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.
sure, how about being in a village taken over by the Khmer Rouge, or a concentration camp in Nazi Germany? Someplace where you don’t necessary die quickly but have to endure a long and very unpleasant time with some amount of psychological or physical pain.
Well, to take the concentration camp example. Every day, you’ll encounter various painful things, such as malnutrition, both physical and mental violence from the guards, generally unpleasant living conditions, seeing your companions killed, and so on. Each of these causes a You Should Really Stop This From Happening reaction from your brain, countered by a system saying I Have No Way Of Stopping This. On top of the individual daily events, your attention will also be constantly drawn to the fact that for as long as you stay here, these events will continue, and you’ll suffer from also having your attention drawn to the fact that you can’t actually get out.
Some of the coping mechanisms that’ve been identified in concentration camp inmates include strategies such as trying to find meaning in the experience, concentrating on day-to-day survival, fatalism and emotional numbing, and dreaming of revenge. Each of these could plausibly be interpreted as a cognitive/emotional strategy where the system sending the impossible-to-satisfy “you need to get out of here” message was quieted and the focus was shifted to something more plausible, therefore somewhat reducing the suffering.
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.
Can you give a more concrete example?
sure, how about being in a village taken over by the Khmer Rouge, or a concentration camp in Nazi Germany? Someplace where you don’t necessary die quickly but have to endure a long and very unpleasant time with some amount of psychological or physical pain.
Well, to take the concentration camp example. Every day, you’ll encounter various painful things, such as malnutrition, both physical and mental violence from the guards, generally unpleasant living conditions, seeing your companions killed, and so on. Each of these causes a You Should Really Stop This From Happening reaction from your brain, countered by a system saying I Have No Way Of Stopping This. On top of the individual daily events, your attention will also be constantly drawn to the fact that for as long as you stay here, these events will continue, and you’ll suffer from also having your attention drawn to the fact that you can’t actually get out.
Some of the coping mechanisms that’ve been identified in concentration camp inmates include strategies such as trying to find meaning in the experience, concentrating on day-to-day survival, fatalism and emotional numbing, and dreaming of revenge. Each of these could plausibly be interpreted as a cognitive/emotional strategy where the system sending the impossible-to-satisfy “you need to get out of here” message was quieted and the focus was shifted to something more plausible, therefore somewhat reducing the suffering.