I think GP has a point, but it kinda works the other way around. (Which is common among unexamined intuitions.)
Basically, you can't represent any data with just ones, or just zeros. And the most basic unit of meaningful sensory data is "suffering/not suffering".
As long as there's any difference between "more preferable" and "less preferable" states of being (and not a uniform homogeneous universe, or alternatively a universe free from subjects able to prefer -- neither of which would not be much of a universe anyway), there will exist suffering caused by being in the less preferable state; and, conversely, the striving towards the more preferable one will be experienced as meaningful.
(And once you're in the most preferable state available to you, "meaning" becomes somehow unimportant. It's why they say "struggle builds character" -- "character" is one name for the ability to discern personally relevant meaning. It's also why it's easy for "personal fulfillment" to make a person kinda dumb -- unless they keep challenging themselves in actually meaningful ways.)
The evident paradox of "why would God not prevent suffering" is therefore a bit nonsensical, like most Christian doctrine (if you look at the history of Christianity past the point of being made state religion of the very empire that persecuted it -- no mean feat! -- you can see how it's pretty much designed by committee). Among extant religions, Buddhism seems to have the most no-nonsense treatment of the question.
On a practical scale one can see something similar in the concept of the "first world problem". Someone cooked your food wrong? There are people starving somewhere, you are in a vastly more preferable position to those -- but the knowledge that someone else is suffering from starvation does not in any way diminish your experience of (admittedly tiny) suffering caused by the unpleasant food. (That one takes a basic degree of self-control -- the "character" again.)
(Someone's taking away some privilege of yours in order to ensure more equitable conditions for others who never had that privilege? Well, pretty much the same thing. Which is why you see people hanging on to ill-gotten gains for dear life...)
So, that's why suffering and meaning are so often juxtaposed. What do we say to people throwing a tantrum over a minor inconvenience? We tell them to "grow up", i.e. that their suffering is not meaningful to us, and they should learn to extinguish that suffering in themselves.
Is it just to tell someone who is experiencing any suffering at all (even that of the minor inconvenience) to just, like, not suffer? That question also has no practical bearing. Ending suffering in oneself is the only end to suffering there can ever be. (Other than death, I guess. In death one is free from all suffering, striving, and meaning. I've heard that the ancient Thracians used to celebrate passings and mourn births, which I find much more logical than the ritually prescribed emotions of our culture. On the other hand, maybe that's why they're gone now :D)
Doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the world and end poverty, injustice, disease, stupidity, and other pretty obviously fixable forms of suffering. We just deserve a more meaningful teleology for that than just "ending suffering". Because I don't think "ending suffering" is a thing that can ever be done in light of the above. Even by an omnipotent being, since "potent" assumes power to change stuff, and "change" assumes the existence of "more preferable" and "less preferable" states. Might as well ask why there's something instead of nothing...
No, you're wrong. It took a while to parse all that. But suffering involves being upset. We routinely have preferences while accepting that they're out of reach, and feeling happy despite this. The equivalence you draw between "less preferable states" and suffering is incorrect.
Suffering has to involve being coerced (even if merely by physics). Something has to upset you, knock you off balance. If you're prepared for it, if it isn't an intrusion, it isn't suffering. We are always in a less than ideal state, but not always suffering - unless you want to make the term meaningless by stretching it.
But problems, which may be welcome and enjoyable, are endless. And it's true that suffering is relative, and people who seem to be having a tantrum are most likely suffering for real.
You're not working with just suffering and non-suffering, you also have death. The existence of death makes the concept of an absolute threshold of suffering meaningful. If, assuming an experience lasts an entire lifetime, you would rationally prefer to be dead, that experience is below the absolute threshold of suffering. In practice most experiences do not last entire lifetimes, but this isn't relevant to the definition. Something can still be below the absolute threshold of suffering even if you willingly and rationally endure it because you know it's temporary.
You could encode the same meaning using only experiences above the absolute threshold of suffering, i.e. as 1 and 2 instead of 0 and 1. I believe a world with no experiences below the threshold of absolute suffering would be strictly superior to our world. Relative suffering is sufficient for meaning.
Huh, that's a good idea, to create a benchmark to rescue the concept of suffering from relativism. But it won't work for me. I'm very anti-death, I don't see death as an escape, or as an action at all: I'm here to live, however unpleasant it gets. Death would be no more pleasant, because being dead is not an experience. It can't logically be an improvement.
