Pain focuses your attention on the particular body-parts involved.
It makes it hard to think about anything else.
Pain makes you tend to move away from whatever is causing the stimulus.
It makes you want that state to end, and it makes you learn, for future times, not to repeat the same mistake.
Yet instead of being grateful for pain, people always complaining about it. “Why are we cursed,” pain’s victims ask, “with such unpleasant experiences?” We often think of pleasure and pain as opposites—yet they share many similar qualities:
Pleasure makes you focus on the particular body-parts involved.
It makes it hard to think about anything else.
It impels you to draw closer to whatever is causing the stimulus.
It makes you want to maintain that state, while teaching you, for future times, to keep repeating the same mistake.
This suggests that both pleasure and pain could engage some of the same kinds of machinery. For example, they both tend to narrow one’s range of attention, they both have connections with how we learn, and they both assign high priority to just one of a person’s many goals. In view of those similarities, a visiting alien intelligence might wonder why people like pleasure so much—yet display so little desire for pain.
Alien: Why do you humans complain about pain?
Person: We don’t like pain because it hurts.
Alien: Then explain to me just what ‘hurting’ is.
Person: Hurting is simply the way pain feels.
Alien: Then please tell me what a ‘feeling’ is.
At this point the conversation may stop, because quite a few human thinkers might claim that we’ll never have ways to explain such things, because feelings are ‘irreducible.’
Dualist Philosopher: Science can only explain a thing in terms of other, yet simpler things. But subjective feelings like pleasure or pain are, by their nature, indivisible. They can’t be reduced to smaller parts; like atoms, they simply are or are not.
This book will take the contrary view that feelings are not simple at all; instead they are extremely complex. And paradoxically, once we recognize this complexity, this can show us ways to explain why pleasure and pain might seem similar if (as we’ll try to show in Chapter §9) we can represent both of them as results that come from similar kinds of machinery. [Also, see §§Dignity of Complexity.]
People often use hurting, pain and suffering as though those conditions were almost the same, and differ mainly in degree. This chapter will argue that we need much better distinctions and theories for these.
§3-2. Prolonged Pain leads to Cascades
Our idea about how Suffering works is that any severe and prolonged pain leads to a cascade of mental change that disrupts your other plans and goals. By thus suppressing most other resources, this narrows your former interests—so that most of your mind now focuses on one insistent and overwhelming command: No matter what else, get rid of that Pain.
This machinery has great value indeed—if it can make you remove whatever’s disturbing you, so that you get back to what you were trying to do. However, if that pain remains intense after you’ve done all you can to relieve it, then it may continue to keep the resources that it has seized—and further to proceed to capture yet more—so that you can scarcely keep anything else ‘on your mind’. If left to itself, that spreading might cease—but so long as the pain refuses to leave, that cascade of disruption may continue to grow, and as those other resources get taken away, your efforts to think will deteriorate, and what remains of the rest of your mind may feel like it’s being sucked into that black hole of suffering.
Now, goals that seemed easy in normal times get increasingly harder to achieve. Whatever else you try to do, pain interrupts with its own demands and keeps frustrating your other plans until you can barely think about anything but the pain and the trouble it’s caused. Perhaps the torment of suffering comes largely from depriving you of your freedom to choose what to think about. Suffering imprisons you.
Neurologist: These ideas about disruptive cascades are suggestive, but have you any evidence that processes like these exist? How could you show that these guesses are right?
It would be hard to demonstrate this today, but when scanners show more of what happens in brains, we should be able to see those cascades. In the meantime, though, one scarcely needs more evidence than one sees in the diversity of the complaints from the victims of suffering:
Frustration at not achieving goals.
Annoyance at losing mobility.
Vexation at not being able to think.
Dread of becoming disabled and helpless.
Shame of becoming a burden to friends.
Remorse at dishonoring obligations.
Dismay about the prospect of failure.
Chagrin at being considered abnormal.
Resenting the loss of opportunities.
Fears about future survival and death.
This suggests that we learn to use words like ‘suffering’, ‘anguish’, and ‘torment’ to try to describe what happens when those disruption cascades continue: as each new system becomes distressed and starts to transmit disturbing requests, your normal thoughts get overcome, until most of your mind has been stolen from you.
Citizen: I agree that these all can come with suffering. But that doesn’t explain what suffering is. To be sure, resentment, remorse, dismay, and fear are all involved with reactions to pain—and can help to cause us to suffer. But why can’t we just regard ‘suffering’ as just one more kind of sensation?
When we talk about ‘sensations’ we usually mean the signals that come from sensors that are excited by conditions in the external world. However here, I think, we’re talking about signals that come, not from outside, but from special resources that detect high-level conditions inside the brain. Later, in section §4-3, we’ll suggest how such resources might actually work.
In any case, when suffering, it is hard to think in your usual ways. Now, torn away from your regular thoughts, you can scarcely reflect on anything else than on your present state of impairment—and awareness of your dismal condition only tends to make things worse. Pain, as we said, deprives you of freedom, and a major component of suffering is the frustration that accompanies the loss of your freedom of mental choice.
Of course the same is true, to a smaller degree, in our more usual states of mind: our thoughts are always constrained by the goals that we hold, which try to engage different processes. Those processes sometimes cooperate, but they also frequently clash and conflict. We never have enough time to do all the things that we want to do—and so every new goal or idea that we get may make us abandon, or put aside, some other ambitions we want to achieve.