you could abolish pain as David Pearce suggests, by bioengineering people to only feel different shades of pleasure (I have serious doubts about this), you’d abolish suffering at the same time. No person bioengineered in such a way would suffer over not feeling higher states of pleasure (i.e., “crave” pleasure) because suffering has a negative feeling associated with it - part of it feels like pain, which we supposedly wouldn’t have the ability to feel.

This gets to another point: one could define suffering as the creation of an unpleasant physical sensation or emotion (i.e., pain) through a thought process, that we may or may not be aware of. Example: the sadness that we typically naturally feel when someone we love dies is pain, but if we artificially extend this pain out with thoughts of the future or past, not the moment, such as, “will this pain ever stop?,” or, “If only I’d done something different, they might still be alive,” then it becomes suffering. This first example thought, by the way, could be considered aversion to pain/craving for it to stop, while the second could be considered craving that the present were different (that you weren’t in pain and your loved one were still alive). The key distinctions for me are that pain can be experienced “in the moment” without a thought process on top of it, and it can’t be entirely avoided in life, while suffering ultimately comes from thoughts, it falls away when one’s experiencing things in the moment, and it can be avoided because it’s an optional thing one choses to do for some reason. (A possible reason could be to give oneself an excuse to do something different than feel pain, such as to give oneself an excuse to stop exercising by amping up the pain with suffering.)

Regarding my point #4, I honestly don’t know what animals’ experiences are like or how much cognition they’re capable of. I do think, though, that if they aren’t capable of getting “out of the moment” with thoughts of the future or past, then they can’t suffer, they can only feel the pain/pleasure of the moment. For instance, do chickens suffer with thoughts of, “I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” or do they just experience the discomfort of their situation with the natural fight or flight mechanism and Pavlovian links of their body leading them to try to get away from it? Either way, pain by itself is an unpleasant experience and I think we should try to minimize imposing it on other beings.

It’s also interesting how much upvoted resistance you’ve gotten to the message of this post. Eckhart Tolle (“The Power of Now”) https://shop.eckharttolle.com/products/the-power-of-now is a modern day proponent of living in the moment to make suffering fall away, and he also encounters resistance: https://www.reddit.com/r/EckhartTolle/comments/sa1p4x/tolles_view_of_suffering_is_horrifying/