It logically can be an improvement if experiences can have negative value. I think most people would prefer non-existence to endless torture with no hope of escape.
No, it's not a zero-value experience: it's no experience. Ugh, how do I express this ... in preferences, an experience of some kind is the goal, or at least, my goal. That means death isn't among the options: putting it in there is a category error.
No, it just makes no conceptual sense to me to "prefer non-existence". It's a contradiction. The concepts of preference and not existing can't go together.
I guess I'll allow that death is the ultimate undesirable thing, disrupting all intentions, negating all possibilities.
I can see how this could be interpreted as unusually high tolerance for suffering, by any normal, latently suicidal person. But from my point of view you're just all getting it wrong. I've never heard anybody else express this position, though, so perhaps I'm an irrelevance.
Late edit: there's more to preferences than mere experiences, mind you. So "I prefer that I not exist" makes logical sense, but not by the reason "because my experiences are so horrible": perhaps some philosophical notion could be the reason for it, though I can't imagine one. Oh, self-sacrifice to save others, for instance, or for knowledge in the abstract, that kind of thing.
I logically prefer than I had never existed, because existing is what exposes me to the cycle of suffering, and I cannot prevent suffering with any certainty. The opposite - this inability to prevent suffering is itself a source of chronic low-grade suffering known to all as "anxiety".
But... I've found myself here anyway! Furthermore, having been born an animal, I find myself bound here by my self-preservation instinct. So, the ethical thing for me to do would be to try and reduce that suffering which I observe. Am I succeeding? Honestly, I don't think I am. (But it's a source of meaning regardless.)
Can I imagine a life without this background of suffering? Only vaguely. Being able to imagine it may itself be a source of suffering, even if I were to accept that it's in fact beyond reach.
I don't think it would be possible to set a threshold for "what counts as suffering", since suffering is an interior experience. It would be the same as attempting to measure consciousness; you can measure its external manifestations, but not the thing itself.
Besides, who would be doing the measuring? Who would be systematizing the results? Who will be interpreting them? None other than beings who are themselves part of the cycle of suffering. So, even if the measurement was to be possible, and communicating its results was to be possible, it's impossible to avoid the data to be biased -- such as by the measurers' self-preservation instincts. An objective measurement can only happen from outside, and... there is no outside.
(I'm imagining maybe dystopian but I would hope at least comprehensible scenarios, such as a state-level actor developing the science enabling them to establish a (purportedly) objective scale of suffering, but then forcing the measurers to publish biased results under duress, in order to promote that state's self-serving agenda.)
Hence, I work with a simple and abstract distinction: less preferable = more suffering. So, not between 1 and 2 -- which communicates exactly as much meaning as 0 and 1, only at a greater cost, think vacuum tube bias voltage -- but fractionally between 0 and 1.
Where the threshold lies for the self and others to recognize that suffering, much less to take it into account, is entirely up to the perceiver(s) in question, and not something that could be irrevocably defined by fiat.
I never claimed that all suffering is good, or that we should maximize suffering, only that eradicating all suffering would be highly undesirable, and even impossible, as lack of suffering would inevitably bring about new suffering.
This is true of being wrong, and problems, and lacking rationality - those are all incidental necessities in a world where we have something to do: otherwise we'd be like Q from Star Trek, stuck in his heaven at the end of time, with no remaining purpose except to mess with Picard's head.
But is it true of suffering? That seems possible, but not obvious. I think it implies that suffering evolves with culture. Like I got cake crumbs on my silk sheets! Such discomfort! How I suffer! ... in this way "suffering" just means viscerally-felt problems that we didn't choose, and it's plausibly an eternal part of existing in a physical world with problems to solve - if we can't manipulate all upcoming problems to be always fun.
Ensuring all problems are always fun probably entails seeing into the future, and wouldn't be possible. So, OK, I'll buy it, suffering is a side effect of living well.
Kind of raises the question of how much we can reduce suffering, though - if at all. Is there a particular percentage of the time that an average human spends suffering, whether in ancient times or today or in the future?
Comments
Without suffering everything would become meaningless instantly. It would be like playing a video game with cheats.
Glad to hear it. I could use more meaning in my life. Please sign over all your wealth to me, so you can suffer some more.
"I could use more meaning in my life."
Telling. (Me, I could definitely use even less.)
I think GP has a point, but it kinda works the other way around. (Which is common among unexamined intuitions.)
Basically, you can't represent any data with just ones, or just zeros. And the most basic unit of meaningful sensory data is "suffering/not suffering".
As long as there's any difference between "more preferable" and "less preferable" states of being (and not a uniform homogeneous universe, or alternatively a universe free from subjects able to prefer -- neither of which would not be much of a universe anyway), there will exist suffering caused by being in the less preferable state; and, conversely, the striving towards the more preferable one will be experienced as meaningful.
(And once you're in the most preferable state available to you, "meaning" becomes somehow unimportant. It's why they say "struggle builds character" -- "character" is one name for the ability to discern personally relevant meaning. It's also why it's easy for "personal fulfillment" to make a person kinda dumb -- unless they keep challenging themselves in actually meaningful ways.)
The evident paradox of "why would God not prevent suffering" is therefore a bit nonsensical, like most Christian doctrine (if you look at the history of Christianity past the point of being made state religion of the very empire that persecuted it -- no mean feat! -- you can see how it's pretty much designed by committee). Among extant religions, Buddhism seems to have the most no-nonsense treatment of the question.
On a practical scale one can see something similar in the concept of the "first world problem". Someone cooked your food wrong? There are people starving somewhere, you are in a vastly more preferable position to those -- but the knowledge that someone else is suffering from starvation does not in any way diminish your experience of (admittedly tiny) suffering caused by the unpleasant food. (That one takes a basic degree of self-control -- the "character" again.)
(Someone's taking away some privilege of yours in order to ensure more equitable conditions for others who never had that privilege? Well, pretty much the same thing. Which is why you see people hanging on to ill-gotten gains for dear life...)
So, that's why suffering and meaning are so often juxtaposed. What do we say to people throwing a tantrum over a minor inconvenience? We tell them to "grow up", i.e. that their suffering is not meaningful to us, and they should learn to extinguish that suffering in themselves.
Is it just to tell someone who is experiencing any suffering at all (even that of the minor inconvenience) to just, like, not suffer? That question also has no practical bearing. Ending suffering in oneself is the only end to suffering there can ever be. (Other than death, I guess. In death one is free from all suffering, striving, and meaning. I've heard that the ancient Thracians used to celebrate passings and mourn births, which I find much more logical than the ritually prescribed emotions of our culture. On the other hand, maybe that's why they're gone now :D)
Doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the world and end poverty, injustice, disease, stupidity, and other pretty obviously fixable forms of suffering. We just deserve a more meaningful teleology for that than just "ending suffering". Because I don't think "ending suffering" is a thing that can ever be done in light of the above. Even by an omnipotent being, since "potent" assumes power to change stuff, and "change" assumes the existence of "more preferable" and "less preferable" states. Might as well ask why there's something instead of nothing...
No, you're wrong. It took a while to parse all that. But suffering involves being upset. We routinely have preferences while accepting that they're out of reach, and feeling happy despite this. The equivalence you draw between "less preferable states" and suffering is incorrect.
Suffering has to involve being coerced (even if merely by physics). Something has to upset you, knock you off balance. If you're prepared for it, if it isn't an intrusion, it isn't suffering. We are always in a less than ideal state, but not always suffering - unless you want to make the term meaningless by stretching it.
But problems, which may be welcome and enjoyable, are endless. And it's true that suffering is relative, and people who seem to be having a tantrum are most likely suffering for real.
You're not working with just suffering and non-suffering, you also have death. The existence of death makes the concept of an absolute threshold of suffering meaningful. If, assuming an experience lasts an entire lifetime, you would rationally prefer to be dead, that experience is below the absolute threshold of suffering. In practice most experiences do not last entire lifetimes, but this isn't relevant to the definition. Something can still be below the absolute threshold of suffering even if you willingly and rationally endure it because you know it's temporary.
You could encode the same meaning using only experiences above the absolute threshold of suffering, i.e. as 1 and 2 instead of 0 and 1. I believe a world with no experiences below the threshold of absolute suffering would be strictly superior to our world. Relative suffering is sufficient for meaning.
Huh, that's a good idea, to create a benchmark to rescue the concept of suffering from relativism. But it won't work for me. I'm very anti-death, I don't see death as an escape, or as an action at all: I'm here to live, however unpleasant it gets. Death would be no more pleasant, because being dead is not an experience. It can't logically be an improvement.
It logically can be an improvement if experiences can have negative value. I think most people would prefer non-existence to endless torture with no hope of escape.
No, it's not a zero-value experience: it's no experience. Ugh, how do I express this ... in preferences, an experience of some kind is the goal, or at least, my goal. That means death isn't among the options: putting it in there is a category error.
That sounds more like your personal absolute threshold of suffering is unusually low, not a category error.
No, it just makes no conceptual sense to me to "prefer non-existence". It's a contradiction. The concepts of preference and not existing can't go together.
I guess I'll allow that death is the ultimate undesirable thing, disrupting all intentions, negating all possibilities.
I can see how this could be interpreted as unusually high tolerance for suffering, by any normal, latently suicidal person. But from my point of view you're just all getting it wrong. I've never heard anybody else express this position, though, so perhaps I'm an irrelevance.
Late edit: there's more to preferences than mere experiences, mind you. So "I prefer that I not exist" makes logical sense, but not by the reason "because my experiences are so horrible": perhaps some philosophical notion could be the reason for it, though I can't imagine one. Oh, self-sacrifice to save others, for instance, or for knowledge in the abstract, that kind of thing.
Nice conversation :)
I logically prefer than I had never existed, because existing is what exposes me to the cycle of suffering, and I cannot prevent suffering with any certainty. The opposite - this inability to prevent suffering is itself a source of chronic low-grade suffering known to all as "anxiety".
But... I've found myself here anyway! Furthermore, having been born an animal, I find myself bound here by my self-preservation instinct. So, the ethical thing for me to do would be to try and reduce that suffering which I observe. Am I succeeding? Honestly, I don't think I am. (But it's a source of meaning regardless.)
Can I imagine a life without this background of suffering? Only vaguely. Being able to imagine it may itself be a source of suffering, even if I were to accept that it's in fact beyond reach.
I don't think it would be possible to set a threshold for "what counts as suffering", since suffering is an interior experience. It would be the same as attempting to measure consciousness; you can measure its external manifestations, but not the thing itself.
Besides, who would be doing the measuring? Who would be systematizing the results? Who will be interpreting them? None other than beings who are themselves part of the cycle of suffering. So, even if the measurement was to be possible, and communicating its results was to be possible, it's impossible to avoid the data to be biased -- such as by the measurers' self-preservation instincts. An objective measurement can only happen from outside, and... there is no outside.
(I'm imagining maybe dystopian but I would hope at least comprehensible scenarios, such as a state-level actor developing the science enabling them to establish a (purportedly) objective scale of suffering, but then forcing the measurers to publish biased results under duress, in order to promote that state's self-serving agenda.)
Hence, I work with a simple and abstract distinction: less preferable = more suffering. So, not between 1 and 2 -- which communicates exactly as much meaning as 0 and 1, only at a greater cost, think vacuum tube bias voltage -- but fractionally between 0 and 1.
Where the threshold lies for the self and others to recognize that suffering, much less to take it into account, is entirely up to the perceiver(s) in question, and not something that could be irrevocably defined by fiat.
I never claimed that all suffering is good, or that we should maximize suffering, only that eradicating all suffering would be highly undesirable, and even impossible, as lack of suffering would inevitably bring about new suffering.
This is true of being wrong, and problems, and lacking rationality - those are all incidental necessities in a world where we have something to do: otherwise we'd be like Q from Star Trek, stuck in his heaven at the end of time, with no remaining purpose except to mess with Picard's head.
But is it true of suffering? That seems possible, but not obvious. I think it implies that suffering evolves with culture. Like I got cake crumbs on my silk sheets! Such discomfort! How I suffer! ... in this way "suffering" just means viscerally-felt problems that we didn't choose, and it's plausibly an eternal part of existing in a physical world with problems to solve - if we can't manipulate all upcoming problems to be always fun.
Ensuring all problems are always fun probably entails seeing into the future, and wouldn't be possible. So, OK, I'll buy it, suffering is a side effect of living well.
Kind of raises the question of how much we can reduce suffering, though - if at all. Is there a particular percentage of the time that an average human spends suffering, whether in ancient times or today or in the future?